HBO makes some top shows, movies and documentaries free to stream - <AUTHOR> https://techcrunch.com/2020/04/02/hbo-makes-some-top-shows-movies-and-documentaries-free-to-stream-on-hbo-now-and-hbo-go/ <comment><USER2> Only in the U.S.

<comment><USER3> And even then, it still requires payment info as seen in the comments on TC:

> Billy Williams:

> Every time I try to watch any thing on that list I get sent straight to the > register a account page and they want my credit card info. Reply Share 2 > Likes

I already have most of those series on DVD/Blueray or seen them enough times that I can't be bothered, but I really wanted to watch Treme, it was a really underappreciated series about post-Katrina NOLA.

Which, is sadly coming full circle as NOLA's Corona Virus epidemic is really highlighting how nothing was ever really fixed and mainly just brushed under the rug. It also has a lot of the same cast from the Wire:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_TG4pLMPLfc](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_TG4pLMPLfc)</comment></comment>


Burnt-Out At 20, Making $20K A Day - with Max Teitelbaum - <AUTHOR> http://mixergy.com/teitelbaum-whatrunswhere-interview/ <comment><USER2> "Andrew: What you were doing was, you were buying ads online and running affiliate advertising against them. The profit was the revenue that you were making from the affiliate programs, what they were paying you every time they got a new order or lead, minus what you were paying for your ads, right."

For the hard-of-money-making, what does this mean, how does it work functionally (black box inputs and outputs), and why is it profitable?

<comment><USER3> I think what you're asking is "how do affiliate programs work." Is that right?

Here's an overly basic explanation that could help: You send a user to a web site. The user buys or fills out a form. You get paid a commission.

<comment><USER4> No. I don't think that's being asked here.

Normally with affiliate links, or how most people understand it (at least I do), is to place these links on YOUR website.

This seems to go in a slightly different direction where you place and ad for some else on a third party website. However, it's not a real ad, it's a third party affiliate link (your affiliate link). Very clever.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This is a great story, and kudos to Max for being able to profit massively from it, but this type of thing always reminds me of day traders. For me, personally, it is not all that inspiring. Maybe I am being too altruistic, but it seems like instead of creating value, he is extracting value from other companies. Honestly, I would rather read stories about young people making 1/100 of what Max made, but instead of affiliate arbitrage, they are building their own product and hustling their own sales. Nonetheless, it is still an interesting read, and a way to make a quick buck if you are willing to put up some cash to get the traffic pumping.

<comment><USER3> Looks like he learned a lot from it and then moved on. Now he's running whatrunswhere.com, which does ad intelligence.

<comment><USER5> That he does.

Truthfully, I would be interested in finding out how he sold his WhatRunsWhere product to all of those clients he has listed on his site. Like I said, the story leading up to this point in his life is good, but I would personally be more interested in hearing more about WhatRunsWhere, not so much about making $10K/day being a broker for diet products. That being said, if the ultimate goal is to make as much money as quickly as possible, this is one way to make that happen. However, by his own admission, he is a shining example of becoming disillusioned with making money just for the sake of making money.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I thought it was pretty cool. I enjoy hearing about these things not because I want to get into affiliate marketing, but because I can use the same techniques to get people to my own products.

When you are playing both sides, your profits are much higher and more stable in the long-run.

I thought it was interesting that he mentioned "wickedfire.com". This is a known black-hat seo hangout and 99% of the things they mention on this forum are unethical and border-line illegal.

<comment><USER7> /me waves

I'm the owner/the guy who wrote it. The guy in this interview is Max, the co- owner. I'm also a moderator on wickedfire. While I would disagree with your characterization of the forum, it would be odd if I didn't post there considering my position.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Does anyone remember AllAdvantage and BeFree from last decade? At that time it was cost per click ... :)

<comment><USER9> Ahh - good 'ol AllAdvantage. My university room mates and I all signed up under each other, and all ran about 10 clients on our computers each night with a script to make the mouse move and click random things.

People thought we were nuts until the money started rolling in.</comment></comment>


Watch an AI bot play Go [video] - r-u-serious https://www.facebook.com/Engineering/videos/10153621562717200/ <comment><AUTHOR> Very cool. I wrote a Go playing game for the Apple II which I sold.

I have recently become interested, again, in Go programming. I have started setting up a framework for using GnuGo to generate training data for a deep learning network. I am starting with a tiny 7x7 board just to see if the general approach works.

If it works (at all) then I will post the entire project to github.

<comment> r-u-serious Cool. I recently started working on a command line Go program. Mainly for learning Haskell and without any AI, yet. [https://github.com/tsujigiri/gosh](https://github.com/tsujigiri/gosh)

<comment><USER2> Fun! I have a Haskell Go web app. It has a super experimental AI that can't actually win that I only spent a couple of hours on: [https://github.com/tinco/ergo](https://github.com/tinco/ergo)

<comment> r-u-serious I'll check that out!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> What's interesting to me about this is the visual pattern recognition -- rather than just scaling up a giant Monte-Carlo search, playing like (presumably) humans do, searching for patterns, is very cool.

I was just this weekend going through my go library, and most of the books I have focus on precisely this sort of pattern training. In fact, there's a whole branch of study in go called in Japanese "Tesuji", essentially brilliant moves that come from bad-looking patterns.

The idea is that you lull your opponent into complacency with your bad-looking pattern, then "BAM", a surprise comes out. My guess is that an RNN could be discovering new tesuji, which would be super cool. If the RNN can look ahead deep enough, then I would think that's a path forward against strong players.

There's also the reverse, Anti-suji, essentially things that look brilliant, but are really terrible.

</comment><comment><USER4> There is something captivating about watching two master-AI's battling it out on the Go board, it's almost Art in a way ;)

Facebook's AI lab will probably reveal more technical details at NIPS 2015. Here's the workshop on Reasoning, Attention, Memory (RAM) they are organizing that will seek to address some of the challenges around advancing from classification and prediction tasks to simple cognition:

[http://www.thespermwhale.com/jaseweston/ram/](http://www.thespermwhale.com/jaseweston/ram/)

</comment><comment><USER5> Related article: [https://code.facebook.com/posts/1478523512478471/teaching- ma...](https://code.facebook.com/posts/1478523512478471/teaching-machines-to- see-and-understand-advances-in-ai-research/)

</comment><comment><USER6> From the short description, it looks like a project from Google about training a deep network to play the game. The resulting bot was quite strong (or at least, quite strong for not using Monte Carlo tree search, at least). Without any more details though, it's hard to tell.

<comment><USER7> Here is the paper for Google's DNN-based move evaluation in Go: [http://www.cs.toronto.edu/~cmaddis/pubs/deepgo.pdf](http://www.cs.toronto.edu/~cmaddis/pubs/deepgo.pdf)

<comment><USER6> Thanks, I wasn't sure where I had the reference.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> "strong human player." Like 1 Dan strong or like 6 kyu strong? It's a meaningless statement.

<comment><USER9> If it's comparable to other computer go ais then it's low dan.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Go should just be labeled Gogame in contrast to Golang.

<comment><USER11> > Go should just be labeled Gogame in contrast to Golang.

At the same time, there's something amusing about the idea that a six year-old programming language should cause a 2000 year old game to change its name.

<comment><USER12> It's also kind of weird we call it by its (newer) Japanese name instead of weiqi.

<comment><USER13> There was a reason for that though. Before the latter half of the 20th century Japanese go scene kind of dominated for several centuries (thanks to official shogun sponsor).

<comment><USER14> More importantly, until the past few decades, Japan did the majority of the go outreach in the West. That's changed a bit, and thanks to Korean influence, it's more common to hear people saying "baduk".

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> He used Monte Carlo methods, not DNN, but a nice talk on Computer Go by Zach Tellman

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v5dYE0CMmHQ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v5dYE0CMmHQ)

</comment><comment><USER12> Btw, why is go-the-game capitalised? We don't capitalise Chess, do we?

<comment><USER5> [http://english.stackexchange.com/questions/8126/is-the- game-...](http://english.stackexchange.com/questions/8126/is-the-game-go-a- proper-noun-what-about-checkers-or-chess)

<comment><USER16> that's a good answer: capitalize to disambiguate

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> _After a few months of playing ... it 's as good as a very strong human player._

This is potentially a really big breakthrough if true, as Go is much harder than Chess computationally. Nobody knows about Go in the West though so don't expect any headlines.

<comment><USER14> This is hard to evaluate. Explicit metrics would be good, but there's also a definitional point. Depending on who you ask, existing AI programs are as good as a very strong human player. Others will scoff at that characterization. The problem is what "very strong" means. Precisely, current programs can beat many professionals with a 4 stone handicap.

