Jeff Bezos convinced 22 investors to back his new company Amazon in 1994 (2018) - <AUTHOR> https://www.scmp.com/news/world/united-states-canada/article/2143375/1994-he-convinced-22-family-and-friends-each-pay <comment><USER2> I persuaded my (then) in-laws not to invest in Amazon at this stage (I was the 2nd employee at the company). They would have certainly put in $50k or so. Fortunately, they are lovely Quaker people and as far as I know have never held a grudge against me because of this (incorrect) advice.

There are some inaccuracies in this article, too. Most of the investment window described here actually took place in 1995 - Jeff had enough cash to see things through the end of 1994. He and Mackenzie did not live in a 1 bedroom apartment that they "rented when they moved to the city" \- they rented a house in Bellevue and the already-converted garage was the first Amazon office. They may well have moved to 1 room apartment later, as it became clear that the company would definitely be in Seattle itself.

<comment><USER3> > I was the 2nd employee at the company

I encourage you to write down everything you remember of your experience there. You don't have to publish it, but future historians will surely find it very interesting.

People are always eager for anecdotes about the early days of Apple and Microsoft, but surprisingly there's very little about Amazon.

<comment><AUTHOR> Seconded. Please. Share as much as you can.

<comment><USER2> Robert Spector documented a lot of the earliest stuff in his book "Get Big Fast" (he even managed to speak to quite a few of the actual people involved).

One of the problems with properly documenting the first year or so is that the people involved mostly don't want to talk about it, or want to turn it into the stuff of legend.

The one person who was there for the full first 5 years besides Jeff (and Mackenzie, to whatever extent she was deeply involved, which I never sensed was a lot, but I may be wrong about that) doesn't like talking about Amazon publicly (though he did a little for a recent PBS documentary). Lots of other people came and went during that time (including me), and we're all a bit like the blind folk feeling out the elephant: we know part of the story, but not the full picture.

Jeff himself doesn't seem very interested in talking about the early period, or if he does, it seems important to him that the story describes a trajectory that obviously connects with what was to come (which is not entirely unfair).

The people who stayed for the long haul generally don't want to talk, it seems; the people who left mostly have not-so-positive stories to tell at this point (partly because of the behemoth that the company has become).

Personally, I think that Amazon's complete failure to take the high road in creating the model of retail in the 21st century is the more important story than details from the early days. The appalling treatment of employees, the conflicts between operating a marketplace and being a seller within that marketplace, and the general emphasis on our lives as consumers instead of the more important roles of citizen and employee .... this is what's really important about the Amazon story in my opinion.

Oh wait, it's HN. You want to hear about how I pushed and pulled C++ objects to and from Oracle in 1994, and how integrated that into NSAPI, amirite? :)

<comment><USER4> Would you have any advice to share for someone working on building an online store / e-commerce system for small businesses (not a marketplace, one a store could conceivable pay as a SaaS solution or deploy themselves with no strings attached - not even through licensing)?

<comment><USER2> Sorry, I worked on this stuff so long ago that no advice I could offer today about technology is relevant. Back in 1994, we worked in C++ and used Oracle directly and loaded our shared object into Netscape Server. AFAICT, nobody in their right minds works this way today.

In addition, we had to invent a whole new way of doing what was essentially mail order - there were several mail order packages available in 1994, but all of them were predicated on the notion that you either had stuff in stock, or were going to order a bunch more so that you had it in stock. Amazon was different: in the early days, we had essentially nothing in stock, so we had to invent an entirely new way of managing order flow and stock management.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> My brother blew what would've been a few million dollars worth Bitcoin on pizzas and some other frivolous crap back when the novelty of doing that was worth more than the Bitcoin itself.

Whenever I heard these kinds of stories, I remind myself that loss aversion is a cognitive bias that we all share.

Sure, maybe some people passed on an opportunity to invest in 1994, but the general public had the opportunity to invest in Amazon any time after Amazon's IPO in May 1997. Someone who invested $50k then would be holding shares worth $95 million today. It's not quite billionaire territory, but it's still a very successful investment by anyone's standard.

<comment><USER6> For much of Amazon's early history, it was something of a laughingstock, as the company had clearly stated that it didn't plan to make money in the foreseeable future, if ever. At a minimum, it made the company difficult to value (and still does).

One of Amazon's important achievements was to attract and retain investors willing to go along for the "their margin is our opportunity" inexorable slow- boat ride to dominance.

<comment><USER7> >For much of Amazon's early history, it was something of a laughingstock, as the company had clearly stated that it didn't plan to make money in the foreseeable future, if ever.

I still remember John C. Dvorak saying how awful amazon is and that it will never make money just ~10 years ago.

<comment><USER8> Another way of looking at this is, stock value doesn't just not mean what reasonable people think it means - the meaning of prices is 200% wrong.

Another way of looking at this is, no one is going to be able to redeem all the Amazon stock there is for cash at this price, that only mark-to-market is wrong.

Another way of looking at this is, Jeff Bezos was happy doing what he was doing for peanuts throughout Amazon's early lifetime, so would wealth taxes or CEO compensation caps or whatever boogeyman really have dissuaded him from taking other people's money?

<comment><USER9> > Another way of looking at this is, no one is going to be able to redeem all > the Amazon stock there is for cash at this price, that only mark-to-market > is wrong.

Maybe, maybe not. Amazon's daily trading volume is about 3 million shares, and there are around 500 million shares outstanding. In 150 days the entire market value of the company trades.

It would be weird if the whole thing was sold at once, but there would be people interested in buying. The company has real value.

[https://finbox.com/NASDAQGS:AMZN/explorer/volume_avg_3m](https://finbox.com/NASDAQGS:AMZN/explorer/volume_avg_3m)

[https://ycharts.com/companies/AMZN/shares_outstanding](https://ycharts.com/companies/AMZN/shares_outstanding)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> He valued his idea at $5M before he had even sold a book and managed to convince 22 people to invest at least $50k in him. That's quite the story, especially back before he internet was a staple in all our lives. Kudos to those who held on the stock. Moral of the story, as is usual in investing, never sell.

<comment><USER6> I still have Sun Microsystems stock certificates, purchased in ~1999. They are more valuable as curiosities or as recycled paper than as a tradeable security.

You have to know when to hold 'em, know when to fold 'em, know when to walk away, know when to run.

<comment><USER11> ...and the best that you can hope for is to die in your sleep.

<comment><USER12> I do every day.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> When I first heard of Amazon starting up, I was kinda amused, and didn't pay much attention. Like they didn't get the point of a distributed hypertext of everything, and they picked the most incongruous-sounding thing to sell on it (paper books!).

Not that I gave it much thought. We dismissed a lot of companies back then, because most of them were obvious nonsense by people who didn't know what they were doing (technically and service/product-wise, not investment-scam-wise) and they didn't have to care, and I grouped Amazon in with the silly companies.

Now the Web browser is not much your interface to a hypertext, but a massively bloated GUI toolkit (albeit with zero-install, a really rich layout widget, and unprecedented spying on intimate reading/interaction behavior and communications)... and that silly we'll-use-the-hypertext-to-sell-paper-books company now sells me most of the things I buy now, and even operates the servers for my company and the majority of companies I use. :)

<comment><USER2> AWS was the one part of this story that Jeff didn't foresee back at the outset.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> I know it's not the intent of the article, but the only thing I can think of is that it must be nice to have "family and friends" that can afford to hand you $50K _each_ to back your strange new idea.

<comment><USER15> It's the friends, family and fools round.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> I can try to imagine how someone might feel to have passed on the opportunity to invest. Yes, money is not everything in life... But missing on a billion dollar might not be easy to process for most of us.

<comment><USER2> I left amzn after 1 year of my options vested. Compared to almost all Americans, it made me rich. It let me spend 10 years as an at-home parent raising my daughter. Had I stayed the full term, I'd have owned 1% of the company (I got ripped off in my initial negotiations with Jeff :).

Occasionally I wonder what I'd have done with all that money, but very rarely. I don't miss the billions. The $1M (plus or minus) that I got out of it was more than enough to count myself deeply fortunate. Nobody "earns" that much money - I just got lucky.

I prefer the path I took - a great life, much happiness, low stress, and for the last 20 years, the fun and games of building one of the most successful libre software projects around.

<comment><USER16> I'm glad you found happiness and out of the rat race. how did you get ripped off?

<comment><USER2> I had no idea what percentage to ask for. I asked a few friends who had been in startups, and that convinced me that the 1% I was being offered (over 5 years) was a good deal. What I didn't realize till about a year later was that my friends had all joined their respective companies as, say, employee #20 or #30. I was coming into a company with zero employees, and it turns out that I should have been pushing for on the order of 5x was I was being offered.

OTOH, I did tell Jeff that I was having a daughter in several months and planned to go to a 3 day week after that happened. He agreed to that ("I knew when I met you that you'd think about work 24/7 anyway"), so there was a tradeoff there.

I'm not really complaining, but when I did find out what some other early hires had negotiated, it stuck in my throat for a bit.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Yeah, but the problem is, how were you to know at that time that _this_ was the one that would strike it big?

