High Crime in the Cocaine Industry - <AUTHOR> https://meanjin.com.au/essays/high-crime-in-the-cocaine-industry/ <comment><USER2> > One aircraft was being pursued over Homestead, Florida in 1994, so ditched > its cargo. A 34-kilogram bag of cocaine fell directly into a back yard where > chief of police Curt Ivy was chatting with the Neighborhood Crime Watch > about what to look out for in their quiet community.

Well that is ironic.

</comment><comment><USER3> Cocaine is a terrible drug that can severely alter one's personality. Most people turn into self centered twats.

One of the most addictive substances known, legalization, acceptance and wide use could have drastic effects on society.

Apparently some have already forgotten about the crack epidemic of the 90s. Many cities are still dealing with the crack generation offspring and the mentally ill crackheads from that era.

<comment><USER4> It says a lot about the state of HN's community that this post is poorly received, while posts supporting cocaine use are seeing more support. This used to be a techie playground; between comments in the heroin thread yesterday[∆] and in this thread today, now HN seems like a druggie haven.

[∆][https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18193884](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18193884)

<comment><USER5> It's poorly received because it's hyperbolic. I've been around many powder cocaine users and have never seen someone's personality radically change. It's a stronger version of caffeine with more euphoria, that's about it. Given the health impacts, I dont recommend using it, but people should be honest about what this thing is, what it does, and how it feels, not participate in fear mongering.

<comment><USER6> I stronger version of coffee _that might give you a heart attack_.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Pure cocaine is a peaceful subtle drug. The product produced by cartels, even at 90% purity is cut with amphetamines, bath salts, and other gross drugs.

Pure cocaine is habit forming but the cravings seem to be more of a daily than a hourly thing, which is the case with cut products.

If you do cocaine you can practice harm reduction by washing in acetone, and if you have it available, cloraform. "Pink cocaine" available on the dark net has been washed using the above methods, then cut with b vitamins.

<comment><USER8> Tell yourself whatever you want, but the awful cardiovascular and neurological effects of cocaine are well-documented and their mechanisms are well- understood. Impurities and adulterations don't make things better, but _cocaine itself is awful for you_.

<comment><USER9> What little experience I've had with cocaine just left me with the impression that it's like caffeine turned up to 11.

This changed my views on both caffeine and cocaine.

I now see caffeine and caffeinated beverages as more problematic, habbit- forming stimulants which I avoid consuming far more than prior to the "my newly rich friends discovered cocaine" phase. And cocaine as a largely overhyped, relatively benign (for an illegal drug with such a reputation) but habit-forming substance made desirable by the media, and expensive by scarcity the war on drugs creates.

They're more similar than they are different, and it seems absurd to me that one is legal while the other isn't.

<comment><USER10> But cocaine isn't just caffeine dialed up to 11. The legality of one versus the other has to do more with cocaine's far greater acute and long term health risks when consumed at levels that provide effect.

<comment> barry-cotter If the normal way of consuming caffeine was snorting a powder that was mostly the pharmaceutically active conpund and bulking agents they'd look reasonably similar. If cocaine was available legally as tea or as powder but taxed much higher there'd be a lot of coca tea drinkers who wouldn't touch the powder.

The dose, and the delivery method, make the poison.

<comment><USER10> That's why I specifically wrote to the point of effect. You can snort caffeine to the point of effect and healthy individuals will be fine.

The distinction between compounds goes far beyond dosage and delivery mechanism.

<comment><USER11> > You can snort caffeine to the point of effect and healthy individuals will > be fine.

How can you possibly know that? Do you have scientific research to cite?

I would assume that someone that ingests enough caffeine (by any means) to "the point of effect" (whatever that means) is going to have some serious risk of heart attack. I know several people who have wound up in the hospital for monitoring after drinking, oh, about 8 cups of coffee within several hours. They didn't realize it was the coffee, they were just like, uh oh, something is not right with my heart beat. The doctors say "how much coffee have you had today? Yeah, you'll probably be okay, but don't do that again."

<comment><USER10> > How can you possibly know that? Do you have scientific research to cite?

Of course, this is well worn territory:

[https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5445139/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5445139/)

The method of delivery is not my claim, so someone would need to show that snorting to effect has a greater negative effect on health than drinking.

"Effect" here typically means desired or pleasurable palpable impact on mood or behavior. For both caffeine and coca that typically entails euphoria and an increase in energy. Beyond a certain point that trend reverses and negative effect come into play.

Anecdotes aren't particularly useful metrics for these discussions, frankly.

<comment><USER11> From that article,

> The threshold of caffeine toxicity appears to be around 400 mg/day in > healthy adults

That's only about 4 cups of coffee, man! Or just two "NoDoz".

The article does not mention snorting caffeine. It seems reasonable to me to predict that if people starting snorting caffeine in an effort to get greater neuropharmacalogical effects, it would be pretty easy to go over 400mg.

There are few (if any?) documented deaths from caffeine overdose from drinking coffee (or even energy drinks), probably because the delivery mechanism means you need to drink a lot of beverage to get that much caffeine (8+ cups of coffee is really gonna fill up your stomach etc.). There ARE documented deaths from caffeine overdose from caffeine pills etc. though. Mechanism of delivery matters. The range between usual caffeine dose and an amount that can be dangerous is smaller than most people think (in that respect similar to aspirin and acetaminophen).

I am not sure what you mean by "to the point of effect", but I don't believe the literature you cite supports your claim that "You can snort caffeine to the point of effect and healthy individuals will be fine." Method of delivery does matter, in part because it effects practical dosages.

In fact, we don't need to guess, while as far as I know nobody's snorting it, highly-concentrated caffeine in powder/granule form (presumably similar to what we'd hypothetically imagine people snorting) _is_ documented as dangerous:

> "FDA Warns Consumers About Pure and Highly Concentrated Caffeine"

> "The FDA advises consumers to avoid pure and highly concentrated caffeine > sold in bulk as powdered and liquid dietary supplements."

> "It can be extremely difficult to accurately measure pure and highly > concentrated caffeine, and you can easily consume a dangerous or even lethal > amount."

> "Dietary supplements consisting of pure or highly concentrated caffeine are > potentially dangerous, and serious adverse events can result, including > death."

\-- [https://www.fda.gov/Food/DietarySupplements/ProductsIngredie...](https://www.fda.gov/Food/DietarySupplements/ProductsIngredients/ucm604315.htm)

> "On May 27, his brother found him unresponsive on their living room floor. > In an effort to increase his energy, Mr. Stiner had used caffeine powder a > friend had purchased on Amazon, but miscalculated the dosage, overdosed and > died. The medical examiner said the cause of death was "cardiac arrhythmia > and seizure, due to acute caffeine toxicity due to excessive caffeine > ingestion.""

\-- [https://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/05/18/caffeine-powder- po...](https://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/05/18/caffeine-powder-poses-deadly- risks-2/)

<comment><USER10> I don't think you're making a counterargument here; I'm not saying caffeine doesn't have negative impacts on health at any level. I'm saying to the point of effect (which again I detailed), it is safer than cocaine is comparably.

The mechanism of ingest only matters if the latency of effect is so great that a user goes past the point of pleasurable effect. Drinking or snorting cocaine has negative physiological effect closer to the point of pleasurable pyschological effect than does caffeine.

<comment><USER11> That's like saying fentanyl isn't particularly dangerous, because you aren't going to OD on the level that is pleasurable. Not how it works. If the difference in dose between what you would have wanted and a toxic dose is relatively small, that makes it dangerous.

Pure or high-concentration caffeine is quite clearly dangerous.

<comment><USER10> > That's like saying fentanyl isn't particularly dangerous, because you aren't > going to OD on the level that is pleasurable.

It's actually the total opposite of what I'm saying. I'm saying that caffeine _specifically_ is less likely to do that than cocaine (or fentanyl).

> Pure or high-concentration caffeine is quite clearly dangerous.

This is another argument I did not make.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Cocaine is a sort of anti-depressant. When used as unrefined coca leaf, it's relatively safe. Three Catholic Popes have partaken of coca leaf tea on visits to South America [0] -- it helps people deal with altitude sickness while they adapt. Coca leaf extract was used in the original Coca-Cola formula. The stimulant was removed in 1903 [1], leaving just the coca leaf flavoring and some of the plant's other beneficial compounds.

[0] [https://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/jul/09/its-not- cocain...](https://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/jul/09/its-not-cocaine-what- you-need-to-know-about-the-popes-coca-drink)

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coca- Cola#Coca_%E2%80%93_cocai...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coca- Cola#Coca_%E2%80%93_cocaine)

There are drugs that are mood-elevating substances sort-of similar to cocaine, but without the euphoria and crash. They are available as prescriptions and in the market (slightly less pure, but good enough for my dog). This class of drugs mostly fell out of favor as their patents expired and the drug industry came out with newer patent-protected generations of drugs.

I met a fellow who tried cocaine in college. He said, "been there, done that, don't need to use again". People who get hooked on cocaine are those who are severely depressed -- they like cocaine because it helps them feel normal.

I've never used cocaine myself, but I've watched the use crack cocaine. Too much makes the user temporarily psychotic, which is why it's now an illegal substance. I learned from a Hacker News comment/submission a while ago that cocaine causes its harm by shredding the mitochondria. [searching] Ahh, found it, this one: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10956058](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10956058)

<comment><USER13> "been there, done that, don't need to use again"

Agree with this sentiment. I have a super addictive personality but the diminishing returns are so extreme that after an hour or two it's just a waste of time. I've never really understood how people can develop a problem with coke given how expensive it is.