Making good analogies is hard, but here's mine: current go programs are probably somewhere in the range of runners running a 2:45 marathon. They're beyond what most people can hope to reach, perhaps even with intensive training, but they're not world-class. In fact, they're not just below world- class: there are thousands of people better than them who are themselves not yet world class. (Context: I play go and run at a level far below the ones quoted above, but know people who play/run at that level. And I've seen those people get their butts kicked by stronger players/runners).

<comment><USER18> But, surely, they are going to improve the system, and fast.

I would bet that in a few years is going to be clear who is superior, the machine or the human.

<comment><USER9> That's been happening for a while now. My understanding is that there was a major wall many go AIs were stuck on prior to the invention of monte carlo tree search (essentially, a way of evaluating a better play objective function) and they're improving now again. There appears to be reticence to evaluate the strength of go programs, though.

Here's a chart of current ratings of popular engines on online forums. The rating system is one of "kyu" and "dan" going from 25k to 1k to 1d to 9d.

[http://senseis.xmp.net/?KGSBotRatings](http://senseis.xmp.net/?KGSBotRatings)

Informally there's another rating system the "pro" rating system which is a bit ceremonial but also broadly assumed to be often higher than the amateur dan rankings.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Does "To help teach systems how to plan, Facebook's AI research team has created an AI bot to play the board game Go. " actually teach AI how to "plan" at anything beyond board games?

</comment><comment><USER20> This Facebook Video suggests it has had months of either training or development, which sounds might be it learning by playing, reinforcement learning in this space could be very interesting - more details would be good.

The two breakthrough papers using Deep Conv Nets to play Go - trained on Expert Games to predict the Experts Next Move.

This is made possible by the huge archives of expert play from online Go servers that have reached Big Data sizes in the last few years.

Teaching Deep Convolutional Neural Networks to Play Go - Clark & Storkey Edinburgh Informatics 2015 [http://arxiv.org/abs/1412.3409](http://arxiv.org/abs/1412.3409)

Move Evaluation in Go Using Deep Convolutional Neural Networks Maddison, Huang, Silver, Sutskever Deepmind 2015 [http://arxiv.org/abs/1412.6564](http://arxiv.org/abs/1412.6564)

David Silver has work on Reinforcement Learning and Go: Reinforcement Learning of Local Shape in the Game of Go Silver et al 2007. [https://scholar.google.co.uk/citations?view_op=view_citation...](https://scholar.google.co.uk/citations?view_op=view_citation&hl=en&user=-8DNE4UAAAAJ&citation_for_view=-8DNE4UAAAAJ:9yKSN- GCB0IC)

Go is scored by occupying and surrounding territory and the opponents pieces taken.

The current State of the Art programs use Monte Carlo Tree Search with each move being evaluated using random playouts - this is well suited to Go as it reasnoble estimate for comparison of the territory that will result from a move.

As the Go search tree branches a lot (~200 branches per play) tree search takes some time and cannot be exhaustive.

The Expert Move Predicting Convnets provide very good moves very quickly, and can provide and provide probabilities the expert would move for each square in a single forward pass.

Most of the current development now centers around using the Convnets to prune the search trees for the random playout MCTS engines.

Go is useful from an AI perspective because it is a huge state space and the patterns are subtle with long term implications. No computer can yet beat the best humans - so it is an area where natural intelligence beats artificial.

Yet the convnets are not doing planning, only predicting what an expert human would do next, the planning is implicit in the dataset but not a part of the convnet itself (though the internals of deepnets are mysterious so who knows).

The Computer Go mailing list is very lively and full of the best program creators with regular computer tournaments against each other. [http://computer-go.org/mailman/listinfo/computer-go](http://computer- go.org/mailman/listinfo/computer-go)

The Facebook video shows GnuGo is the opposing player, this is not the best computer player and suggests Facebooks player is not as strong as the Convnets as yet - it also does not detail how deep the playouts of the tree search are, i.e. what level GnuGo is playing at, so this cannot really be compared to recent work.

Hopefully Facebook will publish more details soon - if they are learning through play then their results may well be interesting.

Remi Coulom's excellent slides detail the Monte Carlo revolution in Go programs. [http://www.remi-coulom.fr/JFFoS/JFFoS.pdf](http://www.remi- coulom.fr/JFFoS/JFFoS.pdf)

AFAIK MCTS with Random playout and hand coded heuristics are still SOTA.

When I visited in the summer Edinburgh Uni Informatics Department convnet Go was in active development.</comment>


How do we solve the filter bubble? - <AUTHOR> Not trying to be political, but I think most people are shocked by the results of this election. Google and Facebook drive most of the new news consumption. What can we do to solve "getting served what you like"? <comment><USER2> You need to distinguish between good and bad filter bubbles. Politics is a good example of a 'bad' filter bubble, but if I search for Python or Ruby, is it unfair to assume that I am talking about programming languages, and not rocks or snakes?

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah, that's an important distinction. Once text analaysis gets better, I think it will be important to mix the results.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> We need a new place for objective, discerning conversation where facts matter. Print media and big three TV networks used to provide a fragile version of that for a while.

FactCheck.org and Politifact.com are steps in the right direction. I'd like to see a site that entertainingly covers news and issues, references other media but is willing to call bullsh*t on the media and politicians.

</comment><comment><USER4> Decentralize information flows. (Good luck with that...) However, it's not simply a problem of getting served what you like. I can guarantee you Trump supporters were not getting served what they like.</comment>


The Math Behind Successful Relationships - <AUTHOR> https://www.wsj.com/articles/how-do-i-love-thee-a-mathematician-counts-the-ways-11549627200?mod=rsswn <comment><AUTHOR> If you're not a WSJ subscriber [https://outline.com/cw9MwN](https://outline.com/cw9MwN)</comment>


Ask HN: Play framework vs Grails - <AUTHOR>

Hey everyone,
Firstly, let me begin by saying that the reason it's down to these 2 frameworks is because my team is mostly Java-based.
I'm trying to develop a BI portal and am evaluating both these frameworks. I have heard some great things about Play (especially from LinkedIn) but have heard even more great things about Grails. An article pointed out that Grails has more plugins and etc.
I just wanted to get the HN crowd's opinion on these 2 frameworks. I've been able to build toy applications on both but I don't think it's substantial enough to teach me about the pains.
My main concerns are that Play framework is moving to Scala and it's more hype than substance (according to an article I read). <comment><USER2> "according to an article I read"

Well, it's like when you buy an expensive TV, you have to search for several reviews, from different sources.

Same thing applies to choosing a framework: read, read, read. When you're given only one info source, you consider it the best, because you have nothing to choose. But in this case you have :)

</comment><comment><USER3> I prefer Clojure/Ring if I'm going to be doing web stuff on the JVM, but if I had to pick between those two, I'd go with Play. I don't think either is a terrible choice though.

</comment><comment><USER4> Have you considered Apache Wicket?

<comment><USER5> ...and besides Wicket, the Clojure web tools are, of course, also Java-based.</comment></comment>


Snapvine.com: Thanks for the memories - <AUTHOR> http://snapvine.com/

<comment><AUTHOR> I'd love to know what happened. $20M is a lot to pay, to then shut the doors.

<comment><USER2> Talent acquisition? [Not cited, just a guess.]</comment></comment>


If the NSA has been hacking everything, how has nobody seen them coming? - <AUTHOR> http://blog.thinkst.com/p/if-nsa-has-been-hacking-everything-how.html?m=1

<comment><AUTHOR> Section 4 is bloody hilarious and clever.</comment>


Counter – How long would it take you to count to a number? - <AUTHOR> https://counter.brn.sh <comment><AUTHOR> OP here—

A few days ago I read something that sparked me some interest: counting to a trillion would take someone over 30 thousand years, if they took 1 second counting each number from 1 to 1 trillion (in short scale, meaning 1 billion = one thousand millions, not one million millions).

The idea was to put the number in a different perspective, as we're quite bad at grasping large numbers.

I'd never thought about numbers that way, and honestly, was quite refreshing.

So I built a small app that helps with that, and also takes in consideration that you don't take 1s per number for most numbers.

You can read more about the why and how here (includes a link to the math for counting and source code of the app): [https://thoughts.brunobernardino.com/putting-numbers-in- pers...](https://thoughts.brunobernardino.com/putting-numbers-in-perspective/)

It's been very interesting for me to put even some smaller numbers in a different perspective, like a thousand. Maybe there's a new way of valuing time with it.

P.S.: There's also a tiny easter egg, if you're curious.</comment>


FAST "shebang" for C - Jeff-Russ This is my first post here so hopefully I'm doing this right. I found this thread https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9144467 from a while back and it got me experimenting with similar things. I found this solution which seems to be MUCH faster:

  //usr/bin/env gcc `basename "$0"` -o _;./_ "$@";rm _;exit
 When you make a C source file, say hello.c with this as the top line, and just run it directly, this line will call gcc on it's own file name, and compile to a file just called _ (underscore). Then it will execute it, forwarding all arguments to it, then remove it, then exit (so it doesn't try interpreting C code as bash or whatever). The whole thing is blazing fast, much faster than some popular solutions I found on GitHub even. <comment> Jeff-Russ It's safer to do $BASH_SOURCE instead of $0 but I really can't think of a real-live scenario where it would matter here. Perhaps if you are chaining calls but I'm not even sure that would work without trying it.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> You should use use '&&' instead of ';' so that you don't end up running another program should the compilation fail.