Every one of 1,000 young startup-y aspiring entrepreneurs thinks he/she is the next one. If you could bet right, you should become a VC.

</comment><comment><USER18> If his parents had that kind of money to invest, back then, he was already extremely rich.</comment>


Is a multi-cloud strategy right for a startup? - <AUTHOR> https://imagekit.io/blog/is-a-multi-cloud-strategy-right-for-a-startup/ <comment><USER2> It makes sense because Cloud is very expensive. You should try to Dev/Test/Qa in a cheap cloud. Usually they are very stable.

Then, with your CI/CD pipelines you should use a more stable and potentially more expensive cloud for PROD or a live environment. Your branch should be in always ready to deploy in the live environment.

If you already layer your startup to easily move from 1 cloud to another, then your startup should instantly benefit from the cheap cost to develop and stability for your clients. Also, at a later point you will be already ready to use multiclouds in the live environment.</comment>


Interpreting neurons in an LSTM network - <AUTHOR> http://yerevann.github.io/2017/06/27/interpreting-neurons-in-an-LSTM-network/ <comment><USER2> So, this is definitely good work, and I don't have any suggestions on how to do it better, but I'm ultimately not sure how useful I find it. I have no intuition for what the histograms for `t` should look like, and so seeing the different histograms for ծ vs `not ծ` doesn't tell me much except that they're different (which is trivially true!).

Does anyone else find this sort of visualization useful? Maybe I'm just misunderstanding this. I would love to develop more of an intuition for neuron activations in deep nets- I want to better understand how they work, as right now, the only thing that I do is feed in inputs and look at the outputs, which is wildly inadequate.

I have the same criticism when it comes to the CNN visualizations that Karpathy et. al [1] came up with. They're cool, but I don't find them that useful.

I hope I don't sound too critical. I'm really glad that people are doing this sort of work, as I think that it's incredibly important to the advancement of deep learning, and I think that this work is well-done, but I don't find it personally useful.

[1]: [https://arxiv.org/abs/1506.02078](https://arxiv.org/abs/1506.02078)</comment>


Tell HN: Flooded area in Queensland now the size of Texas - <AUTHOR> Just a note to say I hope all the hackers are safe in Queensland.  The flooded area is reported to be roughly the size of Texas, America's second largest state.  The area declared a disaster zone is 75% of Queensland - roughly twice the area of Texas, or roughly the size of Alaska.
So if you're in the area, or were in the area, or have afilliations with the area, I hope you're safe, and wish you the best on the road to recovery, whenever that may start.
ADDED IN EDIT:
From a comment by jacques_chester below:

    Here's an easy hack. Pull out your credit card, go
    here: http://www.qld.gov.au/floods/donate.html

    Joint appeal from Red Cross, the Salvation Army and
    the Queensland Emergency Service.
 I can't make that link clickable here in the text - go find the comment and click on it there. <comment><USER2> Myself and my girlfriend had to evacuate this morning. When we left the was water was lapping our diveway about half way up the car's tyres. We came back about 2 hrs later to see what else we could save, by which time the whole house was about waist deep. Managed to save the majority of our clothes, some books and DVDs, iPad, computer etc, but all the big furniture and whitegoods are destroyed. The worst part is that the river is yet to peak (currently 4.5m)... Should be closer to 5.5m by 4.00am tomorrow. We are very lucky to have saved as much as we did, and that we are fully insured for the rest. 12 people in outer areas are dead, and 70 more missing. I am thankful that everyone I know of is safe and we have had many offers of help.

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm sure many here wish you all the best - our thoughts are with you. Here's hoping the recovery program is effective and prompt.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> My first thoughts were that when we moved from Brisbane to London 3 months ago, all my Queensland mates laughed about leaving the Sunshine State for UK weather. They've had nothing but rain since.

A few years ago I helped write a book on the history of Brisbane Riverfront homes. Most of those owners knew exactly where the previous floods (especially 1974, which this one will roughly equal) had reached. In some cases, their multi-million dollar home had been submerged; in one case, the owner boasted how they had come home to find a yacht in their living room. They all knew that no matter how many dams were built or droughts were declared, floods would happen again. I hope they're all safe.

Another interesting piece of information from that book's research was that it takes, on average, about 20 years for the effects of flooding to dissipate in the community. This is most obvious through riverfront housing prices - yes, they are multi-million dollars now (or at least, were 2 weeks ago), but it took a long time after 1974 (and 1955 and 1893) for the mindset to shift from 'major risk' to 'major desire'. Another way of saying: the impact of this flood on the city I love will last a generation.

</comment><comment><USER4> It's nice to see that HN is thinking of us :)

My housemates and I had to evacuate our apartment building this morning. Our place is on the fourth story so our things should be ok, but we won't be able to get back until Saturday, if not later. After all the thunder, lightning, and rain over the last few days it was a bit surreal to be wading down our street (carrying my pack out of the water and trying not to let the cat drown) on a hot and sunny summer morning.

</comment><comment><USER5> Do NOT give to the Red Cross. They are horribly inefficient with money. Nothing you give to them right now will get to people who need it, it's for the NEXT emergency, maybe, if they don't spend it on furniture for the offices instead.

Find smaller, local charities. I know it's not easy but it will actually help people rather than just making us feel better.

<comment><USER6> Can you justify this? Would be nice to have a link to a report or something backing what you write, because the Red Cross is always coming, this is maybe the only organisation you are sure to find everywhere there are people to help. In Germany they are pretty efficient.

<comment><USER5> Maybe they are different in other countries (and maybe you have fewer options in other countries) but in the USA they are very, very inefficient, have had a few scandals, and few people seem to know or care.

Just google the fiasco with what they did with the millions they got after 9/11 when people had impulse to donate but didn't bother to research alternatives. Local chapters kept funds meant for 9/11 and the national headquarters used some of the funds to buy nice furniture for themselves.

The reality is if you want your donation to go towards a specific cause, you are always best off finding a local charity that is smaller and highly optimized and already has "feet on the ground" in the area.

Randomly throwing money at causes to make oneself feel better is wasteful and defeating.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> There was some flash flooding in my city of Toowoomba (close to Brisbane QLD) earlier this week. I was supposed to meet a client that afternoon in the CBD, I'm sure glad I cancelled!

I collected some footage and images if anyone is interested: <http://phillipsdesign.com.au/notebook/toowoomba-floods/>

Good luck to the people in Brisbane and surrounds, stay safe.

<comment><USER8> Didn't realize there were other HNers in Toowoomba. Coffee sometime?

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> For the Europeans: The flood area is greater than the sizes of Germany and France combined.

</comment><comment><USER10> It's really devastating to see that. My heart goes to QLD; much love from NSW.

</comment><comment><USER11> I'm at a loss to think of a hack to help them, but I'll keep thinking...

<comment><USER12> Here's an easy hack. Pull out your credit card, go here:

<http://www.qld.gov.au/floods/donate.html>

Joint appeal from Red Cross, the Salvation Army and the Queensland Emergency Service, I believe.

Edit: <http://telethon.smartservice.qld.gov.au/> takes you directly to the credit card donations page. First link gives you other options.

Edit 2: Red Cross direct donations: <https://www.redcross.org.au/Donations/onlineDonations.asp>

Salvos: <https://www.salvationarmy.com.au/newdonation/donation.aspx>

<comment><USER13> Does Australia need that? I don't think they are a poor country? Sorry if that sounds petty, just wondering.

<comment><USER14> Cleanup bill estimates I've heard so far are in excess of $15 billion. There is an estimated $2 billion in damages to roads alone. Expenditure like this would take anyone for surprise, including seemingly wealthy countries.

<comment><USER13> Sure, but for example I live in Europe and we have to bail out entire countries and industries, which also costs billions. I feel it would make more sense to donate in places where the government can't help, like 3rd world. Is anybody considering donating to the European Union?

I have also heard it can be a problem to donate for specific causes, if the organizations then are not allowed to use the money for other things.

Since apparently these australians live in flooding areas, how many of them have not been insured? Would i encourage them to skip insurance in the future, too, if i would donate now?

<comment><USER12> Two things commonly arise in these cases.

1\. Most insurers don't drive home the point that they're only insuring for storm and surge, not for flood ... until after the floods are done.

2\. Flood insurance is usually set at very high prices. In some parts of the country it's consequently been made illegal to settle in flood zones. But these floods are so large that they're affecting areas that have never flooded before, where a rational person wouldn't have bought flood insurance anyway.

I'm honestly not sure if you'd be encouraging them to skip insurance in future. I suspect not, because the government payouts in past natural disasters have only been a fraction of the damage caused, whereas a good insurance policy could pay 100% or more of the cost. It's still rational to take the insurance if you can afford it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Looks like our house will miss the flood waters. Was out filling sandbags till 230am last night.

</comment><comment><USER16> What is the ratio of Library of Congress's to Texas in area?</comment>


When we work out rigorously, our bodies limit our ability to expend energy - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/12/well/move/pushing-the-limits-of-human-endurance.html <comment><USER2> "runners were expending about two and a half times their resting metabolic rate each day, a notable decline from the early days of the event, when they were burning at least three and a half times their resting rate"

Not sure why they call the findings surprising. Body builders have known that since before Schwarzenegger.