<comment><USER14> The loop works like this: you start drinking, you get drunk, too drunk to drink more so you buy cocaine, happily drinking and doing cocaine until the next day.

It goes hand in hand with alcohol and if you're developing a problem with booze it's easy to continue with cocaine.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> > _Because more than 500 kilograms of leaves are needed for just one kilogram > of cocaine, requiring almost two hectares, vast plantations are essential > for production in any serious volume..._

How much water does it take to produce a kilo? This seems like a much less environmentally-friendly vice than cannabis or even tobacco.

<comment><USER15> It's generally grown in South American rain forests, I would imagine they don't use irrigation, so the water requirement is irrelevant.

<comment><USER4> Not irrelevant, just not tracked. In a Bayesian sense, we're using water, but we don't know how much.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> The illegal economy is a huge part of the overall economy (nationally or globally). We would benefit from more economic research into it, although there are obvious challenges to doing such research. But I liked this article.

</comment><comment><USER16> Who ever wrote this article spelled Colombia wrong 4 times

<comment><USER17> And spelled plata (money) as plato (dish). Also, was grossly off with prices of cocaine paste sourced from fields (it's actually less than half of reported price of 3k kilo). And about the fact you can easily buy it at the source without running into big issues, as in: almost certain death.

<comment><USER18> I paid like 3 dollars for a single gram in Medellin and I'm a dumb foreigner who speaks no spanish so the field price should be like 1000 dollars a kilo or less

<comment><USER19> You are the same person claiming to have used "pure cocaine" because it was in Colombia. Your product was cut, which is why it was so cheap. Pure cocaine easily turns into an oil so socially consumable amounts almost have to be cut to use efficiently.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Minoca OS: A new open source operating system - <AUTHOR> https://blog.minocacorp.com/minoca-os-a-new-open-source-operating-system-4bb7998df3a7 <comment><USER2> I'm very excited about this! Minoca is an interesting system, and I applaud any attempt to make driver-writing less inherently horrible.

Minoca OS has been around for a while, but the news is that they're GPLv3. I think that's a great thing! The MIT license is good for software that wants to permeate through _everything_ , but for building a community, the GPL is a good idea.

It seems that for any operating system to be successful, it has to carry around POSIX compatibility like an extremely expensive entry pass. I wonder when we will leave that behind? Or if we ever will? I'm glad POSIX is just a layer in Minoca, and not the base of the system, because these days it really should just be treated like a big wad of glue.

PS: I love the object manager. I don't see any particularly ground-breaking networking stack, though. A plan9-inspired networked file system approach would have been amazing, but it seems this project is content with today's more typical approach. Perhaps it is just trying to be less opinionated about network structure than plan9 was?

PPS: I'm terrible at organizing a comment. Maybe I need a blog.

<comment><USER3> Seems to me like POSIX compatibility is actually a cheap pass that gives you access to a huge software environment. Right on the homepage they mention already having packages for Python, Ruby, Git, Lua, and Node... would that, and thousands of other packages, be feasible without a workable POSIX layer?

<comment><USER2> > would that, and thousands of other packages, be feasible without a workable > POSIX layer?

I think my problem is the core concept. POSIX stands for Portable Operating System Interface (and X stands for Xtreme?). In an age where we spin up entire operating systems to start a single application, why are we defining portability at the operating system level when network portability works so much better?

Keep in mind, this is also an age where systems like Qubes OS can make separate VMs cooperate with each other.

The only sell for POSIX I can think of is performance, and I don't know if I buy it anymore. Why do programs have to be cross-compatible when the concept of an operating system no longer means owning the hardware?

<comment><USER4> > why are we defining portability at the operating system level when network > portability works so much better

A lightweight POSIX-capable system has real value today. Operating systems need to be in more places than just the data center. IoT devices don't have the resources to run a VM or any other fancy containerized environment. POSIX was designed to be used on systems with comparable resources to what many embedded processors now have. It makes sense to leverage the existing codebase where possible.

<comment><USER2> > POSIX was designed to be used on systems with comparable resources to what > many embedded processors now have.

But not comparable environments. Most IOT environments are very small parts of very big systems, and POSIX defines a system with a teletype and a line editor.

I seriously doubt the value of the existing codebase. Saying code made for a server (like most existing unix code!) is fine for IOT feels wrong, and not just because IOT devices have kilobytes of memory and servers can have gigabytes/terabytes.

I don't think that a universal OS can work well when we know that universal programming languages, data transfer protocols, and _everything else_ didn't. Imagine if we were still doing everything in PL/I. We recognize now that different programming tasks need different programming environments, but we still don't think that different programs need different program environments. It's just strange to me.

<comment><USER4> > Saying code made for a server (like most existing unix code!) is fine for > IOT feels wrong,

There was a time when people ran Linux/SunOS/Ultrix/etc. with tiny amounts of RAM and swap. It's not unusual for an embedded device to have 8, 16, 32 MiB, or more RAM available. Many traditional *nix programs can run unchanged on such hardware.

<comment><USER5> I think the parent's comment was more along the lines of: just because an embedded device _can_ run a Unix doesn't mean it should have to adopt the semantics and history of the *Unix environment that POSIX mandates. In particular the model of TTYs, filesystems, Unix-style file/IO, Unix-style virtual memory / mmap, etc. It's not that this stuff is expensive on modern embedded systems (which as pointed out often have the hardware capacity of high end systems from 20 years ago), it's that these capabilities are either not needed, or impose a conceptual model of what a computer and operating system have to be that don't match up to what the machine is designed for.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I ran `cloc` on the minoca/os repository, here are the results:

      github.com/AlDanial/cloc v 1.70  T=22.43 s (84.3 files/s, 63498.9 lines/s)
      </comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment>-----
      Language                         files          blank        comment           code
      </comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment>-----
      C                                 1023         296251         262652         530443
      C/C++ Header                       438          93833         117592          69529
      Assembly                            95           9588           7773          13383
      make                               270           2236           6402           4784
      Bourne Shell                        38            799           1198           2787
      JSON                                 4              4              0           1367
      Pascal                               4            232             28            718
      Python                               4            194            257            589
      yacc                                 2             99              4            481
      awk                                  3             25             11            263
      Markdown                             3             27              0            172
      Windows Resource File                3             18              0             86
      lex                                  2             44            142             84
      Perl                                 1              7             10             35
      </comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment>-----
      SUM:                              1890         403357         396069         624721
      </comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment>-----

<comment><USER7> Shameless plug of `loc`, a rust implementation of `cloc` that is 100+ times faster:

[https://github.com/cgag/loc](https://github.com/cgag/loc)

<comment><USER8> Has it any remarkable features other than "it's written in Rust"?

<comment><USER9> > that is 100+ times faster

is that not enough?

<comment><USER10> Depends on how slow cloc is. 100x faster than "already very fast" is not going to be a perceptible benefit.

<comment><USER11> The readme talks about dragonfly BSD's codebase; almost two minutes for cloc, just over one second for loc. That's a noticeable difference.

<comment><USER8> But how often do you cloc the BSD codebase?

I do clocs maybe once a week. So waiting for 2 minutes isn't really a huge issue here. (Well, it's less than 2 minutes for my code bases).

Smells like premature optimization ;)

<comment><USER11> This is totally true as well.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I have to say... the code is beautiful: Full English descriptive variable names and nearly every function is documented. As AngularJS has shown, cleaner, consistent code and architecture style = more contributors.

Take a look here for example: [https://github.com/minoca/os/blob/master/kernel/io/iobase.c#...](https://github.com/minoca/os/blob/master/kernel/io/iobase.c#L959)

<comment><USER13> Why the initial capital on local variable names? I don't think I've ever seen that in C code. (Usually types and exported functions are capitalized.)

It kind of makes the code look like Pascal. Nothing wrong with that, really.

<comment><USER14> This looks like the NT kernel coding style, especially with the pointless typedefs for things like PVOID and the PascalCased function names with prefixes like `IopPerformIoOperation`. I looked up the Minoca founders on Linked In and, behold, they both worked as engineers on the Windows NT team. :)

<comment><USER15> NT source code typically (and I say typically, because it's a mish-mash of tens of thousands of people's work over 35 years of development) has local variable names in first-letter-lower camel case. If these guys worked on Windows, it's kind of surprising they didn't follow that convention.

<comment><USER16> Usually it's uppercase with a lowercase "Hungarian notation" prefix. Without the prefix, it starts with uppercase.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Oh please. You have to start somewhere and this is where they're starting. By comparison, Linus' first announcement was:

      Hello everybody out there using minix -
      I'm doing a (free) operating system (just a hobby,
      won't be big and professional like gnu) for 386(486) AT
      clones.  This has been brewing since april, and is
      starting to get ready.  I'd like any feedback on things
      people like/dislike in minix, as my OS resembles it
      somewhat (same physical layout of the file-system
      (due to practical reasons) among other things).

      I've currently ported bash(1.08) and gcc(1.40),
      and things seem to work.  This implies that I'll get
      something practical within a few months, and

      I'd like to know what features most people would want.
      Any suggestions are welcome, but I won't promise I'll
      implement them :-)

                    Linus (torv...@kruuna.helsinki.fi)

      PS.  Yes - it's free of any minix code, and it has a
      multi-threaded fs. It is NOT protable (uses 386 task
      switching etc), and it probably never will support
      anything other than AT-harddisks, as that's all I
      have :-(.