Also highly recommended to use '_$$' instead of plain '_'.

</comment><comment> Jeff-Russ also note that this is not entirely portable since some systems can send args to /usr/bin/env gcc</comment>


My Tribute to Steve Jobs - <AUTHOR> http://netspencer.com/stevejobs/ You've made me a better person and I will miss you but I will never forget what you've taught me. Rest in peace, Steve. <comment><USER2> Another GREAT Spencer creative creation, Your proud Grandad Moore

</comment><comment><USER3> Nice! Love the design! Nice "Thank you" section. Great info.

</comment><comment><USER4> Marvelous.</comment>


Your App Won't Save the World - <AUTHOR> http://theindustry.cc/2013/02/01/your-app-wont-save-the-world/ <comment><USER3> What is the point here? What actionable advice are readers supposed to glean from reading this article? It just sounds like you're being different for the sake of it. You're not really encouraging or discouraging, offering any advice or your own personal beliefs of how things should be.

Might be a bit harsh, but nothing bugs me more than a hater or someone with a dissenting opinion that offers little-to-no actionable suggestion or thought- provoking message. I read this and think "Hm, ok".

I agree that there's an issue with grandiosity, but I'm still unsure if it's a net positive or negative for society. Out of the millions working to change the world, maybe one will develop a solution that will truly affect the lives of others for the better. Or perhaps if we lower expectations and live life only to survive, we may be happier with ourselves overall. Who knows. Perhaps the trick is both raising the bar and lowering it and pushing ourselves to be content with falling anywhere in the middle.

<comment><USER4> > I agree that there's an issue with grandiosity, but I'm still unsure if it's > a net positive or negative for society.

I believe that is a net negative for two reasons: (1) grandiosity is a sign of people tying their self-worth to their achievements and (2) grandiosity is a sign of a lack of healthy self-critique.

Tying your self-worth to your success, especially in a high-risk activity, is a recipe for long-term inconsistency and increased personal risk (which in turn impacts net productivity).

Too much optimism and self-confidence is a recipe for stagnation, and that's what we see for the most part in the startup / app-development world.

For instance, perhaps if people were a bit more self-critical, they would discover that historically most technical innovation has occurred in the context of large, well-funded research programs. People might then choose to, rather than starting that social media website that will change the world or hacking together that 'cool' project for Maker Faire, study computer science and take a job at Microsoft Research, PARC or SpaceX.

Or something else.

But any behavior that reduces the extent to which people think about their actions is probably bad.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> > Civilization has made us docile, but we're still the same people underneath, > and a change in circumstance could send us back into that primitive state. > To quote The Art of Looking Sideways: "Civilization is chaos taking a rest."

I do grow tired of this idea of "primitive" people being a bunch of savages. One would think with the explosion of knowledge in anthropology we've acquired in the last century that the average person (and especially, the non-average person) would better understand just how wrong Hobbes was with his "nasty, brutish and short" comment.

Civilization as we know it is an attempt to adapt humans to societies at scale, ie. beyond ~200 or so people - and so far, it has worked badly. We're heavily optimized for tribal societies, which isn't surprising given that we developed and improved them over tens of thousands of years, compared to a mere four thousand for civilization.

Let me note that this isn't an indictment against civilization. As with any new thing (say, cars vs. horses, or guns vs. bows) the new development will initially be notably worse than the older one. Guns were around for hundreds of years before they replaced bows, and even then it took hundreds of years more before they made the leap to automatics that has made them so effective today.

Civilization is little different - we've tried all sorts of things, some of which have worked in some ways, many of which have collapsed under their own weight of corruption, inequality or other problems. And things are getting better. But this idea that "non-civilized" people are chaotic or savages really needs to go.

</comment><comment><USER6> > Your app won't save the world.

> In fact, if the world is to be saved, it won't be through human devices.

> Our image of primitive man is that he was a bumbling, grunting idiot.

Since the author is Christian (shown prominently anywhere his name appears), these three sentences make me question what he means by the word 'save.' If he means it in the 'spiritual Christian sense,' then of course no app will do that. And the 'our image' of primitive man seems like the Christian one, influenced by the concept of original sin.

> The world is governed much more by human nature than we'd like to admit, and > human nature doesn't change.

It seems to me that human nature can very much be influenced by technology. Slavery used to be commonplace, with many people (including the strongly religious) having no moral opposition to it. Massive atrocities throughout history have taken place because they were outside the public eye. Hateful words were much easier to speak in the past, before being caught by a recording device was a possibility. The fact that knowledge can now be spread quicker to the rest of the world (something that apps these days can sometimes help with) keeps a lot of this 'human nature' in check.

Just looking at the world today, it's hard to say that technology has not made a significant (and probably net positive) change in how people think and behave.

</comment><comment><USER7> This is stunningly wrong. Human nature _is_ change, the ability to not only adapt to our circumstances but to effect them is the hallmark of Humanity.

The changing of cultural mores isn't something that just happens, it's something people do. And technology is just the creation of tools to do things. It won't magically make us better, but it does make us stronger when we choose to do good and be good.

He's also mistaken about Communism; it isn't doomed to fail because of some supposed incapability of humans for collective action (counterexamples: every organization ever). It's doomed because it's based on a misapprehension of the scalability of central economic planning.

This was a lesson learned at the cost of many millions of human lives, and it does them a disservice to not learn it.

</comment><comment><USER8> What a strange rhetorical style. Terse certainty, unimaginative characterization of the human possibility field (via maneuvers to things like "human nature"), short summations of complex historical turns... plus the loud graphic design/quotes. I feel like you've got some points in there but the piece betrayed their communication and a richer exploration.

I do believe a lot of (most?) startup culture applies powerful minds to small problems... which is in support of your headline...

However - why not think of capitalism (and the apps it rides in on) as a medium, or a technology? In this way, it can be used to transform culture. This may not change "human nature," whatever supposed boundaries that has (fwiw, I think it will)... but capitalism&tech applied as such can absolutely save lives, if not the world.

Whatabout an app that uses our network culture to problem solve something like the spread of disease? That counts as "saving the world" in my book.

Of course, "saving the world" usually comes with a shadow of imperialism, but that is another story for another day..

</comment><comment><USER9> I'm surprised no one has mentioned this:

 _Author: Jordan Koschei Designer, developer, writer, founder. Follower of Christ. You can follow him on Twitter here._

No, I'm not implying religious belief means that the OP is dumb. I'm saying that Christ-centered theology argues for a fallen world based on immutable characteristics of mankind's nature. Given this, I can see why the OP is inclined to think that no real change will come from "your app" or any other man-made thing.

<comment><USER10> I came here to mention this.

A common principle in Christianity is that the world is broken beyond repair. Generalised from the principle that everyone is a sinner.

That's why signing up for redemption is such a Big Deal. Either you are on the Christ bus or you're stuffed.

(The exact reasoning varies from church to church, sometimes a lot).

 _It might or might not be relevant_ , though. The linked article actually (sorta[1]) suffers from another common problem, which is that the world is a rational machine that can be "fixed" with a few architectural changes. It's very common for intelligent people to think that way.

Complex systems don't work that way. In fact, the best we can do is intelligent trial and error. Treating people as a physics problem or an architecture assignment tends to end in tears.

[1] Another way to look at is that the author has restated the old observation that technological solutions can't solve social problems.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> > Runkeeper won't make an athlete out of someone with no desire to run

And yet today, while driving and using the Navigon North America app on my phone, I got a nice spoken warning saying "CAUTION!" when my speed accidentally exceeded 75 mph when going downhill on a highway.

<comment><USER12> I would even disagree with the assertion about Runkeeper directly. I never had a history of desiring to run. In fact, I might even say that I hated doing it. However, the nerd in me had an interest in the data I could collect while running. That pushed me out there to actually do it. You maybe still wouldn't call me an athlete, but I am definitely more athletic now than I was before the technology was in my hands.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> I go back and forth on this. It's true that your app won't feed people who're starving, at least not directly. But it's kind of incredible how many problems essentially boil down to information problems, and particularly search problems, and your app can certainly solve those. In particular, I think there's a very large supply of untapped goodwill, and a basically infinite demand for goodwill, that is not connecting right now (or connecting poorly, through inefficient charities). For some things, for some people, at some points in time, an app can help bridge that gap. For example, you could write a volunteer version of Exec where people in your community just, I don't know, _ask for help_ and then someone nearby _gives them help_. Like going grocery shopping or something, or even helping cook dinner, clean the kitchen, etc. Particularly powerful for the elderly - and I think there's plenty of good kids out there who'd be happy to help an elder out for free.