Body adapts and then you have to change the routine.

For long distance runners HIIT or just short, intense workout would be the obvious answer to up the metabolism again.

<comment><USER3> There's a trend of funding & publishing research that yields completely obvious results and when you point it out you always get downvoted to hell on HN, don't know why.

<comment><USER4> It's because occasionally "obvious" claims are wrong, and having research that confirms them gives us a firmer foundation of knowledge. The article mentions that this is one of the first studies to quantify energy expenditure in this way, which would mean it's bringing the "obvious" claims into the edifice of scientific knowledge. Non-novel research results are an important (and underrated/underincentivized) part of science.

The article may be leaning too heavily on claims that the results are surprising, but that has little to do with the research.

<comment><USER5> I do wish we could just buckle down and figure out diet and exercise related health knowledge. So many diet and exercise related studies just have too small sample sizes and are too narrow. This makes sense because it's expensive and time consuming to track a lot of people's diet and exercise routines to get rigorous results. I think, however, we should just bite the bullet and pay $10 billion (or however much) to precisely track several thousand people's diet, exercise, sleep, etc and figure this out. Basically pay people as a full time job to eat and do what you tell them (ethically of course. They aren't slaves. We just need better data than sample sizes of twenty people trying to track their own health with self reported diaries).

<comment><USER6> Most of what we need to know, for most of the population, we already know.

Even if the effort you suggested were to be done, the noise would continue to distract in exactly the same way.

I've worked as a tech exec, and I've worked as a personal trainer, and I've competed... we have the knowledge. We know how people can be healthy, we know how people can live long lives, and we know how people can have bodies that are a benefit to their lifetimes, not a burden.

I remember a study, it graphed a demographic of people across a scale from "healthy" to "unhealthy". What they found was that people were heavily represented on either end of the scale, but to a significant degree, not at all in between.

So, the choice is... people's (barring economics, to some degree, I'll concede -- though, being poor in other countries isn't the health catastrophe that it can be in some first world countries).

<comment><USER4> Yup, there's a lot of information that can seem to point in contradictory directions, but you get some very, very clear signal out of it in a couple of important directions.

People still seem pretty resistant to simple interventions like this though. I think a big part of it is that most people have an incredibly powerful status quo bias, and get extremely uneasy with diverging from the norm of behavior they see around them (even if those norms are of generally far worse health than they're targeting).

I've spent the last decade incrementally understanding more about nutrition and optimizing my diet, and I've reached the point where the divergence between mine and my friends' diets has become pretty insane. Not coincidentally, now that we're starting to enter the period where age catches up with our bodies, I'm by far the healthiest, by both appearance and symptoms. I've had friends ask me what I do, but it's far enough outside the norm that they assume it's impossible or that I have iron willpower (spoiler: I really don't. If you eat healthy, your tastes shift towards healthy food).

This is a general problem with people; in the narrow case, it could be solved by changing their environment (ie blanketing the country with PSAs with simple messages, like we did for smoking). It would do infinitely more good to somehow grant people the intellectual confidence (or indeed, capability) to avoid blunt heuristics like the so-called "wisdom" of crowds, but I have no earthly idea how one would do that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Does anybody have the sane reaction as me?

I often feel much less hungry if I do some physical exertion than when I spend day more or less still.

<comment><USER8> Exact opposite here. I get much hungrier on days that I work out. I basically need to eat an extra meal to not feel ravenous. Not great for weight loss unfortunately.

<comment><USER9> Depends on the exercise. Cardio can suppress appetite for a time, resistance training not so much.

<comment><USER10> In my experience cardio only suppresses appetite for the duration of the cardio. So even running two hours a day (a lot more than most runners, including myself, do), there's still ~14 hours of day to cram calories in my face.

<comment><USER9> Depends on intensity. Vomiting after marathons and triathlons isn't uncommon, and intensity that's slightly lower than that can still induce nausea which can last awhile. Reactions to all sorts of training are largely individual I think.

<comment><USER10> > Vomiting after marathons and triathlons isn't uncommon

Those are long distance, race intensity efforts. Most workouts aren't going to be race pace and most runners for fitness aren't running marathon distances, esp. not for every workout. In my experience, the nausea quickly subsides once my heart rate drops below 190.

> Reactions to all sorts of training are largely individual I think.

Totally agree. I was talking about my personal experience (anecdotal).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> This study has a sample size of three. Worth taking with a large pinch of salt.

</comment><comment><USER12> The validity of "doubly-labeled water" results is dubious at best in an organism with so many pathways to feed the citric acid cycle. Specifically I'm referring to fat adaptation and protein catabolism. Also, how does 600*(3.5-2.5)=6200/3.5?

</comment><comment><USER13> Is this not simply explained by the body becoming more econonmical at repeating the same action over time?

After 6 weeks of daily running the body will adapt to be more effcient at running, so won't need so much energy to perform the same activity.

<comment><USER14> I don't think so. For instance, pro cyclist have been doing nothing but cycling training for years and years. And still, this effect shows up a few weeks into a Grand Tour.

As they mention at the end of the article, from gorging research (eating as much as possible to gain weight) it is _also_ known that the body can't ingest more calories than about 2.5x times the normal daily energy output. So it's more likely that that is the limiting factor -- in the first weeks you have some reserves to burn, but when those are gone your body doesn't burn more energy than it can take in.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> I wonder if this phenomenon can serve to explain burnout syndrome?

</comment><comment><USER16> This is also true wrt to fasting. I consumed less than 400 calories a day and after 3 weeks my weight plateaued.

</comment><comment><USER17> Paywall. Can anybody give a tl;dr?

<comment><USER18> No needs to do anything fancy (to read it), just hit the refresh icon and cancel it _almost_ immediately. Click-20ms-click.

<comment><USER19> Excellent! that worked first pop!

I'd be loading the paywall JS first before the content if I was running the site.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Nothing counterintuitive about these results. Anyone who has ever exercised knows that he has to switch things up if he intends to keep breaking the plateau either for strength or weight loss.

Our body is incredibly good at conserving energy which is why we feel less tired running 5kms daily after a while.

Only interesting point is the barrier on how quickly we can reach this efficiency with the limitation of how much fuel we can consume.

<comment><USER21> I don't know about counterintuitive but the article says they don't know where the savings are coming from. If we have the capacity to be more efficient why not always be more efficient? Presumably there's some trade off.

<comment><USER22> Being more efficient during higher energy demands doesn't necessarily optimize you for the same conditions with lower demands. It would be interesting to re- calculate energy expenditure at rest for the over-exercised grouped.</comment></comment></comment>


Google Cloud Dataflow API for batch and streaming big data processing - <AUTHOR> https://cloud.google.com/dataflow/ <comment><USER2> This is great !

I'm glad to see that the odd signatures of MapReduce operators has been definitely deprecated in favor of true `map` and `reduce` functions (renamed `ParDo` and `Combine`) even if `ParDo` is a `flatmap` (or `bind`) rather than a `map` function.

We gain in simplicity and composability. And the long detour by MapReduce and Hadoop seems to take an end in favor of systems like Spark, Flink, Samza and now Cloud Dataflow.</comment>


Inside an FBI Hostage Crisis - <AUTHOR> http://graphics.wsj.com/hostage/ <comment><USER2> I really enjoyed the presentation of this piece. I understand that may not be a popular sentiment, but the graphics and interactivity worked well in creating a sort of atmosphere as well as helping me get a better understanding of the situation.

It wasn't perfect, but it was interesting and memorable. I could perceive the difficulty the authorities faced in trying to storm the bunker. It was neat.

And of course, the article still looks beautiful when put through the Readability extension. For people complaining about interactivity, you can use extensions to disable it (although I understand the frustration and also wish there was a built in way to disable it).

And more on topic: it was highly unsettling to me that Mr. Dykes could kill Mr. Poland even after the gift of fresh eggs and homemade jelly. The gunshot noises really got to me. The presentation of this article felt more real and visceral than most articles do. I'm glad I bothered to put on the headphones and try it.

</comment><comment><USER3> Interesting story that kept my attention to the end, despite the intrusive multimedia elements (I'm reading this very late at night, with people asleep nearby, and one of the videos started auto-playing and wouldn't let me pause it).

I would say all parties involved, from bus driver Poland to the 911 operator, the FBI and the local sheriff, behaved admirably and at times heroically. For those men to jump down that hole and take bullets to rescue the boy, notably the fellow who located the kid in the dark and shielded him with his body, prepared to take bullets from the kidnapper to save the boy--incredible stuff.

This guy Dykes was a tragic kind of figure, the kind of ticking time bomb that we need to identify earlier on to prevent the kinds of mass shootings that occur with all too much regularity in our country.

I'm not sure what you can do with someone who stays just this side of the law but is clearly deranged and unstable, but there's got to be something beyond just ignoring him and letting him fester.