Good luck, guys. Post some docs to read.

<comment><USER18> Ok, but why are they doing this?

<comment><USER19> They want an OS that's smarter about power management and easier to maintain. They describe their high-level objectives in their FAQ:

 _Why is a new operating system necessary?_

 _...The design requirements of today 's devices have drastically evolved in areas of power management, security, serviceability, and virtualization... By starting from a clean slate, Minoca OS is able to incorporate those core tenets into the very fabric of the operating system..._

 _How is Minoca OS different from other operating systems?_

 _...One of the most noticeable differences at the kernel level is the uniform driver model, which provides a maintainable interface between the kernel core and device drivers... Another very noticeable difference is our strong emphasis on the kernel development environment. Being able to step through code in the kernel, boot environment, and even firmware was something we felt was critical to quickly developing and maintaining kernel-quality code..._

[http://www.minocacorp.com/support/faq/](http://www.minocacorp.com/support/faq/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> >Under the hood, Minoca contains a powerful driver model between device drivers and the kernel. The idea is that drivers can be written in a forward compatible manner, so kernel level components can be upgraded without requiring a recompilation of all device drivers.

This sounds really smart and it looks great overall <3

<comment><USER21> So true. it really is my biggest problem with the monolithic Linux kernel.

<comment><USER22> RHEL/ Centos defines a stable driver ABI, and even has tools that devs can use to check that their binary drivers don't use any symbols outside the ABI.

<comment><USER23> SUSE does too. As far as I'm aware, most stable distributions use a kABI checker. This is the same reason that Android doesn't have many kernel updates -- because proprietary driver authors don't feel like keeping up to date with kABI changes.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> That's a fantastic initiative.

> Can we achieve parity with what what operating systems are used for in > today's world, but with less code, and with fewer pain points? Can we do > better? We'd like to try.

I appreciate the uncertainty!

</comment><comment><USER25> Any images out there for Beaglebone? Quite interested!

Edit: Haaa, use your eyes and you shall see!

[http://www.minocacorp.com/download/#beaglebone- black](http://www.minocacorp.com/download/#beaglebone-black)

Edit: Boo :( I haven't gotten it to boot yet. Boot messages are as follows:

        Minoca Firmware Loader
        Boot Device: 00000008
        Launching bbonefw.bin.
        Jumping to 82000000...
        !

<comment><USER26> Chris from Minoca here.

What you're seeing is the serial output. If you plug in an HDMI monitor, you'll hopefully already be at the shell prompt. Email me (email@example.com) if you run into further issues.

<comment><USER25> Hey Chris! Very excited about the potential for a lightweight embedded OS.

I think I understand my confusion now, I was hoping for a shell on the serial port. Most of the work I do with BBB's is headless. Does the exclamation point mean it's finished booting to userspace? Do you think you could rig up the serial port with a shell?

How does Minoca handle GPIO's, and other things like RTC's and SPI? I'm sure you know of device tree and sysfs drivers for GPIO, but I can write you a quick overview!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Perhaps a stupid question but where is the architecture doc? (I think that should be the starting point, especially if you want help from a community.)

I'm also interested in what theoretical results from the last 25 years are being used. Some references to papers would be nice. Since the biggest hurdle is separation and thus security, I can imagine the OS has an embedded theorem prover, but I see no mention of it.

<comment><USER28> This link was posted elsewhere in the thread:

[http://www.minocacorp.com/documentation/developers/knowledge...](http://www.minocacorp.com/documentation/developers/knowledge/kernel/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> "Minoca OS was written by two developers, Evan and Chris, over the course of a few years."

Big kudos.

Going to look at it when time allows

</comment><comment><USER30> How cool!

I happen to have an interest in OS development myself: it seems that two things have combined to make bespoke OS development practical again. First, the world has mostly standardised on amd64, UEFI &c. None of these standards may be terribly good (e.g. I've always x86 and its descendants tasteless compared to 68000, MIPS and others), but they're _good enough_ , and now there's a critical mass of community support out there for them.

Second, readily-available virtual machines have made it easier than it ever was to rapidly iterate on an OS concept.

My own interest is in non-POSIX, non-Unix-inspired, non-consumption-oriented systems: I think that there's some huge headway to be made in building computers meant to augment the human brain, rather than to just reproduce the past or serve as an entertainment-enabler. But Minoca OS sounds pretty neat in itself. Kudos to the guys for putting in the work, and kudos for releasing it as open source. I hope that they're able to make some money from it too — good work deserves to be rewarded.

</comment><comment><USER31> The code gives me flashbacks to working with the Windows API.

Cool project though and it's nice that they already have a handful of drivers.

EDIT: To clarify, I'm not saying it's bad at all, they're just using a very verbose naming convention that I don't particularly like working with.

<comment><USER32> It looks like they have basically adopted the coding conventions of windows API code, down to the / _++ --_ / comments, style of declaring functions, uppercase types etc. Not that it's is a bad thing, just something I noticed.

Also things like KeCrashSystemEx look _very_ much like KeBugCheckEx in Windows. There certainly is a lot of inspiration.

Edit: I see from Linkedin the OP is actually an ex-MSFTer who worked on Windows' HAL, so this makes sense. I wonder, tho, if this will present legal issues? Could someone say that it is an issue that the API is clearly inspired by the Windows API?

<comment><USER33> While there are the usual legal bizzarities ( [http://blog.smartbear.com/apis/api-copyright-and-why-you- sho...](http://blog.smartbear.com/apis/api-copyright-and-why-you-should-care/) ), there's no reason this should be any different than copyright of code. Design-inspired is not design infringement.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> Took a look at the github page. Sounds really impressive, lads. I only wish it were a microkernel and licensed with an 'or later'. In fact, given how well copyleft works for system software, I'd consider AGPL. Anyway, it definitely deserves a closer look.

</comment><comment><USER35> [http://www.minocacorp.com/community/](http://www.minocacorp.com/community/)

Windows Environment - If you're looking to develop on Windows, you may find this repository helpful, as it contains a native MinGW compiler, make, and other tools needed to set up a Minoca OS development environment on Windows.

Nice to see that development on Windows is supported :)

</comment><comment><USER36> I wish them well, but I'm rather surprised to see no support for 64-bit architecture. Seems an odd place to start.

<comment><USER37> well, like they wrote, they want to support small, power limited devices as well.

<comment><USER38> Today even smartphones are ARM64. They are powerful, yet power limited.

<comment><USER39> Look at the tag at the end of the article. It's targeting Internet of Things devices, which will be a lot more power constrained than smartphones.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> I would love to see architecture and comparison to other kernels described!

Also, I wonder if this can be made to run on Cortex M4 with "MPU" but not "MMU" hardware? Something to run on the Teensy 3.6 would be interesting.

BTW: Binary compatible function driver interfaces are great! They served us well on BeOS. The Linux "recompile everything under the sun" approach really gets in the way for many real world situations.

Finally, I'm sick and tired of POSIX I/O. It's a really old model, and a really bad match to modern hardware and use cases. Someone needs to develop and popularize the callback/messaging based kernel/application interface of the future, complete with something other than the main() entry point...

<comment><USER41> > Finally, I'm sick and tired of POSIX I/O.

How do you feel about kqueue or I/O completion ports? Are those something like the "interface of the future", or just greasing the old machinery?

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> NT coding style and some similarities with naming. Very clean looking in what I've seen so far. Nice work guys.

<comment><USER43> Have to agree about the good work part. Sadly my personal opinion is that I really, really dislike the NT coding style. Now that makes me wonder how coding style affects peoples will to contribute. Compare this to the Linux kernel coding style and they're on different sides of the scale, I wonder how it will affect contributions.

<comment><USER44> Windows can do this with its subsystems (Win32, POSIX, OS/2, Linux). Perhaps they will reuse some of that idea so your preference might be swayed.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER45> Since Minoca seems to be a Corp., does anyone know what their business strategy will be? I could imagine a) a paid enterprise edition, b) paid support or c) paid consultancy (as in "contract the actual maintainers to implement device drivers for your servers").

Whenever a project is corporate-backed, I like to know the business plan upfront before I consider contributing to it.

<comment><USER46> Right now it seems that the business model is the MySQL one: provide the code as GPLv3 and sell licenses if someone wants to use it in a proprietary context.

And correct me if I am wrong but I think the corp is just the 2 developers right now.

<comment><USER47> They are hiring [0], so they have money from somewhere?

[0] [http://www.minocacorp.com/careers/](http://www.minocacorp.com/careers/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER48> The goals for this new OS are quite vague and uninteresting. It seems set to repeat most of the problems with existing OSes.

Let's take the package manager for example. Wouldn't it be great if instead of yet another package manager that is a glorified system of install scripts... we had a declarative functional system ala NixOS? That's just scratching the surface.

</comment><comment> c-smile Question to authors: do you have any graphics layer in-place? Or at least thoughts about its future architecture?

I am thinking about porting my Sciter [1] HTML/CSS UI Engine to an OS that can be used on small (IoT) devices. I think that HTML/CSS as a UI definition/declaration language is quite convenient.

[1] [http://sciter.com](http://sciter.com)

<comment><AUTHOR> OP here. Sciter looks cool, nice site too. Currently Minoca has support for a basic framebuffer, which we use to display our green terminal. Our biggest obstacle to having a GUI now is the lack of accelerated graphics drivers. We'd like to add them, but it will be a very large undertaking and probably require cooperation from one of the major graphics vendors.