No, it's not "changing the world" in terms of making it a utopia in one fell swoop, but it's adding a bit of the community connectivity, and making real people's dreams of making the world a better place. It's not starving kids with flies on their mouths half a world away, it's people who need help right here.

</comment><comment><USER14> If, as the author states:

a) Many types of major improvements in society and life in general aren't happening because they would require change in human nature;

b) Human nature has a tendency to not change, because it's innate to human sapiens and actions like educating "what could be best", moral "brainwashing" etc have only limited effect;

Then you still don't need to conclude that "world will not change" - <USER2> suggests an argument that you may need to change homo sapiens to make the world better. There are tech fields that have potential to change that in the near future, such as biochemistry (mind altering drugs); AI research; and genetic engineering [of humans].

These directions do seem disturbing, but that alone won't prevent them from happening. I mean, gulags and genocide are also disturbing but they happen anyway all over the world every decade. So ignoring ways to change homo sapiens won't help, but we have to discuss on how to manage it so that the result is morally/socially good.

</comment><comment><USER15> How can you explain the fact that we are living in the most peaceful time in the human history? Surely we are not able to change the human mind to control the desires of wanting more and more but we have definitely improved the fundamental definition of what it means to be human. We are not barbarians anymore, we don't enslave other human being for fun and profit anymore. These things matter and matter a lot. We are still in the development stage in-terms of society. We still treat people differently depending upon their skills, knowledge, power and still have notion of national borders and military to protect those borders. I have a feeling that technology will take us to the level of such abundance that future generations will find it hard to believe that we killed each other for resources and honored artificial geological boundaries.

</comment><comment><USER16> Oh, your app can save the world; it just depends on the app. I was trying to save the world with my pet-project <http://theboycottapp.com/> but the execution has been poor.

<comment><USER17> Great idea (if I understand it correctly) but yeah, not much in the way of communicating what it's purpose is.

Did you just run out of steam?

<comment><USER16> Thanks, just trying to save the world. I made theboycottapp during the SOPA/PIPA resistance. I ran out of steam and was bummed out that the UPC scanner wouldn't work on the iPod touch that I bought to test the app out on - not a good enough focus to resolve the UPC.

I'm working on other things now with any available time; all of them are free. I keep track of them here: <http://www.nanch.com>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Have you ever heard of watsi(<https://watsi.org/>)? Its not _my_ app, but its evidence enough that apps can and will save worlds.

</comment><comment><USER19> My one line response.

I am a crazy person and I push the human race forward. <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lXzimTThnPM>

<comment><USER4> All of the people in that ad were intensely self-critical and none of them changed the world by building apps.

<comment><USER19> Your wrong. Richard Branson first business was an App. An App for selling Audio Records in 1970.

<comment><USER10> This is the sort of thing that makes me wish I had the login details for shit_hn_says.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> There was about 1.5 million apps and just one world the last time I checked. Not every app _needs_ to save the world. Making it a little better is a noble goal.

</comment><comment><USER21> _> Our image of primitive man is that he was a bumbling, grunting idiot. In truth, he probably wasn't much different than we are now. Time hasn't made us smarter, nobler, or more compassionate._

Amen. Actually, if you start thinking you are better, note that a good proportion of the world's villains thought they were somehow better.

</comment><comment><USER22> I have said this more than a few times.

The world is unlikely to be saved through technological or governmental machinery. If it is to be saved it will be through the revolutionary actions of neighbors helping neighbors, in opposition to our technology-induced, and urbanization-induced, isolation.

</comment><comment><USER23> Technology changes the world by changing the environment human nature can work within. The birth control pill, telecommunications, the internal combustion engine, and antibotics has changed the world greatly by changing what is possible.

</comment><comment><USER24> i was under the impression that app dev and other web consumer related startup stuff was just the infancy stage of learning ways of organizing and bootstrapping ideas.

I don't consider it to be the end of it. I doubt most people here do either. In that sense, i find the article (and many others like it) to be quite short sighted.</comment>


Less social sharing buttons on ecommerce product pages mean higher conversions - <AUTHOR> http://visualwebsiteoptimizer.com/split-testing-blog/removing-social-sharing-buttons-from-ecommerce-product-page-increase-conversions/

<comment><USER2> I'd encourage everybody to actually test this on their site before assuming that no social sharing buttons will jump your conversion rate.

Part of the problem with having them on product pages is a lot of the times people aren't too eager to "Like" or share a product page...especially something like snow blowers or heavy equipment.

I've seen sites that sell products that _do_ earn a lot of social traction on product pages that like increase the conversion rate (the one I'm thinking of sells wall art/decals).

</comment><comment><USER3> The reduction in conversions might be offset by the increase in traffic though.

For example, you get:

Without sharing buttons: 100 visitors and 50% conversion = 50 sales. Total: 50 sales.

With sharing buttons: 100 visitors and 40% conversion = 40 sales. +50 referrals from shares, 40% conversion = 20 additional sales. Total: 60 sales.

Clearly, having sharing buttons would be better if users sharing drives a lot of additional traffic. You can't just look at a single metric (conversions) and ignore everything else.</comment>


Show HN: We built a social fitness app in React Native for iOS and Android - <AUTHOR> http://squidfitness.com/app <comment><AUTHOR> Hey everyone! We built Squid for iOS and Android using React Native. We originally used Parse as a backend but then rolled our own nodejs/express/mysql backend on AWS after Parse announced their shutdown. Happy to answer any questions and hope you like it. Also, we just shared this on Product Hunt so would really appreciate the support. Thanks!

</comment><comment><USER2> hello! why did you choose to develop using React Native?

<comment><AUTHOR> I've been using ReactJS for a long time and thought this would be a good opportunity to try out React Native. I found that I was able to iterate and release on both platforms very quickly with RN. Also, since it's a social network at its core, we wanted to support both platforms from the start to allow for more adoption.

I've come to love React Native. It has been very easy to get started, increase app complexity while keeping code clean and simple, and building the occasional bindings in Obj-C and Java was very straight-forward. I definitely recommend giving RN a shot!</comment></comment>


Show HN: Hypernetes – Multi-Tenant Kubernetes Distribution - <AUTHOR> https://hyper.sh/blog/post/2015/10/27/announcing-hypernetes-the-multitenant-kubernetes-distribution.html <comment><USER2> I'm curious how scalable Hypernetes is. As it is based on K8s, will it support 1k nodes?

<comment><AUTHOR> As Hypernetes is based on Kubernetes, scaling capacities are the same between both - tests have been made up to 100 nodes, but we believe more would be possible.

Thanks for your interest, do you have such infrastructure to build? Would love to hear about it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Astroturfed/sockpuppet votes and comments are not ok on HN and will get the offending accounts and sites penalized.

Since the current post looks like good work, and we hate to see good work penalized, we'll override the penalty this time. But please don't do it again.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi Dang, and thanks for your appreciation of our work. I'm a little bit confused though, as far as I know we didn't employ such "Astroturfed/sockpuppet votes" methods, and I'm sure there is a reasonable explanation of this.

<comment><USER3> In that case it's probably either that (a) someone tried to help promote your post, not realizing that it was against the rules, or (b) what we call "astroturfed/sockpuppet votes" is different than how you understand those terms.

Arranging for friends or colleagues to upvote a post is against the rules on HN ([https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html)). We want users to vote for stories because they personally find them intellectually interesting, not because they or someone they know has content to promote. Voting for the latter reason is verboten; those are called voting rings and HN has software to protect against them. That software wasn't happy about the votes on this story.

Still worse is when users in a voting ring add comments to the thread, seeming to express organic interest. Most HN users hate that and it's particularly verboten.

I don't mean any of this to pick on you guys personally, but rather to explain the rules. We'll take your word for it that you didn't break them or at least not wittingly.</comment></comment></comment>


What is the difference between a public and private instagram profile? - <AUTHOR> I want to know if they have some rule for protect private profile <comment><USER2> Instagram has multiple pages to answer your question:

[https://help.instagram.com/448523408565555](https://help.instagram.com/448523408565555)

[https://help.instagram.com/196883487377501](https://help.instagram.com/196883487377501)

[https://help.instagram.com/116024195217477](https://help.instagram.com/116024195217477)

But this isn't the kind of question Hacker News is geared for. It would make more sense in (for example) [https://webapps.stackexchange.com/](https://webapps.stackexchange.com/)</comment>


What's in a Prison Meal? (2015) - <AUTHOR> https://www.themarshallproject.org/2015/07/07/what-s-in-a-prison-meal#.1GivoFRMI <comment><USER2> The only prisoners complaining about lack of food are the overweight or extremely muscular ones trying to bulk. Food is a commodity to a certain extent, so trying to acquire more is an obvious tactic. I've been in County Jail for an extended stay and ate quite well.</comment>


ASP.NET Gets No Respect - <AUTHOR> http://www.west-wind.com/weblog/posts/453551.aspx

<comment><USER2> Here's the big item to note:

All of the sites he notes that are running ASP.net are, as he says "big traditional businesses". They can afford the licensing costs of MSDN, Windows servers, a batallion of Microsoft "experts" to help them scale and support contracts. Oh, and Myspace is not an application I'd ever hold up as a good examlpe of anything, but I'll admit that it's my own biased opinion (The site is wildly successful, something I can't deny, but incredibly ugly and has crappy usability).