<comment><USER4> It's not at all clear from the evidence available before the hostage-taking that Dykes was going to harm others.

We must be careful when proposing imposing our own version of 'normal' upon others. When we're in a minority, and all of us are, a majority might chose to do so upon us.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> 9 seconds planned for th rescue, 5 actual minutes, that must have felt like a very, very long time.

\- Is it possible to invent radio-based, directional weapons able to kill through walls? e.g. X-rays or microwave?

\- I'm surprised the federal agent asks for permission to kill the criminal. As long as there is a hostage, isn't the self-defense considered a default?

<comment><USER6> The FBI is a lot more careful about killing people than the US police, although there are concerns about their internal review processes of agent- involved shootings.

[http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/19/us/in-150-shootings-the- fb...](http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/19/us/in-150-shootings-the-fbi-deemed- agents-faultless.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Slightly OT: One small detail that surprised me was that since the daughter of the kidnapper had not enough money to pay for the funeral she had to keep the ashes in her trailer.

Is there no such thing as a legal obligation to bury the dead in the US?

<comment><USER8> I don't think it'd be a particularly popular decision to use tax dollars to pay for a murderer to have a funeral celebration and burial. Maybe that's callous but I'd guess that's the way it is in the US.

As far as I know it's up to relatives or loved ones to bury their deceased and its up to them to arrange a funeral, plot of land, headstone, etc which runs in the thousands of dollars. If there is no one willing or able to pay then I'd assume the state essentially disposes of the body by cremation.

<comment><USER7> Yeah I can see that. I was just surprised that you are allowed to keep the urn at home.

In my country if you no one is willing or able to pay for the burial of the ashes or the body the state pays but can get back the money from heirs and relatives. You are not allowed to not bury the ashes.

<comment><USER4> I don't know the cultural origin of the tradition, but some people keep the ashes of their relatives in their homes. I have friends who have an urn with a parent's ashes in a place of honor.

Ashes pose no public health risk (they're often scattered in public places, parks, and bodies of water), so it's surprising to learn that any government would require that ashes be interred below ground.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> The FBI Hostage Rescue Team is an amazing group of professionals, the premier hostage rescue team in the US. They are the civilian equivalent of Delta Force as they can't normally operate in the US. Historically Delta and the FBI HRT even do hostage training together.

Pretty amazing how highly trained these people are

</comment><comment><USER10> I also liked the presentation, that looked pretty slick to me.

</comment><comment><USER11> Is it just me, or is this a good example of how not to present content on the web. I could hardly read any of that article - the animated background thing took forever to load, and was incredibly distracting. There's a story in there somewhere, I'm sure, but I just didn't have time - it was quicker to google the bad guy's name and read the story on another site.

<comment> at-fates-hands This is the issue I have now with being a developer. There's so many things people do because they believe we all have gigabit fiber internet service and just bloat the fuck out of the page for no other reason than to try and show off.

It only took 140 requests, 36MB and 2.4 minutes later, I was able to read the article.

This is completely unacceptable and an epic failure.

<comment><USER8> One man's bloat is another man's immersive experience I suppose.

I do sympathize with you - your connection speed must be abysmal. But I'm glad the web is not being held back by that - instead I hope that articles like this might help to bring about better connectivity to your location.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I am surprised this came from the Wall Street Journal. What the heck? There is too much going on the page. It takes away from the story thus the videos, animation etc. Can't read it..</comment>


NYHacker Presents Music Hack Day New York - <AUTHOR> http://www.johndbritton.com/post/2011/january/11/nyhacker_presents_music_hack_day_new_york

<comment><USER2> John's site seems to be intermittent. Here's more information:

<http://nyc.musichackday.org/>

<comment><AUTHOR> yeah, it's exploding... thanks for reposting

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> I'm looking for ideas for what to hack on, any ideas that HN would like to see built?

<comment><USER3> I've had a project in mind for a while: reverse and document the protocol used for the pads in Roland V-drums. Picked up a TD-4S kit last month and have been pondering replacing the brain with my own, the first step of which being figuring out the protocol -- shouldn't be too terribly difficult.

Think I'll stop by and do so.</comment></comment>


AI: EU Commission takes forward its work on ethics guidelines - <AUTHOR> http://europa.eu/rapid/press-release_IP-19-1893_en.htm <comment><AUTHOR> A nice summary: [https://www.theverge.com/2019/4/8/18300149/eu-artificial- int...](https://www.theverge.com/2019/4/8/18300149/eu-artificial-intelligence- ai-ethical-guidelines-recommendations)</comment>


Difference between Software Engineers and Programmer/Coders. - <AUTHOR>

Software engineers develop frameworks and tools to be used by coders in software. Similar to the relationship between a mechanical engineer and a driver.<p>What do you all think? <comment><USER2> "Software engineer" is what you write in your resume.

"Coder" is what your future manager reads thinking about what salary he can give you.

:)

</comment><comment><USER3> I think that the difference between those is, the Software Engineer (SE) is capable of create and design further than follow instructions or a specific language, and programmer (P) is like coding only maybe one or two languages but with a limit view of the application/services etc.

I think are similar but I see a SE with more potential to develop things, a P too, but I think his scope is limited to what he/she knows, no go further.

<comment><USER4> The question is really of role. What role does a star programmer play as opposed to a star software engineer. Ideally, a software engineer is supposed to bring in engineering qualities and therefore have a good idea of reliability, scalability, safety, error handling etc. A programmer on the other hand should ideally focus on getting the best of the platform/tools. So, I see an SE to be more broader but a P to have more depth.

<comment><AUTHOR> I was thinking the opposite, I would've though a SE is more specialised in one field, but a P has broad knowledge and hence is more flexible in how he/she applies that knowledge in order to develop a specific piece of software required by a client.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> In this industry we are very good at "giving things name", most of the time giving new name to old things (aka creating hype, that's what we have been mostly doing for the last 60 years or so) and then doing long discussions around these names. I would suggest don't bother with this, it is completely a waste of time.

</comment><comment><USER6> In many jurisdictions, the term "engineer" refers to a licensed professional. So a software engineer would be someone with the requisite education and professional experience to obtain that license and be endorsed by their local regulatory body. It would also mean additional professional and ethical obligations. In Canada, for example, you can't have the term "Engineer" in your job title without being a licensed professional engineer. However, this rule is poorly enforced and mostly ignored.

Now mind you, most software engineers are NOT engineers in that sense, but I still think of it that way. Most software engineers are really software developers, but the engineer title is more appealing for whatever reasons (status?). Programmer/Coder is just slang for Developer, IMHO.

<comment><USER7> > _However, this rule is poorly enforced and mostly ignored._

Thank god.

<comment><USER6> IMHO, the current state is detrimental and devalues the profession. We put our trust in doctors, for example, because we know that someone who has self- taught themselves medicine and has no formal ethics training or obligations can't just obtain a title of doctor.

<comment><AUTHOR> That is a very loose comparison, as even "trained" doctors have huge differences in skill levels. I personally ignore all formal programming education below a PhD in programming as IMHO programming is a discipline which needs self motivation and individual thought for anyone to excel at it. Teaching it to someone only goes so far.

<comment><USER6> For "programming", I would agree with you and that why anyone is free to call themselves a developer or programmer. We're specifically talking about the term "engineer" here, so it goes beyond "programming".

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Software engineer means exactly the same thing as software developer or programmer/analyst.

Coder means that the person referred to is at a Junior level. People who write frameworks are usually at a senior level although even a junior can write a framework by essentially porting from one language to another.

And all this terminology stuff is nonsense. Basically meaningless in a professional context. Even HR people should ignore titles because too many people inflate their titles.

</comment><comment><USER9> I see a software engineer as someone who has a lot of knowledge about the hardware and can write embedded programs, device drivers, board support packages and communciations programs. A programmer writes user interfaces, web pages, databases and various business packages such as CRM, inventory and accounting tools.

</comment><comment><USER10> [http://youtu.be/BDA0t49AaZ4?t=3m3s](http://youtu.be/BDA0t49AaZ4?t=3m3s)

<comment><AUTHOR> I have to say, I disagree with him the two are separate disciplines, they need to be distinguished properly.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Their level of self-confidence.

Seriously. There is no difference. People who are selling themselves short and lack self-confidence will (to their detriment) refer to themselves as programmers / coders.

People who believe in themselves will refer to themselves as software engineers.

<comment><USER7> _Truly confident people_ don't depend on labels to "sell themselves", their work and attitude does that for them. They don't need to pretend to believe in themselves, because the wealth they create and example they set inspires others to believe in them.

Many such people who happen to write code call themselves "hackers". But regardless of what title they put on their resume, _those_ are the type of people I'd want to work with.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> There is no standardization of titles. Any distinctions you try to establish will be wrong.

<comment><USER8> And yet, there could be a differentiation. How many of you have read and follow SWEBOK or SEMAT or, better yet, both. Those are the only people who have a right to call themselves "engineer" as something that is better than the run of the mill developer.

And there are very, very few such people about, especially in Silicon Valley's cowboy coder environment.