<comment><USER49> Once you get at least one accelerated graphics driver implemented, would you design your own GUI framework/toolkit, or use an existing one like Qt?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER49> How does this compare to Minix 3? THat's a microkernel-based OS, so drivers are isolated, and it's also pretty small.

</comment><comment><USER50> Interesting take!

If I were developing a new OS, I certainly wouldn't have a default text terminal...

That just looks gross.

But my interests differ. I would focus on the graphical user interface as my number one concern.

It would always run in a OpenGL type graphics mode, where you could spawn any number of text terminal-style windows, but I would definitely skip a full- screen text mode. Its just never needed.

Does that make sense?

<comment><USER51> Yes and no. There are so many dofferent parts to an operatong system that you quickly favor the text console because its so easy to do. If you are going to work on a GUI first thing, you might as well forgo the operating system bit and just write it as a program in some other OS while you perfect it

<comment><USER52> MacOS Classic was GUI first. There was no terminal; the closest thing that came to a console was the MacBugs debugging interface to inspect the assembly instructions.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER53> Since it runs well on ARM, you guys might want to consider reaching out to the Raspberry Pi organization for collaboration.

</comment><comment><USER54> sounds like it could be interesting, looking forward to seeing more is it a monolithic kernel or a microkernel? hybrid? :P

</comment><comment><USER55> "...it's simply not in widespread circulation."

And won't be under GPLv3. If your goals are to prevent others from locking up your code in proprietary products, and to give your code to the world, then this license is for you. If your goal is "widespread circulation," this is not the license you want.

<comment><USER56> Is Linux more widely used than any of the BSD's?

Yes.

So license doesn't seem to be a sufficient impediment if the functionality advantages are sufficient.

This meme "seems" right, but I see less evidence for it in the field.

<comment><USER55> Linux is not GPLv3 for a reason[1]. Not to mention it's only a kernel, not an entire OS. Basing your OS on a Linux kernel doesn't expose your other code to the GPL. Writing apps to run on a Linux system doesn't expose your code to the GPL.

The Minoca OS folks are asking for the community to contribute code to their OS that's licensed under GPLv3. GPLv3 supporters are necessarily a subset of open source supporters. I contend that the subset is small enough that a Minoca OS licensed under GPLv3 will continue to experience a lack of widespread circulation.

1 - [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PaKIZ7gJlRU](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PaKIZ7gJlRU)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER57> a barebones debian install of debian-testing or debian-unstable, running no services takes about 68MB of RAM, whether in i386 or amd64 kernel versions, and with a very recent v4.7 or v4.8 series kernel... how much more lightweight do you need?

<comment><USER58> On a PC, 68 MB is nothing.

But in embedded space, 68 MB RAM just for the system is pretty big. Many systems have a fraction of RAM of that. 1 - 256 kB RAM is common. Of course embedded systems can also have gigabytes of RAM. It's a wide spectrum, so as small as possible is preferable.

</comment></comment><comment><USER59> Exciting times. First [http://github.com/fuchsia- mirror/](http://github.com/fuchsia-mirror/) and now this

</comment><comment><USER60> I would like to see a built-in natural-language interface so I can, for example, "ps -elf | grep something" with a voice command.

In the future we will need these interfaces so if this is built in to the OS that would be nice advantage :)

<comment><USER61> "need". I don't think you understand what the term really means.

<comment><USER62> Well if you want to play that game, we don't "need" any computers at all.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER63> this should be interesting. POSIX support? I'm game.

I hope they don't try to compete with Linux. just do their own thing and see where it goes. usually the competitive edge kills projects like these.

happy to see new kernels popping up!

</comment><comment><USER64> Very little information on their site about the actual architecture of the system. Very bad flag there.

I'd be interested if it was based on a post-Liedtke microkernel, but I suspect it's yet another boring monolith.

</comment><comment><USER65> This is impressive. I'll give this a shot :-)

</comment><comment><USER66> can it run on raspberry pi?

<comment><USER67> Yes, they have pre-built images for RPi: [http://www.minocacorp.com/download/](http://www.minocacorp.com/download/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER68> Very cool. Is it possible to run it in VirtualBox/VM Ware?

</comment><comment><USER69> You need design help?

</comment><comment><USER70> Would be amazing to see DotNet Core run on Minoca

</comment><comment><USER71> Is it able to self-host?

</comment><comment><USER72> Why's it written in C? :(

<comment><USER73> What would you rather?

</comment></comment><comment><USER74> MINHOCA

</comment><comment><USER75> YAOSWVITEBN

Yet Another OS With the Vague Impossible-To-Evaluate Benefit of 'Newness'

edit: not to suggest I have a problem with people trying new things, but rather...why not write up a little essay on the architectural decisions you've made and their impact before releasing it publicly?

<comment><USER76> Just because you're not the target demographic doesn't mean the demographic doesn't exist.

<comment><USER77> Their competition is dsl, arch, raspbarrien and other small/IoT OSs. Not to say their product is worse. But why are they forking instead of supporting existing technologies?

Not saying their work isnt useful. But theres an argument to be made for "why"?

<comment><USER78> Because they can. There's your why.

Now you get to answer the "why not?".

<comment><USER76> Also, as they put it themselves:

> We wanted to see if with 25 years of hindsight and a clean slate we could > create something interesting and unique in the operating systems space.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> Also, GPL3? Not my favorite license. (MIT/BSD are the best IMO)

<comment><USER79> I felt this way as well (since the mid nineties) until a couple of weeks ago when I read _Social Architecture_ by Pieter Hintjens. It has a strong idealogical flavour. He stresses that you should focus on building a community, with the code and platform as happy side-effects of that community.

For that reason, you want GPL because it forces everything back into the community. He gives examples of a friend of his who slaved on a BSD project that got forked with the friend having nothing to show for it. And NT adoption of much of the code from the BSD sockets API.

<comment><USER80> > He stresses that you should focus on building a community, with the code and > platform as happy side-effects of that community.

Exactly, so license shouldn't matter that much. I'd probably be a lot more interested in it were it BSD licensed, as it is now I have no real desire to play with this new OS.

<comment><USER81> Can you explain why you prefer BSD as a contributer (I'm assuming you're not running an OS company) so much that you won't help a GPL project?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER82> "lean, maintainable, modular, and compatible with existing software." \- i wonder how long that will last.</comment>


Anti-climate action statements get more visibility in news coverage, study finds - <AUTHOR> https://www.brown.edu/news/2020-07-27/wetts <comment> 0-O-0 > Approximately 14% of press releases opposing climate action or denying the > science behind climate change received major national news coverage, she > found, compared to about 7% of press releases with pro-climate action > messages.

There might be a very simple explanation: there are significantly more pro- climate change press releases, than anti. Comparing percentages without correcting for that seems to be dishonest.

<comment><USER2> Covid has really driven home a point to me. As a society, we are statistically illiterate. Politicians and journalists particularly so. Most of our important, newsworthy information today is statistical.

This is a real problem. In the context of public schooling, I think statistics needs to become the primary discipline taught in high school maths. It's more useful to our work life, and (relevant in the context of public schooling) essential to informed citizenship.

Literacy is a pretty close analogy here. The average person is totally ill equipped to to read politically relevant news and form an opinion about it. Often, the person who wrote it is just as ill equipped.

Statistical statements have a tricky form. They seem like a statement of fact. They are, kind of. It's a fact that this researcher measured what she measured. The implication though, that's conjecture, and it may or may not be a good one.

<comment><USER3> If anything, COVID drove the opposite point for me.

The whole "masks don't work" spiel that the WHO did was _statistically_ legitimate... We really _don 't_ have proof (or whatever the medical community considers is "proof" \- like double blind large scale trail with less than 5% chance of being false) that masks work. _Statistically,_ we don't know.

But _operationally_ masks have negligible risk and practical burden, while having a huge _potential_ benefit (stopping the pandemic in its tracks), so even if the overall probability of this benefit is low (or at least not necessarily 95+%), it's the correct decision from an _executive_ perspective.

Basically: scientific / statistical opinion: masks aren't proven to work; executive decision: recommending masks has minimal downside and massive potential upside;

<comment><USER4> I was under the impression that masks only work to protect you from transmitting to others. Has that aspect not been studied yet?

Or are you talking about the efficacy of masks protecting the person that wears it?

Appreciate your time.

<comment><USER5> The largest reduction in rate of transmission is when the infected person is wearing a mask. However if both the infected, and uninfected person are wearing masts, it drops just a little bit lower. But you're right that if an unmasked infected person comes in contact with a masked healthy person, the masked person is still very likely to get infected.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> 90% of press releases were pro-climate action, only 10% were anti-climate action. That's makes it less newsworthy if an org is pro climate action.

Let's also talk about scale in the study- it looked at 1,794 press releases. Only 10% of those were anti climate action, and only 14% of those were cited, so we are talking about 25 press releases over 20 years, as opposed to 113 pro-climate press releases. That means that 81% of covered PRs are pro climate action instead of 90% of press releases- readers would still get the impression that an overwhelming majority of orgs are pro climate action.

I have other quibbles here (climate consensus has changed over the last 35 years), but I definitely didn't come away agreeing that there is something fundamentally wrong with journalistic standards as the article and abstract imply.

<comment><USER7> What do you mean, climate consensus has changed?