I'm not saying it doesn't happen, but can someone show me some small startups using ASP.net successfully? Because to me it appears it only is used by big monolithic business setups - which would be exactly why it gets a bad rap. If it's not accessible to the potential entrepeneur, it's going to be difficult to justify. And when I can setup a Linux server using LAMP for a grand total of $0, why would I pay thousands of dollars in licensing fees to Microsoft, for a toolset that I'm not going to be able to find people to develop on?

</comment><comment><USER3> The biggest issue with ASP.NET for me is that it ignores the underlying protocol. The writer tries explaining this away, saying that you can get at the raw http components if you want, but I don't think that matters much when the default use of ASP.NET is via the web forms model.

Once you're in web forms, you have to pretend like you're not on the web at all. I cannot apply all the knowledge I've learned from perl, php, java(jsp/servlet), and ruby on rails.

Basically, it's just not very easy to transfer knowledge of the web over to the ASP.NET framework. You have to relearn how to do basic tasks, and do it the microsoft way.

<comment><USER4> ASP.Net MVC resolves _some_ of these problems.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> _In addition ASP.NET's naming container ID mangling which causes client IDs to be changed can be very counter productive for styling with CSS and for working with elements using JavaScript. It's no fun referencing controls with references like $("#ctl000_StatusCtl_txtNameId") for element selection (with jQuery here) especially since those generated ID values can change._

Yeah, I sure can't understand why that system gets no respect. What a headscratcher!

<comment><USER6> The only place I have seen such ID "mangling" was when I had to do some work with an SAP portal - where the portal software was indeed doing some interesting things to HTML element Ids.

I have built several active ASP.NET sites and I am building another now and I can say categorically that no such problem exists in the mainstream.

<comment><AUTHOR> You must not be working with JavaScript or Master Pages (or if you are, you're using Microsoft AJAX). Create a master page, then create a placeholder or panel in a content area, then put a textbox in it and refer to it by its generated HTML ID attribute (it's probably something like ctl00_MainContent_Panel1_MyTextBox at this point) in a javascript. Then if you move it to another panel, the ID changes. That's the mangling he's describing and it is by far the biggest issue I have with an otherwise solid framework.</comment></comment></comment>


The Performance Cost Of Spectre/Meltdown/Foreshadow Mitigations On Linux - <AUTHOR> https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=linux-419-mitigations&num=1 <comment><USER2> Maybe we should just give up wanting to run untrusted code safely as a failed experiment.

For example 90% of the JavaScript I run is for advertizing purposes. The pragmatic solution would be that either everybody moves to self-hosting ads, or that the neccessary telemetry for third parties is moved into a browser function. Web pages (that are not applications) should not need a "turing complete" language (in the vulgar sense of the term).

If you have real applications - like GMail or Facebook - you should run them in a sandbox, but they should not be treated differently from native apps. Yes, a native app could use Meltdown etc. to attack other apps, but usually it can compromize you even simpler since most desktop apps are not sandboxed. It can just open the memory of other apps or abuse accessibility functions. My point is, I don't _expect_ MS Word or Photoshop to be perfectly sandboxed. I explicity trust the vendor when I install their app. If we would really _trust_ what we trust, and really _distrust_ what whe don't, a lot would be won.

Of course, I know that the world is not set up rationally and we'll continue to be compelled to trust untrustworthy code on our PCs, so for the time being it looks like we're stuck with the mitigations.

<comment><USER3> > desktop apps are not sandboxed. It can just open the memory of other apps

Care to elaborate? What about process isolation?

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I guess we know why Intel tried on that benchmarking restriction. Serving static content from Nginx is a 22% drop on Intel, a 7% drop on AMD. That's huge for cloud providers!

<comment><USER5> The microcode update allowed an optimization (VMX conditional cache flushes) for virtual machine hosts. It was just a lawyer having fun, I guess.

<comment><USER6> The theory I heard that seems more likely than a rogue lawyer, is that it accidentally got left in from the license of a pre-release test version -- I can understand why they'd want to prevent benchmarks of unreleased software (not that I necessarily agree with that).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> AMD seems to fare better with the patches. Its good for AMD. I remember when AMD64 came out and AMD had a lead on intel. Its good to have have some competition.

<comment><USER8> Except Intel + mitigations still much faster on most workloads than AMD without mitigations.

<comment><USER9> This isn't Bulldozer anymore. Intel has faster single thread performance on some workloads, but the difference for "most workloads" is modest and for the same money AMD is offering more cores, more memory channels and more I/O. For threaded (i.e. server) workloads it has been a solid choice even before these mitigations started eating into Intel's single thread performance lead.

<comment><USER10> A 2-socket AMD setup has the same NUMA topology as an 8-socket Intel machine, and because of that the performance is terrible on many workloads.

<comment><USER9> There are a lot of things that have to go the wrong way at once to get to the point where that really matters.

The first is that your working set won't fit in the processor caches and has regular cache misses into main memory -- but most of the Epyc line has 64MB of L3 cache.

Then the access pattern has to be random rather than sequential, which knocks out a major class of the applications satisfying the first criteria (all the ones that process big files in sequential order).

Then the operating system scheduler has to fail to schedule the process on a core in the same node as its data, most commonly because you have a process with more active threads than there are threads per node.

What you're left with is, basically, large databases. But large databases also benefit significantly from more cores, memory channels and I/O. Which factor dominates is going to depend on specific usage, e.g. a database with randomly accessed individual bits will be more sensitive to latency whereas one containing pictures or other medium-large blocks of data will be more sensitive to memory bandwidth.

You can certainly find a worst-case usage pattern for one or the other but in general they're going to counterbalance each other.

<comment><USER10> I don't think you really understand the architecture of the machine. EPYC looks on paper like it has a large L3 cache, but it consists of separate L3 caches per "core complex" of which there are two per die and four dies per package. So what you've actually got is a bunch of redundant 8MB caches, which is not the same thing. Because of the baroque topology, especially when you have two sockets, access to main memory varies between almost-as-fast-as-xeon to way-way-slower-than-xeon. Combined with the small caches it's a total disaster.

<comment><USER9> The amount of L3 per thread is still 64MB/#threads. Where the difference you're describing most matters is for single-threaded code, where in theory the one thread could otherwise have the entire 64MB. But that isn't the circumstance with the NUMA latency anyway. If there is only one thread the OS can schedule it on the same node as its data.

Most working sets fit in even 8MB (or less) -- the reason for 64MB is to provide for multiple threads. In which case if one thread isn't using its proportionate share there are seven others that can use it. Sharing with sixty-three instead would be "better" but at some point it's diminishing returns.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> KPTI hurts (a lot). Syscall latency and architectural impact is dramatically increased with KPTI, in large part due to the TLB flush that is typically required.

This is probably why AMD CPUs do not have as big of a drop; KPTI is not (urgently) necessary on AMD CPUs.

</comment><comment><USER12> Regardless of whether the impact is big or small, you are stuck with it if you need the security. But 5-10% performance impact is completely unacceptable for the cases where you don't care about security (much) such as gaming. Given how hard it is to keep my windows machine from eating my CPU anyway with updates etc while I'm gaming: should people start booting to a special partition with a legacy OS without these mitigations, and without a lot of the unnecessary background tasks? 10% CPU might not be enough (depending on where the bottleneck is) but for 10% higher FPS I'd do it.

<comment><USER13> Games are rarely bottlenecked by CPU and they don't do much io, so they are much less affected by the mitigations than server loads.

<comment><USER14> I suppose. Though, personally, I have to manually toggle the meltdown patch (and reboot windows) to be able to play certain games effectively. One game that I play frequently has a benchmark launcher and it shows a 40% performance hit for the meltdown patch...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> this is very useful to know if i've already got a server or ten thousand, but unfortunately the data doesn't help me with making a purchase decision. does amd overtake intel performance-wise after mitigations or is it only a reduced gap?

<comment><USER5> See [http://openbenchmarking.org/result/1808296-RA- SMELTDOWN82&ob...](http://openbenchmarking.org/result/1808296-RA- SMELTDOWN82&obr_imw=y) for the full data set.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> tl;dr: 2% - 20% degradation in performance depending on specific task; AMD EPYC less affected (sometimes significantly) as compared to Xeon.