<comment><USER13> Jesus wept. To elaborate: Focusing on pedantic lists of software techniques which have not and cannot be shown to produce predictable outcomes does not an engineer make. No definition of engineering could encompass the fragility and unpredictability of software projects and solutions.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I think that the term software engineer will replace the common term programmer and coder. Due to how complex everything is becoming. Plus people love their titles.

<comment><AUTHOR> That's wrong, I think there needs to be an abstract term to describe all but then use engineer and coder to describe specific roles.</comment></comment>


How to Dial Down the Earth's Thermostat - <AUTHOR> http://recode.net/2014/12/11/harvards-david-keith-knows-how-to-dial-down-the-earths-thermostat-is-it-time-to-try/

<comment><USER2> I always wonder why there is never any mention of non-linear dynamics and chaos theory in discussions of climate change and, especially, mitigation.

We've changed a few variables in a complex and sensitive system by introducing a lot of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. Temperatures appear to be rising in approximate correlation to the concentration of those gases. It's naive to expect that taking out the CO2 or - God forbid - pumping out sulphur dioxide particles is going to have any predictable effect.

<comment><USER3> I think we have an extremely robust understanding of exactly what would happen from reducing atmospheric CO2. You seem to be overstating the danger of that one. There is a lot of unknown territory around things like dumping iron into the seas, or spraying salts into clouds. Nobody knows all the pitfalls there.

There are other avenues with less possibility of side-effects, e.g. launching something into space to partially block the sun would have a direct impact.

<comment><USER4> Is it based on first-hand experience with atmospheric models or something related? If so, could you elaborate where robustness comes from?

<comment><USER5> It's based on first-hand experience with an atmosphere with less CO2 than the current one. Like what everybody here had yesterday, for example.

Of course, things never change back to exactly what they were in the past. But to state that the risk of that option is similar to doing a completely new experiment on a global scale is insane.

Also, I always love those people that say that, since we've made Earth a worse heat sink, we should compensate by making the Sun a worse heat source. First principles do not go away just because you have a chaotic system.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> tl;dr: "Cloud brightening, which entails spraying salt particles toward coastal clouds to make them reflect away more heat; and stratospheric injection, which pulls off a similar trick by lofting particles like sulfur dioxide into the sky." (From TFA.)

What. Could. Possibly. Go. Wrong?

I'm no luddite, but we are so bad at manipulating ecosystems, we cause so much damage via secondary, tertiary, and etcerary effects, that the idea of mucking, nay, fucking, with the entire atmosphere just seems overwhelmingly idiotic.

I really hope this guy is neither charismatic nor driven, because he is handsome enough that with charisma and drive he will convince enough politicians that surely someone somewhere will try this, regardless of the results of thoughtful risk analysis.

There is so much here we barely understand we must move cautiously, lest we kill ourselves in the process.

<comment><USER7> Careful. It's dangerous to dismiss ideas based on intuitive feelings rather than evidence-based analysis.

Consider nuclear power. If we had scrapped developing it because it sounded dangerous with the argument: "What. Could. Possibly. Go. Wrong?", then France today wouldn't generate 75% of it's electricity from nuclear power. Many countries around the world would be forced to use more coal and fossil fuels, adding a lot more pollution to our environment. And we'd be deprived of the source of energy that causes the fewest deaths per amount of energy produced.

But more broadly, this type of reasoning just isn't scientific. We can only judge geoengineering by carefully understanding what it would do. Yes, this would have to include a tough analysis on possible risks. But dismissing it out of hand and depriving it of funding because it feels wrong in your gut is not rational.

It's easy for us to approve studies that, say, fight disease. Everyone knows it's important to get information on, say, what the health impact of a new chemical is. But those are the easy cases. Doing science well is about getting it right in the hard cases. I believe geoengineering is one of those hard cases, because it feels wrong to us that we'd be able to control our environment. It doesn't seem like "our place" to tinker with nature.

But let's see. Volcanos erupt making abrupt, profound changes in our environment. As mentioned in the article, when Mount Pinatubo erupted, it shot enough stuff in to the atmosphere to cool the earth by nearly a degree Fahrenheit. Given that the world didn't end because of this, perhaps there's a place for controlled intervention by humans which more efficiently and precisely alters the world.

We don't know yet if anything we think of would work. We need to do more research. But do you really think we should quit because it doesn't sound nice?

The fate of the world rests in our hands. Are we going to throw away one of the few potential solutions to our problems because it doesn't appeal to our human intuitions?

It's time to grow up. Let's do science properly before we fuck ourselves over.

<comment><USER6> Remember the Manhattan Project? Remember when they realized there was a finite probability of igniting the atmosphere and the did the hard work to realize that probability was exceedingly low?

Remember the pile under the stadium at the University of Chicago?

Long before building nuclear plants we did a lot of small scale isolated engineering with the basic technology. Learned a lot. Killed more than a few people along the way.

Realized where the basic science was sufficient, realized where we needed more, realized where we needed hard engineering.

And we generally experimented _on small scales_. And built _on small scales_.

With this proposal, there really are no small scales. We need to evaluate the risks conservatively since there are many we simply do not yet know how to quantify. And proceed cautiously.

As you write, let's do science properly. Small steps. Lots of data. Better models. No dogma.

<comment><USER8> > With this proposal, there really are no small scales.

That's not my understanding from the article. For example,

"There are lots of experiments that will tell us something useful about the risk and efficacy of [geoengineering], and these experiments are so small that their physical risks are negligible."

He's not suggesting launching right into full-scale geo-engineering, but rather to start with small-scale tests and related research.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> The earth has warmed and cooled many times in its history. Isn't it reasonable to expect there is a natural negative feedback mechanism, and that this negative feedback mechanism will manifest itself and return the earth to equilibrium?

<comment><USER10> Those historical adjustments are on the scale of hundreds or thousands of years. Also, there has never been as rapid a rise in CO2 as there is right now. That might mean that the rise is too fast for the feedback mechanism to work. We just plain don't know, because I don't think anyone has identified the actual feedback mechanism chain.

<comment><USER11> _We just plain don 't know_

This is the key thing. We're just modeling, and models aren't so trustworthy over the long term when they're based only on past experience.

<comment><USER12> Models that don't prove their ability to predict are much worse than untrustworthy.

<comment><USER11> It's false confidence (confidence intervals, assuming that distributions don't change, etc) that causes real problems. Never trust a novice running a regression. :-)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Testing in production.

Big fan of engineering climate stability given that we are inadvertantly engineering its instability but, as always, the devil is in the details and the nitty gritty of how to do it.

</comment><comment><USER14> so current (pre)heating of the Earth happens to be only pre-movie show. Buckle your seat belts, it is only a matter of time before somebody would do something like this on a global scale. China if not US, or Russia or ... some wealthy individual :

[http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2012/oct/15/pacific-i...](http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2012/oct/15/pacific- iron-fertilisation-geoengineering)

</comment><comment><USER15> I find this stuff annoying. It's heroics. And I think that is the opposite of what we need. If you want things to calm down, pushing hard in the opposite direction does not calm things down. It just introduces yet more stress into an already stressed system.

I wish we could do more to promote walkable community design and public transit and bicycling as a commuter alternative, especially in the U.S.

This sort of thing really frustrates me. It is chest beating, not problem solving. It is ego-based, not care-based.

<comment><USER16> Walkable communities and so on are nice and I support them, but they wouldn't come close to actually preventing the worst effects of climate change.

<comment><USER15> You know, I am probably running a fever and generally feeling cranky at the moment, but I have been told that kind of thing for many years about some other problem space and my experience is that if you do what is within reach, that is small and not dramatic, and rinse and repeat, you can find yourself going down a path of accomplishing what the world deems to be "impossible." It's an approach I have used repeatedly, in various problem spaces and one I am very familiar with and I know it to be a powerful thing, though it tends to make me feel like Cassandra: Someone who is simply not listened to.

So while I probably cannot convince anyone here, I will remain equally unconvinced that I am wrong. Also, fwiw, I was an environmental studies major. My degree happens to be incomplete, but I have studied environmental issues formally, to some degree. So I don't think I am merely talking about my butt.

Anyway, have an upvote.

<comment><USER16> Well thanks :) ...and I certainly agree that we should do those things, I'm just saying we shouldn't fool ourselves into thinking they'll be enough to prevent catastrophe.

So yes, get people riding bikes and taking public transit and convincing themselves that climate change is a problem people can tackle. Just don't stop there.

<comment><USER15> I am not suggesting we stop there. I am suggesting we START there -- and see where it leads. Instead of starting with this ridiculously dramatic idea that is likely to have all kinds of unexpected, unpleasant side effects that we won't know how to cope with. We know what some of the side effects of walking more are: People get healthier, etc. Win/win.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


How to Write a Git Commit Message (2014) - <AUTHOR> https://chris.beams.io/posts/git-commit/ <comment><USER2> My team uses a git commit message convention that helps us read fast and also is parsable by toolchains.

We agree on a short list of leading active verbs:

Add = Create a capability e.g. feature, test, dependency.

Cut = Remove a capability e.g. feature, test, dependency.