<comment><USER6> To be clear, I'm talking about views and understanding in broader society, not the scientific community. 35 years is a long time- roughly half the humans in the US weren't alive 35 years ago. It'd be surprising if nothing had changed.

(edit: although maybe things have not changed as much as my lived experience tells me: [https://news.gallup.com/poll/1615/environment.aspx](https://news.gallup.com/poll/1615/environment.aspx))

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Debate on climate is now much more interesting than whether or not climate change is real or caused by humans. Those things are pretty well established. Now people are debating what the appropriate actions are, and it's much more nuanced.

For example, we have the "eco-pragmatists" like Michael Shellenberger publishing "Apocalypse Never" that involves some really interesting interviews and points about how economic development can be more important for people living on the edge of the Amazon rainforest or alongside Virunga National Park in the Congo from the perspective of climate resilience. In other words, having modern electricity and infrastructure seems more likely to help people in these situations than rapid decarbonization, especially given our slow progress in decarbonization and that fact that the world today is still >80% fossil fueled.

He also suggested a merit order of fuels that went: biomass < coal < natural gas < nuclear. Moving from left to right is good, but moving from right to left is bad, he argues.

He published this with a pretty abrasive blog post featuring undersupported controversial points and basically got blacklisted and deplatformed by the major media outlets. Yes, he seems to have cherry-picked a bit to support his narrative, but that's something all authors do.

And we have the Michael Moore produced doco on Youtube (Planet of the Humans) that criticized the mainstream green energy narrative and also got temporarily deplatformed due to outcry.

I have found interesting insight in these people even though I've considered climate change one of the major challenges of our time for 20 years now. It's certainly interesting times.

<comment><USER9> >And we have the Michael Moore produced doco on Youtube (Planet of the Humans) that criticized the mainstream green energy narrative and also got temporarily deplatformed due to outcry.

That pseudo-documentary was so dishonest, though: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planet_of_the_Humans#Factual_a...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planet_of_the_Humans#Factual_accuracy)

As Dana Nucitelli said: "The film's case is akin to arguing that because fruit contains sugar, eating strawberries is no healthier than eating a cheesecake."

<comment><USER8> That section lists very weak criticism. Some solar farms are lower efficiency than others. So what? That doesn't go against any of the points made in the film. They did not say that all solar farms have lower-than-average capacity factors. The fact that you can get deplatformed for this really surprises me. This level of technical criticism is not even remotely proportional to the massive negative backlash it got. Clearly there's a higher-level battle being fought.

A lot of what it had to say about the combustion of renewable biofuels (air pollution, carbon emissions) was pretty right-on though, and is not very well known.

The fact that there are indeed actual externalities to renewable energy is a conversation that needs to be had. I think a lot of people are hoping they won't be too bad at scale.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> After reading this article, my mind simplified the findings as: organizations that have more money get more press than those that have less. Seems pretty obvious when framed in this manner.

<comment><USER11> If two very reliable scientific studies come out about the same subject, one confirming what everyone already knows about it, and the other one finding some basic flaw in the accepted science that entirely challenges our understanding of it- in that case, which one do you think would have more press?

It seems only natural to me that the more interesting one is the one challenging our knowledge: its (potential) information content is higher, simply because it is less probable.

In other words, in the current world an article pushing for climate change activism might be the classic "dog bites man" while the opposite is "man bites dog".

<comment><USER12> I agree with your premise, but nobody is finding basic flaws in climate science that challenge our understanding of it.

<comment><USER13> Warning: light hyperbole in this first paragraph: We don't really know because anything that could challenge it sadly get summarily downvoted without an explanation.

I believe in it but it is sad to see that we are so scared of it that we cannot even bother to explain why something is wrong and instead have to opt for

\- name calling

\- appeal to authority

\- strawmen

every time.

Again: I don't work for big oil. I don't fly and haven't for years. I reduce, reuse and recycle and do all the right things.

But there are still a number of questions I have that I cannot get answers for because if I ask them before anyone who knows has a chance to answer someone will summarily downvote and/or flag it and say I am a JAQ-ing shill. (JAQ = Just Asking Questions is a known bad tactic, but it is incredibly frustrating to be accused of that when I just want to know the answer.)

<comment><USER14> Something getting downvoted is different from a study presenting solid data not getting published. As far as I know there is no solid data refuting the consensus as described for example in the IPCC reports.

<comment><USER11> But then maybe we should treat with the same scepticism studies diverging from the IPCC consensus in _either_ direction. Those that downplay the risks of climate change as well as those that announce catastrophic outcomes that are not considered likely by the IPCC.

<comment><USER14> If you look at climate policy we treat everything with extreme skepticism that tells us any change is necessary. Announced climate goals fall way short of anything the IPCC reports would support, and implemented policies fall short even of those unambitious goals.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> > "Journalists seem to feel that they always have to include opposing voices > when they report on climate change," Wetts said. "But sometimes they give > those opposing voices so much weight, they lead readers to believe that > climate denial is more than a fringe stance."

Interesting. I agree that false equivalency should be avoided. But in all honesty, humans love novelty, so disproportionately covering things like this makes sense, even if wrong

<comment><USER16> There is really nothing novel about climate denial.

<comment><USER17> If a large portion of the population thinks climate denial is not a good thing climate denial is also an outrage prompter, prompting outrage is good business in 2020.

<comment><USER18> > prompting outrage is good business in 2020

Yes, in the social media sense. But there's plenty to be outraged about regardless of that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Any article about impending catastrophes that may well end up wiping us all from the Planet are a bit hard to tolerate. When we are confronted to them our brain automatically trigger its best protection mechanism, which is denial. We immediately think of thousands of reasons convincing us that the article is wrong, misinformed, etc. Another article with any explanation of why the first one is wrong is therefore much more pleasant to our brain. That's why denial articles get more coverage. That's also why we don't clearly see the reality and why we do nothing to prevent our impending doom.

<comment><USER20> Yet post-apocalyptic entertainment media is a thriving niche.

<comment><USER21> Would that be for the same reason automobile traffic slows to a crawl when there is a traffic accident to view? (Not talking about traffic in the same direction which is subject to lane closure and slowed down for safety of responders but traffic in the opposite direction.)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Alcohol has positive health benefit articles get far more shares than alcohol has negative health benefit articles. People/companies like to share things that support their views and advertising dollars.

</comment><comment><USER23> Reading the linked article, and not the full text of the article, I do not see what the criteria was for determining what constitutes a position "opposing climate action." Is it defined more in the full article? Opposing climate action can be defined on a broad spectrum, which will cross political and other boundaries. For instance, if a company or group opposed Green New Deal legislation, that is a big difference from opposing implementation of any action.

</comment><comment><USER24> 1922 Walter Lippmann kickstarted the idea of "news value" which lists criteria predicting whether an event or narrative is worth printing.

He proposed the following, and we can apply them here to compare the two types of news:

Oddity: anti-climate wins

Sensationalism: anti-climate wins

Damage: anti-climate wins

Establishment, Duration, Structure, Relevancy, Use, Prominency, Proximity: about equal

(Translations mine, couldn't find good English ones)

Thus, the result is little surprising. Still a good study, the obvious should also be proved!

</comment><comment><USER25> > When organizations take a stand against actions to combat climate change, > they get more news coverage than their pro-climate action peers

Could it be that news organizations are doing this as a way of publicly shaming? In which case the discrepancy makes perfect sense.

</comment><comment><USER26> Broadly speaking, the press loves the nutters. They make a sensational story and draw eyeballs. This is fine, but then both-sidesing leads to the normalization of nuttery. Fact checking is hard work, and not adequately compensated. It's a public good problem, a failure of capitalist incentives to protect the public interest. Often the impulse is to use regulation to circumscribe such damages, but in the case of the press, doing so has unconscionable consequences as well. It will take a simple act of genius, restructuring the markets for public information (supply side), and/or a leap in public education and conscience (demand side) to address such a wicked problem.

</comment><comment><USER27> Clickbait generates clicks, study finds.

<comment><USER28> Clickbait study finds clickbait generates clicks.

<comment> kube-system New study discovers one weird marketing trick you'll never believe!</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Could rapid development of the JVM help it beat the CLR? - <AUTHOR>

Oracle, after being barmy for some time, has turned into a good mentor of the Java Platform...<p>It has started working for the improvement of now fully open sourced OpenJDK, by implimenting the research prototype of the Da Vinci Machine, in the form of InvokeDynamic, for multiple language support. It claims to improve the startup time in Java 8. Is JVM platform of the future? <comment><USER2> Lots of apps does not work with OpenJDK, I wonder how the "open" JDK differs from the "official" one. That's not real open-source to me (at least, not in the spirit). But I agree, the JVM is evolving in the right direction, maybe too slowly.

<comment><AUTHOR> Actually OpenJDK is the official one....... Aha So can I say its the platform of the future??? Everything cannot be native, and I do not think Mono is that good, and I am hacking in Clojure, so the JVM is the default choice.</comment></comment>


Facebook Promotes Its Credits as Path to Dollars - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/23/technology/23facebook.html?_r=1&src=twr <comment><USER2> I can't believe Zynga is expected to make $500 million in revenue this year. What a gold mine.</comment>


Introducing Sifflet: a visual functional programming language - <AUTHOR> http://mypage.iu.edu/~gdweber/software/sifflet/home.html <comment><USER2> The mental model doesn't seem consistent to me. Within a function diagram the boxes (which seem to just be functions) have input and output nodes, but the function that you are working on _contains_ it's arguments.