</comment><comment><USER17> What is the best way to disable the mitigations if you don't care about security but care about performance?

<comment><USER16> Don't update your OS/Microcode.

<comment><USER18> > Don't update your OS

Sounds like a good way to remain insecure to all other types of vulnerabilities.

<comment><USER19> It is, but if you care only about performance, and not security, you don't care.

<comment><USER18> Let me rephrase: Sounds like a good way to remain insecure to all other types of vulnerabilities, and to never receive any performance improvements.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Collie - high performance javascript library - <AUTHOR> http://jindo.dev.naver.com/collie/

<comment><USER2> Fix the title -- it's a "high performance javascript _animation_ library"</comment>


Ask HN: Worthwhile hacker events in the Bay Area for March/April 2009? - <AUTHOR>

My business partner and I are in SF from Australia until mid April. We are working on a SaaS style collaborative modelling tool.  We've been reading up on events listed on meetup.com, garysguide.org, sdforum.com and googling what we can find. Can anyone recommend any other websites, or particular must see events?<p>Doug <comment><USER2> Bootstrappers Breakfast Mar 13, 17, 27; Apr 3, 10, 21, 24 <http://www.bootstrappersbreakfast.com/>

Fibre High: rent a cube for a month as home base <http://www.fiberhigh.com/>

Hackers & Founders Mar 25 <http://www.hackersandfounders.com/>

New Tech Meetup Apr 7 <http://www.meetup.com/svnewtech/>

Plug & Play: rent a cube for a month as home base <http://www.plugandplaytechcenter.com/>

SDForum Cloud & SOA SIG Mar-24 [http://www.sdforum.org/index.cfm?fuseaction=Page.viewPage...](http://www.sdforum.org/index.cfm?fuseaction=Page.viewPage&pageId=652&parentID=483&nodeID=1)

Silicon Valley Startup Entrepreneurs (many events) <http://www.svase.org>

Workit: another good calendar <http://www.workit.com/>

<comment><USER3> Thanks for the plug, Sean (skmurphy).

I host Hackers and Founders (www.hackersandfounders.com), and we get together every couple of weeks to tip a pint and have a chat about stuff. About half of the people that attend are pretty active on Hacker News.

If March 25 doesn't work for you, drop me a line, I might be able to schedule a meetup for you that works with your schedule. It would be a shame to come to Silicon Valley for a while and not be able to hook up and chat with interesting people. That's really why you're here.

The New Tech Meetup: <http://www.meetup.com/svnewtech/> happens fairly often and seems to pretty popular. If you can't get in via RSVP, just crash it. A lot of other people do that and they don't seem to get hassled.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I hate to shamelessly self-promote, but I've actually been working on an event search web app: <http://www.gocerebro.com>

It still has a long way to go (right now only about 10 other people know about this), but hopefully it helps. Any feedback would be welcome as well.

<comment><USER5> Great site btw. Thanks.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> <http://superhappydevhouse.org/> is fun

</comment><comment><USER5> Actual links for the curious: <http://www.meetup.com/> <http://www.sdforum.com/> <http://sf.garysguide.org/>

Also been sifting through: <http://www.churchillclub.org/index.jsp> <http://www.eventbrite.com/>

</comment><comment><USER7> Pivotal Labs does quality (and catered) lunch tech talks every Wednesday. They tend to be web/ruby-centric.

Update/Edit: NoiseBridge has weekly meetups in machine learning, synthetic biology, and other subjects. <https://www.noisebridge.net/wiki/NoiseBridge>

</comment><comment><USER8> There's always the web 2.0 expo ... not purely hackerish, of course but there could be some worthwhile speakers and/or connections to be made <http://www.web2expo.com/webexsf2009>

<comment><USER9> Costly affair...

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Every Wednesday we have the Open Hacker House in San Francisco from 8am to 6pm: <http://archivd.com/open-hacker-house>

</comment><comment><USER11> A really fun one that will be going on soon is Startup Weekend. Here's the URL: <http://sf2.startupweekend.com/>. It's from April 3rd to 5th.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for all of the great tips everyone. Should keep us busy :). Looking forward to meeting some of you at some of the events.

</comment><comment><USER12> If you want to catch up with an ex-pat Aussie for a beer or two while you're here, just drop me a line.</comment>


The Criterion Channel streaming service is coming on April 8 - <AUTHOR> https://techcrunch.com/2019/01/30/criterion-channel-launch-date/ <comment><AUTHOR> For those of us who mourned the closing of Filmstruck, this is good news.

They've already started a kind of soft launch, with one free movie being offered every week.</comment>


Health Experts Want to Stop Daylight-Saving Time - <AUTHOR> https://www.wsj.com/articles/heres-why-health-experts-want-to-stop-daylight-saving-time-11583340645 <comment><USER2> There's a lot of talk about acute risks--what happens a day or two after the time change. Most articles you'll read are all about this.

The second topic, the main one that circadian scientists talk about, is chronic risks, and I believe they are more important to our health. To follow this logic, you have to believe that people will continue doing whatever it is they do today (e.g., going to bed at midnight), and won't shift their schedule around right away to optimize sleep--i.e. they will not recognize that their body clock is set mainly by sunlight. The campaign to change school start times has been going for 25+ years already, so fast changes here are pretty rare.

When the clocks change, people wake up at a different _circadian_ time, and if that time is too early, it is associated with worse health outcomes.

Some large-scale epidemiological tools have been used to figure these things out. One compares the difference between sleep patterns on "work" days and "free" days - like how much do you sleep in on a weekend? (Till Roenneberg's "social jetlag"). A second method uses "position in timezone" \- comparing people living on the eastern or western edge of a timezone in various ways.

Roenneberg's work from the mid-2000s showed that night owls suffer a lot under "wake up before the sun" kinds of schedules (their "social jetlag" is bigger) - it makes them fatter, more irritable, get more diabetes, etc. They don't go to bed any earlier, but they're forced to wake up earlier.

Next, when you look at timezone position (this has been done for millions of people), people on the western edge of a timezone (where the sun comes up later but the clock is set at the same time) are quite a bit worse off for cancer rates and obesity - 10-20% more for some kinds of cancers, and a roughly 20% increase in chances of being obese.

I'm worried about these chronic health problems, so I've been writing and advocating for standard time: [https://medium.com/@herf/why-standard-time-is- better-e586b50...](https://medium.com/@herf/why-standard-time-is- better-e586b500923)

<comment><USER3> We better stop flying across time zones for work or holiday then, if the impact is this severe.

<comment><USER4> It's not like jet lag is a new phenomenon. It's just a bit unfortunate to introduce minor jet lag to the entire population without giving them much chance to adapt.

<comment><USER5> It's not just a bit unfortunate, especially as we learn more about how jet lag isn't just about being tired but also can damage metabolic health.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Good reasons, for sure. And engineers want to stop changing clocks twice a year for other good reasons. And many laypeople want to stop changing clocks twice a year because it's bothersome and tiresome. I don't particularly care _which_ time zone is ultimately selected for my state; I just want it to be fixed year-round.

<comment><USER7> Time is relative, and "noon" is irrelevant. UTC everywhere is optimal and ideal.

<comment><USER8> Everyone has a smartphone these days. There should be fifty time zones in the US, and your smartphones should adjust the time by a few minutes every night so that sunrise is always at 7 am, which mimics what would occur naturally. When you want to know the time elsewhere, you ask Siri. That should make humans much healthier by keeping circadian rhythms naturally aligned, not under continuous stress from artificial UTC, or even DST.

<comment><USER7> Only 50? The country spans almost 110° longitude, from West Quoddy Head lighthouse in Maine (66 degrees 57 minutes west.) to Cape Wrangell on Attu Island, Alaska (172 degrees 27 minutes east.)

That's nearly 1/3 of the globe. So why not ~450 down-to-the-minute timezones? Or, why not subdivide those into 28,000 down-to-the second timezones?

How would we ever ensure that all those times were universally coordinated?

Bonus question: What timezone is the moon?

<comment><USER9> To say nothing of Hawaii...

<comment><USER7> Funnily enough, the Hawaiian time zone is an hour past the single Alaskan one is still further East than some of the Aleutian islands.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> The title here implies that there's a consensus among "health experts", but there is no such thing. Click bait. All we have is some health experts saying there are downsides to the back and forth switch

<comment><USER5> Do you know of health experts who explain the benefits of DST? I'm interested in their arguments.

<comment><USER11> I think the point is there are health experts who want to stop DST, and there are health experts who are ambivalent. It's disingenuous to say that "health experts" want something if not all - or even the majority - actively want it.