Fix = Fix an issue e.g. bug, typo, accident, misstatement.

Bump = Increase the version of something e.g. dependency.

Make = Change the build process, or tooling, or infra.

Start = Begin doing something; e.g. create a feature flag.

Stop = End doing something; e.g. remove a feature flag.

Refactor = A code change that MUST be just a refactoring.

Reformat = Refactor of formatting, e.g. omit whitespace.

Optimize = Refactor of performance, e.g. speed up code.

Document = Refactor of documentation, e.g. help files.

<comment><USER2> Feedback on this git commit message convention is welcome, and so are pull requests:

[https://github.com/joelparkerhenderson/git_commit_message](https://github.com/joelparkerhenderson/git_commit_message)

<comment><USER3> I would recommend putting it in a git commit template if you haven't already. This will make it easier to implement the convention IMO.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> There are so many articles like this, and all of them focus so much on prescriptive rules for commit messages. There's a similar set of articles on how to deal with branching and merging. Somehow, everybody comes to slightly different conclusions.

The discussion that needs to happen before this is to understand what tools you want to make available to your developers in the future. Using git's history as a first class debugging tool is powerful, but it's by no means mandatory to provide. There's also a real cost to providing each of the tools.

\- Do you want bisect to be available? Well, then you should have most commits represent a fully-functional version of the software. Consider squashing branches when you merge them.

\- Do you want narrative documentation around strange choices? Fine-grained commits are a great place to put those thoughts, but they may discourage devs from writing those thoughts in inline comments.

\- Do you want ownership via git blame? Line-by-line changes may help you identify who wrote the code, but that might prevent your developers from ever fully transferring ownership, which could create bottlenecks in startups that have a few long-tenure devs and a lot of recently hired devs.

I really like to think of git history as a context tool, like monitoring or unit testing or documentation. It's worthwhile to sit down with your team, define what you want them to be able to do with commit history, and build your commit style from there.

</comment><comment><USER5> My personal, subjective impression: Commits are getting smaller and smaller nowadays. As in: In the subversion days, many people commited only few times a day, sometimes not for several days. SVN commits of course involved a sync with the server (a "push" in git lingo), and thus usually represented a much larger increment with a substantial change to the code base [X]

With git, it became very common to structure changes to a code base in many, very small commits. Rename a variable? Commit. Write some docs? Commit. Of course, the overall changes when developing a feature did not become smaller, they are now just distributed over many more commits. So I'd argue that a SVN commit was often conceptionally closer to what we now have with a git pull- request.

Why does this matter? Because It is kind of hard and not helping anyone if you describe your renaming of a local variable with an extensive docstring.

What I do miss however, is a good description of the overall change. I.e. now often the description in the merge commit is just the autogenerated message, but this is where I would like people to really take the time and describe the change extensively. This is why I like `--squash` merges, because they let people focus on the relevant parts in their description. _I know, rewriting history is bad, but overall, I favour reading a history book than 18th century newspapers._

[X] not saying that there weren't small one-line-change commits, but overall they were rarer.

<comment><USER6> I find tons of small commits a clutter and waste of time. I don't see any reason for doing so. On the contrary I can see disadvantage - reading and understanding a history later may become difficult task. After all what counts is your full chunk of work, reviewed via pull request, and merged to master. It should be treated as a whole.

Has it really become so common with git? I don't see such trend around me.

<comment><USER7> The main reason I request commits to be split up is for ease of code review. It's much easier to review three commits that each do one easily comprehensible small thing than one commit that does three things at once. It's also better if you find there's a bug -- you can bisect down to a commit that's fairly small where the bug should be easy to see, rather than one that's enormous and where the bug is hard to find among all the other changes.

<comment><USER6> I think it is a matter of definition of "small" and "enormous". If you have a small thing, easily comprehensible, but big enough for it to be a complete piece of work. Then probably you also have separate task for it, and the change you introduce doesn't break the build. So it the end it's just a perfect candidate for pull request.

But note the comment above mentioned a commit for variable change. Or a commit for adding some comment sentence. Nano commits they are.

Sure, tasks should be small, easy to get, easy to review. But there must be a balance. Going to extreme, both ways, doesn't do any good.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I really recommend angular-style commit messages: [https://github.com/angular/angular.js/blob/master/CONTRIBUTI...](https://github.com/angular/angular.js/blob/master/CONTRIBUTING.md)

type(scope) message

e.g.

feat(button) added play button

Types are:

\- feat: A new feature

\- fix: A bug fix

\- docs: Documentation only changes

\- style: Changes that do not affect the meaning of the code (white-space, formatting, missing semi-colons, etc)

\- refactor: A code change that neither fixes a bug nor adds a feature

\- perf: A code change that improves performance

\- test: Adding missing or correcting existing tests

\- chore: Changes to the build process or auxiliary tools and libraries such as documentation generation

<comment><USER2> If you like this format, then you may want to try a similar format that uses the same purpose, plus uses words that easier to read and that make more sense to people in more cultures.

We use Add, Fix, Refactor, Reformat, Optimize, etc.

See my comment on this thread or [https://github.com/joelparkerhenderson/git_commit_message](https://github.com/joelparkerhenderson/git_commit_message)

<comment><USER8> I don't mind command names.

However, in the linked article no visual separation between type and message (and no scope) is something I consider less useful.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I've been writing commit messages this way for a little under a year (I think this is the same guide I used when I was looking for a more consistent form to write them and to avoid the dreaded -m "Fixed some things").

One thing I noticed is that it's increased my confidence in my commits; at the moment that I go to write the commit message because I'm describing why I made the decisions I did it breaks logical inconsistencies between what I've actually done and what I think I've done. If I'm able to explain all the change I'm much more confident that it's correct.

Another is that bad commit messages have trained people not to read them. Often people will ask why I've made a change and then discover that the commit message contains the answer to their question!

</comment><comment><USER10> The only one that really drives me crazy is

> Wrap the body at 72 characters

Why? Because the git CLI doesn't wrap properly? To borrow a quote, that seems like a 'you' problem, not a me problem.

Maybe I'm just biased because these days I almost entirely interact with git through a GUI (either desktop client or web interface), and though I use the CLI occasionally (mostly for branch management, sometimes for quick commits) I can't think of the last time I used it for _any_ type of history viewing -- pretty much any GUI is going to do a better job of that.

My team often uses markdown (mainly bulleted lists) and the output looks terrible when you insert manual line breaks (because markdown interprets that as meaning that you explicitly want a line break there) and you're viewing it on a screen/viewport that is either larger or smaller than 72 characters wide.

Unless you're explicitly using a publishing format (eg, LaTeX, PDF, postscript), the function of wrapping text should be a concern of the rendering of the output, not the origin.

Am I missing something here? Is there any other reason to manually wrap text besides the git CLI's handling of it as a viewer?

<comment><USER11> Linus Torvalds answered exactly this question [0]. Not that that means you should unblinkingly take it on authority, but the original reasoning is: the renderer doesn't alway know when a line should be wrapped. Examples: a stack trace, or long log line, or essentially any other quoted artifact that has a specific pre-determined format.

The relevant quote from the link:

      Some things should not be word-wrapped. They may be some kind of
      quoted text - long compiler error messages, oops reports, whatever.
      Things that have a certain specific format.

      The tool displaying the thing can't know. The person writing the
      commit message can. End result: you'd better do word-wrapping at
      commit time, because that's the only time you know the difference.

[0] [https://github.com/torvalds/linux/pull/17#issuecomment-56611...](https://github.com/torvalds/linux/pull/17#issuecomment-5661185)

EDIT: small clarification and formatting

<comment><USER12> I understand this rationale, but I think most developers will encounter commit messages written by bozos who don't press enter after every 72 characters, far more frequently than commit messages that contain stack traces or other fixed- format artifacts. (Disclosure: I am one of these bozos.) The tool flubs every non-wrapped paragraph just so it can preserve the occasional blob of ASCII art.

If the tool applied reasonable wrapping heuristics and got it wrong once in a while, it could easily offer a `--no-wrap` option to let users see the message exactly as it was composed.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> How to write good git commit messages literally from the person who wrote git (Linus Torvalds):

[https://github.com/torvalds/subsurface-for- dirk/blob/0f58510...](https://github.com/torvalds/subsurface-for- dirk/blob/0f58510ce0244513521296b75281fcc32f72a931/README#L92-L119)

I always send this to people as I teach them git.

<comment><USER14> Some more from Linus: [https://github.com/torvalds/linux/pull/17#issuecomment-56637...](https://github.com/torvalds/linux/pull/17#issuecomment-5663733)

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> I really like that Gerrit code reviews allow reviewers to comment on the commit message in the same way as on the code. The way to ensure useful commit message practices is the review process, if you ask me.

</comment><comment><USER3> 1\. Git commit templates. 2\. Emoji. 3\. Bullets in body.