Taking a look at the first example from the tutorial, it would make more sense to remove the salesA and salesB boxes and instead have nodes on the outside of the function. Then you could have external nodes (one for salesA and one for salesB) feed into the grossProfit function. This would solve the problem of the fairly inelegant "Input Values" dialog.

Ultimately I agree with gruseom on this one, any real world program would be sufficiently complex to make this not very useful. But as a teaching tool I think it could be wonderful to take abstract concepts and turn them into concrete objects that a student could play with and inspect. It's also nice to see all the intermediate values.

</comment><comment><USER3> Love the idea. I find the UI itself rather inelegant, but I'd be happy to see more experimentation in this direction.

</comment><comment><USER4> It's amazing how regularly people reinvent this. Truly the perennial failed paradigm.

I once worked with a programmer who had a bee in his bonnet about visual modeling languages. Every week or so he would arrive for another hour-long harangue on the topic. Nothing I said could convince him of anything, until one day it occurred to me to suggest that he take a moderately complex real- world model (from one of our clients) and mock it up in his visual language. He disappeared for three months, then showed up at my office, said "You are right! Can't be done," and left. That was the end of that. I got lucky, because he was smart. Had he come back with visual spaghetti instead I'd have been done for.

People have told me that visual programming languages have found a niche in industrial process control. I have yet to hear a good answer as to what it is about this domain that makes visual programming actually work, since it's so infamous for being useless in pretty much every other area of computing.

<comment><USER5> It's a decent paradigm for anything that has to do with signal processing. It mirrors almost exactly how you would do it in real life. I.e. connecting cables to boxes which do a filter or an amplifier or an oscillator or whatnot. The best examples are systems like Labview, Max/MSP and Quartz Composer.

<comment><USER4> Ah, that may explain it: the programs are constrained by the physical things that they're modeling.</comment></comment></comment>


FEMA Spends More Preparing for Terrorism Than Hurricanes - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-08-27/hurricane-laura-fema-grants-aren-t-focused-on-climate-change <comment><USER3> In the abstract, this doesn't bother me. The potential attack surface for terrorism is huge, and there is a lot of potential for damage (both loss of life and economic damage). Hurricanes are a fairly well understood phenomenon which tend to cause a lot of damage but in fairly limited ways (typically only to coastal cities, and typically with warning).

It's not all that surprising that it may cost more to prepare for the huge and unknown variety of possible terrorist attacks as compared to the pretty well- known threat of hurricanes.

To me, the more important thing is that we make sure they have adequate resources to address both kinds of disaster (as well as others). I don't really care which one is more expensive.

<comment><USER4> I had the same reaction.

Hurricanes are not only well understood, they are also something that every single citizen living in a coastal city knows is inevitable and frequent enough that they take the precautions personally for dealing with them.

They also strike with anticipation, so after you've secured your personal property and made sure you haven't built in a flood plain like a responsible citizen, you have plenty of time to evacuate if/when one is going to make landfall where you live.

Terrorism can strike without warning and the same preparations for terrorism would help in disasters like the blast in Beirut.

<comment><USER5> You propose that people should look after themselves, and their belonings. Presumably some of the things people need to do in preparation for a hurricane benefit from economies of scale. Temporary shelter, preparing for rescue operations, structural engineering, stocking of supplies. People would probably be well advised to band together in some sort of emergency management cooperative to share expenses and increase efficiency.

<comment><USER6> I don't think anybody was arguing otherwise.

The point is that hurricanes are arguably a less difficult emergency to manage – they are predictable, understood and come with plenty of notice, to the point that individual preparation is both possible and effective.

This doesn't mean that centrally-coordinated emergency response isn't still useful – merely that it's not unreasonable for it to cost more to prepare for a rare and unpredictable emergency than a more frequent but predictable one.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Hurricanes don't threaten government credibility the way successful terrorist attacks do. We might not like it but it makes perfect sense that a government agency prioritizes threats to the government.

<comment><USER8> > _Hurricanes don 't threaten government credibility the way successful > terrorist attacks do._

This is one of those claims where the only reasonable answer is... "do they?" Bad disaster responses can make administrations look pretty bad.

<comment><USER9> While this may be true, one is carried on a news cycle for a longer period of time. Weather events are a normal and predictable happening, so the "shock and awe" don't carry the ratings necessary for the news coverage, regardless of the human tragedy.

Unfortunately, our society's attention span for weather tragedy is short and it is very unlikely any federally funded memorials will be built for victims of wildfires, floodings or hurricanes.

<comment><USER10> People can't disagree with and hate hurricanes the way they do other people.

<comment><USER11> Perhaps, but some apparently think they can with global warming.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> A lot of FEMA's work is generalizable—set up emergency shelters, evacuate people from disaster areas, provide supplies to disaster areas. Most of that stuff is pretty similar for earthquakes, hurricanes, wildfires, or terrorist attacks. Having more terrorism-specific funding doesn't mean terrorism is a higher priority or greater threat than hurricanes, just that it's more expensive to deal with.

</comment><comment><USER13> FEMA isn't supposed to be a nationwide front-line disaster management agency. It's supposed to be a backstop for when state governments, who have the primary responsibility for disaster relief, become overwhelmed. (Put differently, nobody voted for the whole country to subsidize hurricane prone states through FEMA.) It makes total sense for FEMA to focus on disasters that could happen anywhere rather than ones that happen routinely in certain hurricane prone stages.

<comment><USER14> Did the whole country vote for FEMA to subsidize relief for terrorism prone targets?

<comment><USER13> More or less, yes, after 9/11.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Are there any real examples of where the money is going for counter terrorism? In the entire article there's only one example, copied below. And it's of $14 million out of billions.

>A review of FEMA grant requests made by the latter state for 2019 through 2020 shows that a large chunk of the nearly $14 million has been sought for law enforcement communication, SWAT training, and bomb detection.

I'm also not sure what more FEMA money would do. As mentioned in the article, they're not worried about running out of money during the initial response to any disaster. If it's serious enough (like Katrina was), I don't doubt more money will be made available. FEMA primarily responds to disasters, and while some money goes to preventive measures, they are not in charge of preventing hurricane damage along the entire coast.

</comment><comment><USER16> FEMA is misguided in that is should be dispensing aid to states and cities in need and not instead doing the relief itself. Too often it actually steps in and blocks cities and states from properly administering aid to those in need. In effect, it should be handing out block grants and insuring that states don't conflict with each other, not be the source of conflict.

One major problem FEMA faces is not how it allocates its fund between disasters and terrorism it is instead the more of those funds land in states which have representation in Congress committees which exercise oversight on FEMA. Terrorism funding goes to police mostly and some to fire and related but the police and sheriffs of this country have outsized power in politics; related - the reason why defund the police was quickly dropped from political platforms

<comment><USER17> This would work great if every state and city government was competent and good at disaster relief. In general they're not, and FEMA already rely too much on having competent local government that they can co-operate with - <USER2> particular, I get the distinct impression that a lot of the disaster relief problems in Puerto Rico which were blamed on FEMA and the federal government were actually the result of the local government being completely and utterly useless (infamously so, even).

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> terrorism is scarier. it's unpredictable to the masses with no warning sign. it has people who commit. a person to put blame on and a theoretical ability to prevent it.

weather is just weather. we just blame God or "it happens" regardless of how bad it is. and most can be evacuated if we dont wait to the last minute to do it. we treat them like they're already mitigated.

<comment><USER19> > weather is just weather. we just blame God or "it happens" regardless of how > bad it is. and most can be evacuated if we dont wait to the last minute to > do it. we treat them like they're already mitigated.

Kinda? The effects of extreme weather can be mitigated (eg: don't build on flood plains), but we're seeing increasing cases where mitigation efforts are ignored and the adverse effects of that (ie: Hurricane Harvey in 2017, where neighborhoods in Houston that had been built on top of flood plains were inundated by storm surge). Mitigation is almost always cheaper than recovery.

While you can definitely mitigate some elements of terrorism (eg: remove cases where radicalization is likely), you can't mitigate it anywhere near as well as weather effects.

<comment><USER12> FEMA is also not responsible for the civil engineering of Houston (or New Orleans, for that matter). They're in charge of _managing_ emergencies, not preventing them.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I don't know if it's relevant or not, but FEMA is the agency that took over the Civil Defense role. (Think fallout shelters and that kind of thing.) While it later took on responsibility for natural disasters, I don't believe that was the priority for it.

</comment><comment><USER21> Hurricanes don't impact much of the US. Nebraska for example has zero hurricane risks, and while low it's has some terrorism risks. Also, in terms of preparation that can have positive returns it's not clear FEMA actually needs to spend that much on Hurricanes per year. 10 year old flood maps still work just fine etc.

So, this may actually be completely reasonable behavior based on FEMA's mandates.

<comment><USER22> Atlantic hurricanes have cost $400 billion of damage in the last 5 years alone.

The total damage caused by all terrorist attacks, worldwide, in the 21st century probably amounts to the damage caused by an _average_ year of Atlantic hurricanes. Add in the Pacific hurricane season, which is generally worse, and it's clear that hurricanes cause far more damage than terrorism does.

<comment><USER21> It's not FEMA's job to reduce physical damage. That's what building codes etc are for. FEMA's job is to coordinate responses to save lives in the short term and rebuild infrastructure in the long term. Hurricanes do a lot of damage, but rarely kill people in the US.