<comment><USER5> With a field as large as "health experts" it would be a bit much to ask for a majority. Do you think that the many health experts, the fact that the American Academy of Sleep Medicine is publishing a DST position statement, and the long list of chronobiologist societies doesn't suggest there is a pretty good consensus?

You will always have a ton of ambivalent health experts on the matter because for most health experts this isn't their field.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Brazil ended daylight-saving time recently:

[https://www.theepochtimes.com/brazil-has-nixed-daylight- savi...](https://www.theepochtimes.com/brazil-has-nixed-daylight-saving-so- should-everyone_2889754.html)

</comment><comment><USER13> You know you could change your working yours instead of changing "time".

Nope. Lets change time twice a year cause health problems, IT problems, car accidents.

Its already time to use a global time and stop with this bs of timezones. Timezones are an unreliable way to measure time the relation between time space.

<comment><USER14> But is a great way to give sunlight hours a normal schedule regardless of DST. Global time makes zero sense, like literally none.

<comment><USER7> 13:00:00.00Z means the same moment wherever you are on (or off) the planet.

Does that help it make sense?

<comment><USER8> No, because people use local time to decide when to go to bed, and when to get up. Aligning that to the sun is the most important bit. Asking your smartphone what time it is somewhere else is trivially easy no matter what method you use.

<comment><USER15> > people use local time to decide when to go to bed, and when to get up. > Aligning that to the sun is the most important bit.

And yet, this is what DST gets so damn wrong.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> They didn't give any reason for preferring Standard Time over Daylight Savings Time.

<comment><USER17> I was also frustrated by the article's lack of elucidation on that matter. I think this is about as close as we come to an explanation:

>[T]here is a discrepancy between your biological clock and social clock, which researchers refer to as "social jet lag," Dr. Roenneberg said. Permanent standard time is closer to the sun's natural time so social jet lag is reduced, he added. "Daylight-saving time means that we virtually live in another time zone without changing the day-light cycle," Dr. Roenneberg said. "The problem is the misalignment."

Which makes sense on its own, but it doesn't account for the variance within time zones. A Chicago resident experiences sunrise and sunset about an hour earlier than a resident of Lubbock, Texas, even though they are in the same time zone (Central). So you can't really say that Standard Time is the one- size-fits-all solution -- and indeed, the Illinois Senate just passed a bill [1] to make DST permanent in that state (although it is hamstrung by the same federal regulations that other states face after passing similar bills).

[1] [https://www.illinoispolicy.org/illinois-senate-passes- bill-t...](https://www.illinoispolicy.org/illinois-senate-passes-bill-to-end- clock-change-during-daylight-saving-time/)

<comment><USER18> That absolutely does not make sense even on it's own. What is "the sun's natural time" supposed to mean? That seems to suggest that anyone not waking up at whatever Dr. Roenneberg considers the correct time is "misaligned." Not only does he not consider variance within times zones, he doesn't consider variance within schedules.

Depending on schedule, location, and plain personal preference, any number of time schemes could be "the best" for any given person. Ultimately it doesn't matter whose on what time as long as we are standardized to reasonable large areas, and pick something that's within a few hours of most people's ideal.

<comment><USER5> Roenneberg isn't stupid. He is saying that biological time and social time are such that setting clocks closer to solar time ends up being healthier for more people.

Also Roenneberg is quite clearly aware of the variance of daylight within time zones and the health effect that this causes. I bet he's even written papers on this effect!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I don't want to stop Daylight Saving Time. I want it year round.

The quirk, due to the Uniform Time Act, is that States have a choice -- either _never_ use DST or _only_ use DST during Spring/Summer dates stipulated by Congress.

</comment><comment><USER20> The same research is quoted again and again...

But people do travel in an ever increasing amount over timezones. Often many of them, often more than twice a year. At least here bar opening hours have been significantly deregulated over the last decades. So you can go out and drink until 4am or 5am and obviously people do that.

Compared to that the health effects of 1 hour time shift twice a year sound ridiculous to me.

<comment><USER5> The article points out that travel related jet lag is often different because it doesn't happen over and over and over however when you switch to daylight savings time you may have to be waking up an hour earlier according to your biological clock day after day after day.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> In addition to the public-health issues of heart attacks and car accidents, the time-swaps are also a huge PITA for parents of young children. Kids between half a year and three years old have sleep routines that don't shift just because someone says the clocks have changed.

Fall back an hour? Congrats, your wake-up time just went from 5:30 AM to 4:30 AM because that's when your kid's still getting up. Spring forward an hour? OK, you just lost an hour from that shining window between when your kid goes to sleep and your own bedtime when you can actually get other stuff done.

</comment><comment><USER22> In Australia, in Queensland, we've been trying to get this outdated state to start using daylight savings for years.

95% of the population is in the south east.

In summer, the sun is up at 4:30 AM, which means the birds go off nuts at 4 AM. Sunset is at 6:30 PM.

On a side note, listen to this little as@#$%^%^*, [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h5SIs08k8uk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h5SIs08k8uk) and imagine him screaming out your windows at 4 AM.

Growing up in Europe, I remember the winters to be dark and miserable, but in the summer we had sun till 9:30 PM.

There are many true and false arguments PRO and AGAINST DST.

The worst I've heard is "it will upset the cows with feed times" and "it will fade more curtains".

The best argument I've heard against DST is that it would put the kids coming home from school outside a sun-hour earlier, meaning there is more UV and it is warmer. That's a valid case against, seeing it's so bloody hot here in summer.

Another case, PRO DST study concluded that the lack of DST causes people to drive home in peak hour with the sun in their eyes, causing more accidents.

At this point, I think DST is still a good thing. It's good for the economy. We don't go out to have dinner in the dark, for example. But I'm getting too old to care.

This article's arguments are very thin in my books.

<comment><USER23> > In Australia, in Queensland, we've been trying to get this outdated state to > start using daylight savings for years.

Speak for yourself. I live in the south east and don't want DST.

> 95% of the population is in the south east.

That's not accurate - where did you get that figure? Regardless, Western Australia has an even greater percentage of its population in the southern part of the state than Queensland, and it voted against DST _four times_ over the last 40 years.

> it's so bloody hot here in summer.

Not to mention by the time you go to bed the temperature is cooler without DST.

<comment><USER22> I'm interested to hear why not?

re-95% I should have said 'coastal'.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> As long as we can all agree to stick to standard time, I will be all for any such motion.

If you want to go to permanent DST, that's gonna have to be a hard no from me, dawg. I'd rather suffer continued switching of hours than move to permanent DST.

</comment><comment><USER25> Could a US president change this unilaterally?

<comment><USER26> No, it would require an amendment to the Uniform Time Act [1]. Under current law, states can opt out of DST (subject to some conditions), but the federal executive branch can't unilaterally force them to opt out.

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

<comment><USER27> So then you create an executive order and then withhold federal funds from the states that don't comply. I wish states would have a backbone but with the lion's share of taxes going to DC they are just powerless.

<comment><USER25> I know you mean well but that software would just not be used.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> As someone who lives in NZ and works in the US market, I cannot wait for this to end. As every year I have 4 time switches.

<comment><USER29> I have missed a certain weekly meeting twice in the past few years during that specific week where Europe has changed hours but the US hasn't...</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Migrating from static generator to wordpress - <AUTHOR> My personal site is not much active but when I have something interesting I tend to post.
https://www.minvolai.com/blog I used to blog using wordpress in 2007. Then I migrated to static generator mynt and have been on this from atleast 5 years. Mynt is not so well maintained now and I plan to move to nikola, another static blog generator (written in python).
On the other hand, most of the web uses wordpress. So if I move back to wordpress, I believe I will have a better understanding of other people's workflows and issues. I do not mind keeping the installation up-to-date etc.
One thing that used to bug me when I was using wordpress, was embedding code snippets as a part of blog content. Wordpress would often replace embedded code symbols with html encodings , like ">" by "&gt;". It got really annoying to open every post where it happens and set it right manually.
So my questions are:
* Has anyone moved a programming blog from static blog generator to wordpress? How is the experience?
* Has anyone faced the code replacement situation recently and if so, how do you handle it? <comment><USER3> I worked with WordPress professionally a bit. Personally, I hope to never have to touch it again.

WordPress is designed as a sort of self-hosted SquareSpace. Set it and forget it. The coding style follows this idea by being a huge pile of spaghetti code with no enforced software pattern. The plugins library, while extensive, also follows this philosophy by leaving everything up to the plugin developers. So you end up having a pile of noodles overridden randomly by an SEO plugin that overrides the WordPress dashboard with what I can only describe as a "professional" ransomware prompt if you let the mandatory support license lapse (mandatory being that the plugin is supposedly GPL'd, but impossible to use without a paid license key). And, on top of all this, since it's supposed to be like SquareSpace, the kinds of people who usually use WordPress are the kinds of people who know nothing about technology and constantly look for ways to get functionality cheaply.