1\. Any article on structured git commit messages should mention git commit templates! [https://robots.thoughtbot.com/better-commit-messages- with-a-...](https://robots.thoughtbot.com/better-commit-messages-with-a- gitmessage-template)

I use a commit template for structure, as well as reducing boilerplate for expressive messages. Here is my default template on ibgib: [https://github.com/ibgib/ibgib/blob/master/git-commit- templa...](https://github.com/ibgib/ibgib/blob/master/git-commit-template.txt)

2\. I also use emoji (with a key there in the git commit template for reference) to communicate concepts like implemented, bug fix, etc., in a single emoji character. Note though that it is inappropriate when you start to do a pull request, as not all git message viewers will display the emoji. But I find it very useful FTMP.

3\. Bullets are a simple way to enable both terse and structured comments within a commit.

</comment><comment><USER16> Does nobody else require there to be at least one issue tracker reference in the commit message these days? It makes automating stuff like release notes much easier.

<comment><USER17> So then you have like fifty hashes attached to the ticket?

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> This reminds a recent tweet by Rob Pike:

Goals imposed by git: Commit subject < 65 "chars", commit message lines < 70 "chars".

All in service of the punch card god Hollerithus.

[https://twitter.com/rob_pike/status/837410954518286337](https://twitter.com/rob_pike/status/837410954518286337)

</comment><comment><USER19> It doesn't matter that much. Some things in programming mater a lot, like consistent indentation and casing. Some things doesn't, like perfectly formatted commit messages. whether the verbs in commit messages should be in imperative or present tense is just too much.

I can tell you that I have been programming for a very long time. So if someone asks me "Why does it MATTER if lines are longer than 80 characters?" then I can answer "Because it means that the distribution of line-lengths will be more uniform, meaning that you will be able to fit more code on the screen, meaning that the amount of scrolling you'll have to do when trying to understand the code is greatly reduced." And scrolling interrupts your focus, which is bad. But if I ask someone, "Why does it MATTER if verbs are in present or imperative tense?" no one can answer.

<comment><USER20> One reason I can think of for using the imperative tense is to use commit messages to generate changelogs. AngularJS does it this way, wouldn't be surprised if there were others.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> We've been using this format on our project for over a year now. Our commit history looks nice as a result: [https://github.com/google/nomulus/commits/master](https://github.com/google/nomulus/commits/master)

</comment><comment><USER22> Git has zero opinion on when you commit or what the messages are. Commits are made in private. Commits are also immutable. This is a losing battle.

If you use a code management tool like BitBucket or GitHub, it seems like the unit of work is less a commit and more a PR. A PR's description can always be edited and refined for future engineers, and a PR (almost) always represents a block of work that can be reverted. Instead of creating a hundred different approaches to writing commits that engineers essentially have to get right the first time, why not just focus on documentation in the form of PR's? It seems like if you could trivially tie a commit back to the PR and ticket it came from, most of these problems would be solved.

<comment><USER21> Private commits aren't immutable at all. You can change anything about them up until you push them to a remote repository that other people are syncing from. I routinely squash a bunch of private commits together before issuing a public PR, for example.

<comment><USER22> Commits are immutable; when you squash commits you're replacing them with new ones and rewriting the history. And since there is no difference between your local repository and the remote one, the reason why you wouldn't squash commits on the remote repository is to be nice to your coworkers.

So unlike PR's, if your coworkers criticize your commit messages it's already too late.

<comment><USER21> > And since there is no difference between your local repository and the > remote one

Uhh, there's plenty of difference between your local repository and the remote one. One is local and used just by you and one is remote and used by many, for starters. Changes aren't automatically synced between them. You can rewrite commits locally to your heart's content (which I do all the time). You aren't "locked in" to anything until you've pushed it to a shared repository and someone syncs from it.

<comment><USER22> All those differences you mentioned are not related to implementation. The remote repo is functionally identical to your local repo. You can "rewrite commits to your heart's content" on the remote repo too, there is nothing stopping you. Like I said, the only reason you don't is to be nice to your coworkers.

By the time somebody else criticizes your commit messages, you've already pushed. It's too late. All that time you had while the commit was local-only means nothing, unless you brought your coworkers over to your computer to review your commits before creating a PR. Expecting developers to get commits right the first time (before pushing) is not a sustainable solution.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> The main issue with commits is that they end up representing more than a single logical change.

Are there any tools that allow you to initiate a commit as an 'intention stack' for work I am about to do, rather than work I have already done?

I'd love to be able to write an intent message "refactor XYZ.." before starting in on that activity, then when I have to go down another rabbit hole in the middle I push another intent message to the stack, then pop back out afterward and continue with XYZ. The final overall commit message could be auto generated from the initial intention and all tangents.

<comment><USER24> Commit each of the changes you make, including possible detours etc. Then use git rebase -i to work it into a sane history later.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> My team uses task number and title as a commit message. We just can't fit all the description from task into one line of comment. So, when we look at git blame - we get a reference to a task in project management tool where we can find all the reasons behind a given change.

If there are more commits for the same task, all of them bare the same commit message. After each review, we add a comment to project management tool. That way we focus only on newer commits when performing another round of reviews.

Every other attempt to describe changes and intentions in one line seems doomed to me.

</comment><comment><USER26> I've really welcomed the recent GitHub features such as "squash & merge" and "rebase & merge". Instead of parsing through 200 commits of "typo", "lint", "spacing", a feature is placed in a compact diff with the feature title & related task id as the commit message.

A commit should be a unit of work. Tests should pass before and after. The commit message should describe the change. Ensuring that you have a good commit message then influences what content you contain in a commit.

</comment><comment><USER27> I've found that writing commit messages by stating the problem in the subject, and an explanation of the solution in the body makes them very clear and descriptive.

For example:

        Problem: Windows build script requires edit of VS version

        Solution: Use CMD.EXE environment variable to extract
        DevStudio version number and build using it.

I got the idea from ZeroMQ's/hintjens' various repos.

</comment><comment><USER28> We've used this style in our commit messages for a few years, and it's been great. We also only allow fast-forward merges of squashed commits for our branching strategy.

      [ISSUE-ID]: Title

      [Problem]
      State problem and customer impact

      [Solution]
      Describe and justify solution

      [Test]
      Describe automated/manual testing

</comment><comment><USER29> Useful things to have in a commit message:

\- Test plan when there's no unit test (describes how to test that the patch actually works).

\- Task ID (link to whatever is used to track tasks/bugs, as there's usually more context there).

\- Blame rev when a patch fixes a bug, it's useful to know which commit introduced the bug.

<comment><USER24> Blame rev is very useful for back/forward porting fixes.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> He mentions using the imperative mood for the subject line, but doesn't anyone else think it makes more sense and sounds better to use the present tense, e.g.

Opens the pod bay doors

Instead of

Open the pod bay doors

?

<comment><USER9> Maybe but it's nice to fit in with the existing imperative mood in the automatic commits (Merge x into y)

You can read them in your head like this "Applying this commit will $MSG"

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> just going to leave this here: [http://stopwritingramblingcommitmessages.com](http://stopwritingramblingcommitmessages.com)

</comment><comment><USER32> I can't believe believe people write essays on how to write a git commit message.

It even includes an example of not including a full stop - I'm all for examples, but sometimes they are not necessary.

Do other people not have actual work to do ?

<comment><USER33> (I haven't written such an easy. Regardless...)

I can't believe people whine about ways I spend my time (or what I choose to write about). It's not like you are being forced to read any of it.

<comment><USER32> its been submitted to a message board for comments, did you expect everything to be positive ?

GIT commit message are hardly significant, unless you are doing some form of automated release notes - and then you just follow whatever convention is required.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> .

</comment><comment><USER35> The most important tip is "Use the body to explain what and why vs. how".

I'd also say: remove thw -m option from git and force people to open the editor. Do not accept messages shorter than 3 lines, start the editor with a template

      Title

      What changed and why it changed.

<comment><USER36> Dogmatism like "commit messages must be at least three lines" will result in commit messages like:

      here's
      some
      code.

Concentrating on form over substance is myopic.

<comment><USER37> Totally agree. Using three lines of text to describe fixing a typo in the comments or rewording/reformatting a block of text will just lead to an unclear message.</comment></comment></comment>


Yan on Twitter - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/bcrypt/status/1305613883902578689 <comment><USER2> Please use original title and source where possible. 'Yan on Twitter' is no indication what the link is about.

"Whistleblower Says Facebook Ignored Global Political Manipulation" [https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/craigsilverman/facebook...](https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/craigsilverman/facebook- ignore-political-manipulation-whistleblower-memo)

Previous discussion [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24474343](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24474343)</comment>


Illegally climbing the Golden Gate bridge at dawn (2011) - <AUTHOR> http://www.nopromiseofsafety.com/?p=1680 <comment><USER2> I'm really not sure how I feel about these things. On one hand, these are great escapades, and they result in fantastic pictures. I do like seeing "forbidden and forgotten areas". On the other hand, I would never want to encourage anyone to do something like this. It's illegal for a reason. The reason is not just your own safety. If he had fallen on to the road side of the bridge, not only would he die, but he would risk the safety of others driving across the bridge. Even in the best-case where he doesn't hit a vehicle or cause an accident, the morning commute is screwed up because of what on the surface appears to be another suicide.