<comment><USER22> Hurricane Florence alone killed more people in the US than any terrorist attack since 9/11\. All hurricane deaths in Trump's term alone (predominantly Florence, Harvey, Irma), excluding Maria, have killed more people than all terrorism attacks since 9/11 combined. Hurricane Maria killed more than 9/11.

<comment><USER21> If you're looking at the excess deaths after Maria then you need to do the same thing for 9/11\. By one estimate 221 policemen died as a result of medical issues from 9/11 which don't make the official figures based on initial deaths. Dust inhalation etc very much killed people only indirectly involved on 9/11\. Thus, any kind of apples to apples comparison of either direct or direct + indirect deaths put 9/11 as a significantly more deadly event.

PS: Also that extrapolation on death rates for Maria is extremely questionable as it's been rising in Porto Rico for years. The increase from 2013 to 2014 is larger than the increase for 2016 to either 2017 or 2018. [https://www.statista.com/statistics/580903/death-rate-in- pue...](https://www.statista.com/statistics/580903/death-rate-in-puerto-rico/) You can assume the only thing bad that happened was a hurricane, but the data really doesn't support that.

<comment><USER22> You've lost sight of your own argument in the weeds of specific numbers here.

The broader point I'm making is this: hurricanes in the SE US and the Caribbean are, to a large degree "expected" disasters. As such they can be planned for, and damage can be minimized. And, I believe what you want to say is that they aren't all that "bad" anymore because of proper disaster preparation.

I would agree that hurricanes _shouldn 't_ be all that devastating in effect. But the data shows, quite convincingly IMHO, that we aren't doing as good as we could be doing in actually preparing for them.

<comment><USER21> My point has nothing to do with what _we_ should be doing just what FEMA should be doing. They have a very important but also very specific role. Other organizations are supposed to prevent levees from overtopping, keep buildings standing, etc. FEMA is there for redundancy so that such instances are mitigated after the fact.

When it comes to hurricanes that equates to selecting evacuation routes and locations to shelter the storm etc. If needed they may help create such shelters, but that stuff really seems to be working well. What happens after the storm is largely a question of how well other organizations have done their job. Aka what percentage of homes are habitable translates into how many people FEMA needs to find shelter for.

However, that last bit is a real question. Do we ramp up FEMA's ability to build temerity houses or reduce the need for such temporary houses? I think it's clear FEMA could do a much better job in disaster aftermath, but for hurricanes I think that's largely solving the wrong problem.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Maybe part of this is a branding and messaging problem.

I think of FEMA as a response-oriented agency: They aren't there to prevent disasters from occurring, they're intended to pick up the pieces afterwards.

If you approach it with that perspective, then you'd surely expect them to be devoted predominantly to hurricanes and similar natural disasters, as they can be anticipated and planned for.

If their true role is to be proactive about some specific disaster functions, maybe this needs to be better communicated to the public. Otherwise you end up with the poor guy who gets a job with the Secret Service and his family is "OMG do you jump in front of a bullet for the President" when he's going to spend his career squinting at bogus $5 notes.

</comment><comment><USER24> They should be focussing on their capacity to quickly move in mobile hospitals, potable water, emergency accomodation, etc and have adequate stockpiles of essentials ready to go.

How quickly and effectively you can help those impacted will reduce total fatalities regardless of whether a terrorist attack, natural disaster or something like the Beirut explosion.

</comment><comment><USER25> Hurricanes only kill people who can't afford to flee, while terrorism is something that even the wealthy are afraid of.

</comment><comment><USER26> In FEMA speak, preparedness is different from hazard mitigation. FEMA has an entirely separate grant program for hazard mitigation, which is funded with ~$0.7bn for flood and infrastructure resiliency, for example.

Each of these is dwarfed in turn by the actual response budget which goes into the Disaster Relief Fund, something around $15bn this FY.

</comment><comment><USER27> We have a pretty good idea of how to identify and respond to hurricanes.. not so much for terrorism.

</comment><comment><USER28> One thing I didn't see mentioned in the article is that Congress usually approves emergency funding after a major hurricane, which can be used to rebuild to prepare for the next hurricane.

</comment><comment><USER29> To me it's obvious and logical that they spend more resources on preparing for terrorism.</comment>


New Image of Pluto - <AUTHOR> http://www.nasa.gov/feature/new-image-of-pluto-houston-we-have-geology <comment><USER2> These are from 5.4 million km away. According to [1], in a few days (July 14) a Pluto system flyby is planned, at a distance of just 12.5 _thousand_ km (and a speed of 13.78 km/s), and they can take images of Pluto's surface at 70m resolution. Pluto's circumference is 7232 km. So, do I understand this correctly that we can realistically expect to see _much_ higher resolution images soon?

Or is the bandwidth really that limiting? It seems that even at 1kbps it would be possible and worth it to transfer some slightly higher resolution images. A typical color JPEG image at 640x480 is at most around 200kB, so that would take 27 minutes to transfer. For example here[2] is Mars at 640x480 in 38.4 kB. Is that unrealistic?

[1] [http://pluto.jhuapl.edu/News-Center/Resources/Press- Kits/NHP...](http://pluto.jhuapl.edu/News-Center/Resources/Press- Kits/NHPlutoFlybyPressKitJuly2015.pdf)

[2] [http://i.imgur.com/0vdGSV1.jpg](http://i.imgur.com/0vdGSV1.jpg)

<comment><USER3> Emily Lakdawalla has written an excellent guide explaining what can be expected to be seen over the next several days:

[http://www.planetary.org/blogs/emily- lakdawalla/2015/0624055...](http://www.planetary.org/blogs/emily- lakdawalla/2015/06240556-what-to-expect-new-horizons-pluto.html)

<comment><USER2> Indeed excellent, thanks! TLDR: Yes! "Pluto at 3.8 kilometers per pixel (~630 pixels across disk)."

<comment><USER4> That's transmitted shortly after closest approach, but that won't be the highest resolution image taken. It's just the highest resolution where pluto still fits into the frame. The highest resolution images will just be of portions of Pluto. One will come in on the 15th, but I believe the rest won't be transmitted until September due to the slow uplink speed.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> ~10 years in flight.

~20 times the speed of a bullet.

~5 billion kilometers away.

And there are pictures from this. What a feat.

</comment><comment><USER6> Wow... The picture of the science team reaction is gold.

<comment><USER7> To me it looks like they (especially the main guy operating the computer) is putting on an expression for the sake of the camera.

Cool how two people can get completely opposite vibes from a picture :)

<comment><USER8> This is interesting cultural phenomena.

First there was laugh tracks in sitcoms.

Then Japanese started to add those small reaction screens in the upper corners of the TV-competitions. Now it has taken over the world. Shows like MythBusters turned into collection to extended reaction shots to stuff that happens repeated over and over. You can see SpaceX having employees arranged to react and cheer and film crews filming the reactions half of the time.

We are spoon-fed with cues on how to react and reaction pics and interviews of people telling how amazing it and hyping it up has taken over.

Some people can find it draining, but I think there is good reasons why it's done. Competition for attention is fierce.

<comment><USER9> I think this is basically the same thing as a much older practice -- would you enjoy major holidays as much if people weren't so festive about them?

A sitcom with a laugh track may be less cinematically pure than the same sitcom with austere silence in the background, but watching a sitcom as a bonding activity works better with a laugh track.

So all things considered, it makes perfect sense to me for SpaceX to basically declare that certain occasions are SpaceX holidays and people should show a little more joy than usual.

<comment><USER10> > watching a sitcom as a bonding activity Never thought they can be used like > that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Just saw this awesome documentary from NASA about the New Horizons Mission [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EJxwWpaGoJs](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EJxwWpaGoJs) \- it is definitely a good watch.

</comment><comment><USER12> Absolutely incredible. I can't wait to see the close-up pictures taken on July 14.

<comment><USER13> Well they won't quite make it here on July 14th. The spacecraft will be spending most of July 14th making as many observations as it possibly can then in the following days/weeks/months we'll get a slow trickle of data back. The current plan actually calls for not getting a full download of all the data until November 2016! However we should have some reasonably good quality (lossy) compressed images back within the first week or so.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> I'm the only one that see an hexagonal pattern in the image? I don't mean a single hexagon, but several.

<comment><USER15> Hexagons are common in nature: [https://www.quora.com/Geometry/Why-do-we-see- hexagons-in-nat...](https://www.quora.com/Geometry/Why-do-we-see-hexagons-in- nature-so-often)

<comment><USER16> [http://www.scanningvirus.com/](http://www.scanningvirus.com/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Also NASA still use ThinkPads

<comment><USER18> Google does, too.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> The "did you know your browser is out of date" popup ruins the site on Android. If NASA's web team is reading this comment, please test your site on mobile.

</comment><comment><USER20> Just for curiosity, do anyone here knows how much time it takes to transfer images from Pluto to the Earth? And also what protocols do the NASA use for doing this?

<comment><USER21> It will take months to transfer the full data sets back. The data are formatted in ITF packets, inside CCSDS packets, inside CCSDS transfer frames.

[0] [http://public.ccsds.org/publications/BlueBooks.aspx](http://public.ccsds.org/publications/BlueBooks.aspx) [1] [http://www.boulder.swri.edu/pkb/ssr/ssr- fountain.pdf](http://www.boulder.swri.edu/pkb/ssr/ssr-fountain.pdf) [2] [https://books.google.com/books?id=oZfpYIUKDrUC&pg=PA347&lpg=...](https://books.google.com/books?id=oZfpYIUKDrUC&pg=PA347&lpg=PA347&dq=new+horizons+ccsds&source=bl&ots=xu5-AcaP3x&sig=Af-1FWiZN7Q2ync8eCy6UjElPKY&hl=en&sa=X&ei=F5WhVaHiL8Kw- AGX6rrYBw&ved=0CCQQ6AEwAQ#v=onepage&q=new%20horizons%20ccsds&f=false)

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Where does it go after the flyby?