As far as personal blogs go, Medium has been looking somewhat nice these days as a public diary of sorts. If you want more control over how your content is used, then you might want to consider either Jekyll or static HTML/CSS in a creative Apache setup.

</comment><comment><USER4> Why go all the way to WordPress? Maybe look into netlify.com. They have a basic CMS frontend that lets you publish posts via several static site generators with free plans. I'd much rather stick with static sites if I can.

<comment><USER5> Or try [https://appdrag.com](https://appdrag.com) a cloud cms with zero maintenance required and hosted on aws

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> For static site generators take a look at Jekyll.

For a CMS, maybe consider CraftCMS.

I personally wouldn't touch WordPress. It is easy to install but i've Found it near impossible to change (spaghetti code by design) and don't trust the plugin code malware-wise and security-wise.

<comment><USER7> WordPress 4.9... no longer allows you to edit any code through their editor. You have to edit it through FTP. This change screwed my site up badly to the point where I had it so customized, I basically spent a weekend just finding a theme, only uploading bits and pieces of the database at a time, just to get it working again.

I was about ready to switch to Medium.com to let them handle my website... but the did away with custom domains. But it is pretty much now.. I cannot customize anything on WordPress anymore the way I am used to.. and everything has to be done with plugins. I don't mind a few plugins, but there were just some plugins that were unnecessary and I could just write the script myself to handle certain things.

So... I am still using WordPress, this move was done basically to protect people from themselves. But I feel it should have been optional.. don't force me to be unable to edit certain files, especially in the WordPress editor itself. I certainly miss the freedom of being able to write scripts and do as I please with my WordPress install. That is why I'm not on WordPress.com and opted for my own website. Not saying I can't still do some of it, but going forward with WordPress updates.. nothing can guarantee that my scripts will work from version to version.

<comment><USER8> > WordPress 4.9... no longer allows you to edit any code through their editor.

WordPress 4.9 still allows you to edit your templates through the editor. Although it shows you a warning if you want to do so it is still possible to change and save your templates.

<comment><USER7> I was never able to edit after... always had the spinning wheel and then tells me that I need to edit it via FTP.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> What's your reason for moving back to Wordpress?

<comment><AUTHOR> Because that is where the target market is.

<comment><USER9> I don't think I understand. The target market for a blog - for content - <USER2> nothing to do with the software you use to display that content. Unless you're publishing on a social network like Medium. But that's not Wordpress.

<comment><USER3> I think OP is saying that he/she wants to use WordPress because everyone else is seemingly doing it for blogging, regardless of his/her actual needs.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Blackbeard's Ship Confirmed off North Carolina - <AUTHOR> http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2011/08/110829-blackbeard-shipwreck-pirates-archaeology-science/

<comment><USER2> Very cool. We visited the NC Maritime Museum in Beaufort a few weeks ago. I don't know that I'd make a trip just for that, but if you're in the area (Emerald Isle, Atlantic Beach, Morehead City) it's definitely worth stopping in.

The museum also maintains a workshop for building small craft which is cool to watch, and the whole thing is free (donations accepted).

Disclosure: I'm a native of the area, but I've been away long enough to attain 'dingbatter' status.

</comment><comment><USER3> Don't call it piracy, call it ship-sharing.

<comment><USER2> You wouldn't download a frigate.</comment></comment>


What I learned doing the Doublets kata in Clojure - <AUTHOR> http://paul.henrich.me/posts/2015/01/clojure-koan-to-kata.html?hn

<comment><AUTHOR> I resubmitted this because I'd love some feedback. New blog and first Clojure program of any substance. Sorry if you're on mobile—I know the styles need some work on some sizes.</comment>


Thinking Parallel, Part I: Collision Detection on the GPU (2012) - <AUTHOR> https://devblogs.nvidia.com/parallelforall/thinking-parallel-part-i-collision-detection-gpu/ <comment><USER2> Coarse collision detection is only expensive if done from a cold start every time. In practice, there's a startup cost of ordering the bounding boxes, but then only a small incremental cost as things move around. Most moves are local, and require only a small number of changes, and many objects in a game don't at all. Here's the classic paper from Ming Lin, from the 1990s.[1]

Fine collision detection can also be done incrementally. Incremental GJK is a good approach. Here's Steven Cameron's paper on that.[2]

I wrote one of those once in C++, using the ordered bounding box approach from Lin and the incremental GJK approach from Cameron, plus some new stuff to guarantee continuity as objects moved. It turns out that incremental GJK has some serious floating point loss of significance problems as faces approach parallel. When you build a physics engine this way, the near-parallel case gets explored very thoroughly as objects settle. Turns out you need a 64-bit FPU. This was a problem on some consoles, and is still a problem on some GPUs.

[1] [https://www.cs.jhu.edu/~cohen/Publications/icollide.pdf](https://www.cs.jhu.edu/~cohen/Publications/icollide.pdf) [2] [https://graphics.stanford.edu/courses/cs468-01-fall/Papers/c...](https://graphics.stanford.edu/courses/cs468-01-fall/Papers/cameron.pdf)

<comment><USER3> Is gpu based collision detection at all common in modern games?

<comment><USER4> No, practically unused. The GPU is normally fully used for rendering in modern games.

<comment><USER5> Is there any evidence you can provide for this? I don't necessarily dispute it, but I don't entirely buy that it's _just_ for rendering - I thought some games were starting to offload particle systems and physics.

<comment><USER6> Unity physics engine uses only CPU implementation of PhysX.

[https://blogs.unity3d.com/2014/07/08/high-performance- physic...](https://blogs.unity3d.com/2014/07/08/high-performance-physics-in- unity-5/)

<comment><USER7> Same goes for UE4 [https://youtu.be/-lFKZRX1K_0?t=190](https://youtu.be/-lFKZRX1K_0?t=190)</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


A risky currency? Alleged $500,000 Bitcoin heist raises questions - <AUTHOR> http://feeds.arstechnica.com/~r/arstechnica/index/~3/WZ6R0WGNqJs/bitcoin-the-decentralized-virtual-currencyrisky-currency-500000-bitcoin-heist-raises-questions.ars

<comment><USER2> Of course this is one of the risks. It's balanced by the alleged rewards.

Think of it as cash - you can store your $500k worth of savings in a jar under your mattress and shop completely anonymously, but the risk is that someone will come into your house and take it.</comment>


ScriptKit - Drag and Drop Programming for iPad - <AUTHOR> http://scriptk.it

<comment><USER2> Just downloaded this and am playing with it now. What a fantastic take on programming - this is definitely the future!</comment>


Tips on how to work smarter from Ricardo Semler - <AUTHOR> http://www.37signals.com/svn/posts/946-tips-on-how-to-work-smarter-from-ricardo-semler <comment><USER2> I know it's nitpicking, but I've seen this in a few places lately, and it bugs me...

 _This wouldn't have surprised Mark Twain, who once apologized for writing a long letter because he didn't have time to write a short one._

... because as everyone knows, or should, this particularly excellent witticism was Pascal's:

 _I have only made this letter long because I have not had time to make it shorter._ \-- Lettres provinciales, Dec. 14, 1656

It's also attributed to Cicero (but I've googled for a source and can't find it) and Augustine (but what he said was a little different).

Edit: as long as a couple people are interested- more here: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=163425>

</comment><comment><USER3> FTA: We simply do not believe our employees have an interest in coming in late, leaving early, and doing as little as possible for as much money as their union can wheedle out of us.

This one (and delegating in general) is really, really hard. It has taken me a lot of practice to learn to trust people to turn up with what they should have. Constantly checking up on people is a good way to stop them feeling like their work is their own.

You do, along the way, get burned a few times - but when stuff is late or wrong I have had good results from doing the 5 why thing. If you don't get what you need, keep asking why until you get to the root cause. Quite often it's me (adding extra work, or being unclear about priority).

Much better to take a few minutes to get all the way to the real problem, rather than just saying nothing or going off the deep end. You find out what you need to fix (which might be the individual but probably isn't), the guys on your team get constructive feedback with clear understanding of what they need to do next time, and no one gets resentful.

<comment><AUTHOR> Micromanaging is not good for anyone...

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Good article; I work 6.5 hours a day - 4 hours of solid work. Im happy, my employers happy ... what else matters?

(of course in the sense of startup; reverse that, 4 hours of sleep can be expected)</comment>


Should we try to destroy all jobs? /r/badeconomics discussion - <AUTHOR> https://www.reddit.com/r/badeconomics/comments/3go59q/jobs_are_terrible_we_should_destroy_all_jobs_am_i/

<comment><AUTHOR> Some choice quotes:

"maybe rainbows and unicorns rained down the from space saucers and drowned the dinosaurs; we just don't know."

"humans are not horses [citation needed]"

"We'll all be replaced with undead slave labor."</comment>