<comment><USER23> There are a couple of candidate Kuiper belt objects for a flyby in a year or two, they were found by Hubble after a search with ground telescopes came up with nothing. No decision has been taken about that flyby yet.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> It is interesting to me that the one constant tradition in astronomy from antiquity to today is that we name features observed in the heavens of abstract shapes after things specific and unique to Earth.

From the man in the moon, to constellations shaped like swords or crabs, and now Pluto's whale - we seem to impose ethnocentrism on everything, no matter how remote.

<comment><USER25> > we seem to impose ethnocentrism on everything, no matter how remote

Because A5236 is so much better.

We either give random designations or non-random ones. Random ones are hard to remember. Non-random ones will obviously be named in a manner that makes it easier to remember, otherwise why go non-random? So if you're naming something with the goal of making it easy to remember, then yes, you're going to name it after something that it resembles, however slightly.

Please put the political correctness back on the shelf.

<comment><USER24> [http://xkcd.com/1551/](http://xkcd.com/1551/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Off topic, but I wish the New Horizons website's title said NASA - New Image of Pluto.

When I have more than two tabs open, I kept looking at the tab the Pluto photo was in and thinking it was a blank new tab.

</comment><comment><USER27> couldn't help but giggle at

>After nine and a half years in flight, Pluto is well worth the wait.

</comment><comment><USER28> I am a little frustrated at the "slow" pace of NASA puts the raw LORRI images on their public website. The newest is two days old. At this pace of approach every few hours closer has a new and more fantastic image. At least NASA puts up raw data fairly quickly. ESA takes months for its Mars and Rosetta images.

<comment><USER4> Note that the craft can't take pictures and send data at the same time, so it only sends back a few navigation images and only periodically, fewer now as they're doing more science as it gets closer. It also takes up to 4 or 5 hours to transmit the images (I think they're down to ~1 kbps now). The last few seem to have been posted within less than a day of the team receiving them.

You can see the transmission schedule here: [http://www.planetary.org/blogs/emily- lakdawalla/2015/0624055...](http://www.planetary.org/blogs/emily- lakdawalla/2015/06240556-what-to-expect-new-horizons- pluto.html?referrer=https://news.ycombinator.com/) (images to be posted on the raw image page are in bold)

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> Why is image so grainy? In this day and age, we should have better images, even from 5.4 million kilometers away.

<comment><USER30> It's imaging hardware likely from 2001 or older. Remember this space craft has been in flight for almost 10 years, in development for several years before that and the imaging hardware needs to be well tested and hardened for space flight.

<comment><USER31> Even if it was today's hardware, we'd still be getting grainy images from this distance. It might be slightly better, but not the amazing hi-res images people on this thread seem to be expecting. Pluto is really small and far away. It's just a tiny spot even to Hubble. Well get the hi-res images once new horizons actually does its flyby and once the data is downloaded.

<comment><USER32> There's one person in this thread who is disappointed. Everyone else seems to recognise this as the amazing thing it is.

Perhaps we just need some kind of infographic? If the camera is a single pixel, how many pixels away is Pluto? What's the equivalent using (as one person suggested) a iPhone camera?

<comment><USER4> LORRI, the camera taking these photographs has a resolution of 4.9 µradians per pixel. From what I can put together, the iPhone 6 has a horizontal resolution of about 340 µradians per pixel. So a 70-pixel-across image of pluto from LORRI (about what we have here[1] taken about two days ago) would appear to be a single pixel on an iPhone 6.

It's possible that single pixel wouldn't show up at all since it's pretty dim all the way out there, but Apple has been working hard on their low-light image capture :)

And that's of course not accounting for radiation protection, a very carefully designed CCD and mounting so you can actually do science with the results, calibration after riding up on a rocket, sensitivity across 350nm to 850nm, etc.

[1] [http://pluto.jhuapl.edu/soc/Pluto- Encounter/view_obs.php?ima...](http://pluto.jhuapl.edu/soc/Pluto- Encounter/view_obs.php?image=data/pluto/level2/lor/jpeg/029878/lor_0298787344_0x630_sci_1.jpg&utc_time=2015-07-09%3Cbr%3E22:37:05%20UTC&description=OpNav+Campaign+4%2C+LORRI+1X1&target=CHARON&range=5.4M%20km&exposure=100%20msec) (actually closer to 75-80 pixels across)</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


E-Myth Revisited: Why Most Small Businesses Don't Work and What to Do About It - <AUTHOR> http://www.squeezedbooks.com/book/show/40/the-e-myth-revisited-why-most-small-businesses-dont-work-and-what-to-do-about-it <comment><USER2> I thought the entire book could have been written in less than 10 pages. For years I worked as a manufacturing engineer, so documenting your processes is kind of second nature to me. On the other hand, I hated bureaucratic systems like ISO 9000, so my advice is always to do the minimum necessary.

For startups, just keep simple documentation of essential processes. For example, I rarely had to process refunds through PayPal, so I would forget how to do it. I kept overlooking the refund link. So I made a screen shot, circled the link, and saved it in my process documentation folder. Basic, but effective.

For other processes, I have written documents, flowcharts, and checklists, depending upon how complex the process is. If you have 1-2 people in your company, you're doing it for your own benefit, so there's no need to be formal.

<comment><USER3> I read the first edition, and it had more than 10 pages worth of useful advice including a fair amount of stuff besides the "document processes" advice (although that was its biggest message).

One of the best was "make sure there's a head for every cap." I.e. there are a lot of necessary roles in every small business (at the highest level, things like marketing and sales, at a low level, say, backups); make sure every important role is identified and assigned to _someone_.

It's still on my "top 5" list of books anyone starting up a company should read.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> I just finished this book, and it's interesting, although somewhat less targeted at startups than at small businesses. Indeed, some of the advice contained seems to actually go against how I have always seen startups. For instance, "operations manuals" are things best left until you are a Big Company - better to spend time working on the product rather than worrying about creating some kind of 'system' to make you replaceable. Indeed, reflecting on this advice is an interesting way of considering the differences between a real 'startup' and someone simply starting a business.

Anyone else read it? What'd you think?

<comment><USER4> "Operations manuals" sound like a scary bureaucratic thing that only big companies have, but personally I think everybody needs them. It doesn't have to be big and formal, it could simply be a wiki on the internal web site, but somewhere all important steps and procedures should be documented. Even if no one gets hit by a bus, having a check list on how important things work is always handy to refresh your memory, especially if it's something you only do a couple of times a year.

Also if you hire a new person, being able to point them to a place which explains exactly how your company does version control or how your build process works will save everyone a lot of time.

<comment><AUTHOR> See above, but the message I got was that if you're a small restaurant or a bike repair shop or something like that, _the_ thing to work on is the 'system', which means making it so you can drop new people in to grow by handing them a manual which describes in detail how things are done.

I'm not so sure something like a tech startup is like that. What would have been the point at replacing most founders early on? The whole point is developing a product that scales with the 'hockey stick' curve, which is very different from growing, say, a bike shop into a chain of 3 or 4 bike shops.

I agree completely with documenting things, but one is documenting stuff so it doesn't get lost or have to be explained out-loud every time, to help people get up to speed with things. The other is create a system for people to work in that doesn't leave people much room to screw up, so that you can have someone new up and flipping burgers in a day.

 _Edit_ \- the book makes a lot of sense in the context of a 'small business' where the goal, often enough is to extract yourself from being the business and make it run without you. Where I'm a bit more dubious is about startups...

<comment><USER5> Correct me if I'm wrong, but I thought part of the idea was not so much to replace the founder as it is to allow the founder to drop parts of their responsibilities as you expand. I would think that would be applicable to most startups.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Valve Announces Half-Life: Alyx for VR - <AUTHOR> https://www.polygon.com/2019/11/18/20970733/half-life-alyx-vr-release-date-valve-announcement <comment><USER2> Seems like its only going to be VR. Thats sad. I love halflife games but I am not going to shell out hundreds of dollars for a VR headset to just play that game.

<comment><USER3> I see it the other way around -- lots of people have shelled out for a VR headset and need quality content. (valve's lab was good but just a teaser)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Rather: Valve announces future announcement of …</comment>


Live stream of Christchurch attack runs on social media and news sites - <AUTHOR> https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/mar/15/video-of-christchurch-attack-runs-on-social-media-and-news-sites <comment><USER2> I've been looking for the right place to post this, this may or may not be it.

I've actually been very impressed with the news coverage that I have seen of this for one distinct reason.

This was a horrific incident, perpetrated by someone with an obvious agenda in attempt to push it further. Whilst it was streamed live, there seems to have been a concious effort of news outlets to not publish any real details of who did it, rather what happened to the victims.

After all the shootings in the US, and lots of talk of "not giving the shooter their glory", it feels like the coverage so far has been much better from that point of view.

<comment><USER3> Maybe you've seen something different, but so far I've only seen one news report stating that the reason the shooter moved on to a second location (at least 40 victims) from his first location (at least 9 victims) is because someone at that first location started shooting back at him!</comment></comment>