<comment><USER3> People committing suicide would tend to jump off the bridge into the water? There are, very roughly, one person committing suicide per fortnight from the Goldengate Bridge.

One idea to slow down that number o fdeaths is to install a big net. It'll hurt when people land on it, and that might be enough to snap them out of the impulsive decision to end their lives.

The net would cost about $45m.

Some people might feel that spending the money on mental health services and suicide prevention services would be a better investment.

([http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/26/us/26bcjames.html?pagewant...](http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/26/us/26bcjames.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0))

Superficially it's obvious why Fresno CA has such a high suicide rate (14.8 per 100,000) - low employment, high crime, staggering drug (especially meth) addiction. But Sacramento CA has higher rates of suicide (22.7 per 100,000), and it's not as easy to work out why.

<comment><USER4> I'm genuinely curious how a net to go under the bridge would cost $45m. How?

<comment><USER5> I've only been there once, but I'm picking that harsh weather, height and the need for attachment points outside the existing bridge make it expensive. I'm not at all surprised that it is expensive, but I am that it hasn't been done yet.

<comment><USER6> A primary complaint, believe it or not, is that the net would hurt the aesthetics of the bridge.

People have been pushing for a net for years, but a variety of (lame) excuses keep conspiring against it. The reality is that there's no really good reason to keep from doing it...just a lot of little bad ones that seem to win.

<comment><USER7> How about "it's not society's job to keep people (even insane ones) from doing what they want with their own bodies"?

You can take this to apply to everything from the inside of one's uterus to hurling oneself off a bridge.

<comment><USER5> It is societies job to look after everyone, especially the unwell. I do recall there being a handrail, so someone believes in some safety.

<comment><USER7> Handrails are to prevent accidents by people not trying to hurl themselves off.

You are confusing safety with coercion.

<comment><USER5> I get your first statement, however If someone falls off due to poor sight/bad knees/inner ear problems or someone jumps off due to a temporary depressive illness, I see little difference. All relate to medical problems. It's not that I'm rabidly anti suicide - I am pro suicide rights - but I'd hardly call a net coercion. Can you explain this for me? Grafton Bridge in Auckland has put up Perspex screens for suicide prevention (and the safely of those under the bridge) instead of nets. [http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grafton_Bridge](http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grafton_Bridge)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I have been BASE jumping for quite a while and within that community there is a strong thread of leave no trace. It reduces the legal risk, eliminates property damage, and keeps it open for everyone else.

Back to Joe, I found his blog and saw a picture of him setting off fireworks on top of a crane I had just climbed and jumped in the city I used to live. I kept thinking the increased security probably should have led to my arrest since setting off fireworks isn't exactly stealth and if I was property owner and found that I'd definitely be horrified enough to increase security. I tracked him down and took him out to an antenna for him to climb and photograph warning him what could happen if he kept posting so publicly. He was eventually was arrested for this:

[http://www.nopromiseofsafety.com/?p=311](http://www.nopromiseofsafety.com/?p=311)

He was an interesting dude. Modified a car to have a skin of bottle caps all over it. He does not walk to the beat of normal society's drum.

<comment><USER9> "He does not walk to the beat of normal society's drum."

...says the base jumper.

<comment><USER8> We come from all walks of life. Met more than a few start up founders, doctors, and Googlers

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Amazing things like this make me wish I wasn't afraid of heights. Even the pictures sort of make me feel uneasy. Haha Regardless, this is incredible.

<comment><USER11> You're not afraid of heights, you're afraid of falling. To me, NOT being afraid of heights is irrational.

<comment><USER12> I love falling. It's hitting the ground that I'm afraid of.

<comment><USER13> Flying is the art of throwing yourself at the ground and missing.

<comment><USER14> Hi Ford.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> In railfanning we don't look kindly on people who trespass to great the 'perfect shot' because they just end up screwing things up for everyone else with ever increasing rules, surveillance and fences. Please think about the consequences of your actions when doing something like this.

<comment><USER8> Same for BASE jumping. I had a talking too with the guy from this blog. He was eventually arrested, but after getting a few things we were jumping locked up.

There is a history of tar and feathering (with cold tar) people that ruin it for everyone else.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> If you like this sort of thing, you might appreciate Vitaly Raskalov [0].

0: [http://englishrussia.com/2013/03/22/on-top-of-the- pyramide/#...](http://englishrussia.com/2013/03/22/on-top-of-the- pyramide/#more-122040)

<comment><USER17> I was offered the chance to do this in Egypt. I was told that it was totally safe as long as I brought along enough bride money in the event that we got caught.

<comment><USER18> how much?

<comment><USER17> $20

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> > In a choice between a 300-foot-fall to water and a 30-foot-fall to concrete > the winner is discernable if not immediately clear

I'm guessing the correct choice is the concrete, but for some reason I feel like I would still prefer to go for the water...

<comment><USER20> This is why I love the TV show Mythbusters: they routinely demonstrate how our intuition on these matters is wrong.

(A 30-foot fall onto concrete might still kill you, but a 300-foot fall into water will definitely kill you. And if the fall onto concrete doesn't kill you, it will be much easier to get you the medical attention you need if you're not floating in San Francisco Bay).

<comment><USER21> Huh, I never saw the Mythbusters show. Why would a 300-foot fall into water definitely kill you? I know the world dive record is 172 feet. And terminal velocity for a human is about 120 mph. I imagine if you make yourself flat for most of the fall you could lower that speed and then right before you hit the water take a "pencil" position. Would you not at least have some chance of surviving that?

<comment><USER20> Water is noncompressible. Maybe the word "definitely" was misused because there's always the possibility for a fluke, but my understanding is that at terminal velocity hitting water is functionally equivalent to hitting concrete.

Look up the "hammer drop" episode of Mythbusters if you want to see the long explanation.

The second point still stands, though. I'd rather fall onto the concrete, where I could get help quickly and if I knocked myself out but survived I wouldn't drown.

<comment><USER22> In a 300 foot fall, you're not reaching the bottom at terminal velocity. Mythbusters have in fact gone over this a few times and the results are a bit different - falling from such a height onto more or less anything is almost certainly lethal. Given equivalent height, even at terminal velocity, you're still slightly better off falling into water.

<comment><USER8> You're still going about 80 mph. Just from memory it's roughly 20 mph/second until you hit 4 seconds where it's reduced to 10 mph/second due to air resistance. The greatest chance you'd have is to impact shallow water with mud. This has saved at least three people, of which there are fairly spectacular Youtube videos.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> This is lovely and amazing!

90% of chance of law enforcement to be in touch with you soon, unfortunately. This is akin posting Youtube video of yourself breaking legal speed limits.

<comment><USER24> Just FYI:

        Date: February 24, 2011

If they haven't given him a call by now, they probably don't care at this point.

<comment><USER25> I wonder whether the statute of limitations applies to such things. I hope it does.

<comment><USER26> It'd be trespass and other crimes on federal properly, so 5 years, no?

<comment><USER27> How is it federal property? It's owned and operated by an independent quasi- governmental organization.

<comment><USER26> The bridge is classified as a national monument, which would protect it as federal property.

<comment><USER27> I can't seem to find a single thing online that supports your statement, either concerning the monument part or federal jurisdiction of the bridge.

<comment><USER27> Further, it does not appear on this list:

[http://www.cr.nps.gov/archeology/sites/antiquities/Monuments...](http://www.cr.nps.gov/archeology/sites/antiquities/MonumentsList.htm)

I'm assuming you made an error.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> I caught myself wondering why climbing the bridge has to be _illegal_.

You can't practically damage the bridge. You will mostly just hurt yourself if something happens. Theoretically the worst that could happen is you could fall onto a car but the damages incurred by a dead climber would be peanuts for any insurance company — people crash their cars by themselves alone all the time. And that could already happen because climbing being illegal doesn't stop the people who want to climb the bridge, as demonstrated in the article.

Of course, there's there "could" track where anything "could" happen thus it must be declared illegal before it happens, but you can extend that thinking to nearly everything until living just becomes impossible. For example, it "should be illegal to climb the big rocks on the shores because you could fall on an innocent party on a boat".

I would be inclined to reserve the illegal status for activities that actively affect other people. Stealing, mugging, murdering, manslaughtering, kidnapping, etc. Conversely, accidents just happen.

<comment><USER29> Because if the general public was doing it 50% or better would be squished. Public employees have to clean your guts up off the pavement each time it happens. It's not "victimless" after the same old guy has scrapped 30 people off the bridge and has mental health issues.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> _It is the most photographed landmark in the country_

I am sorry but that is BS. I could not find any statistics about "photographed landmarks" but a quick check of any measure of tourism and this seems extremely unlikely. For starters San Francisco's tourism does not come close to NYC.

<comment><USER3> ([http://www.nbcnews.com/id/43240059/ns/travel- travel_tips/t/m...](http://www.nbcnews.com/id/43240059/ns/travel- travel_tips/t/most-photographed-places-earth/))

> _Mining data from 35 million Flickr photos, scientists at Cornell University > made some surprising discoveries: Not only did the world 's most > photographed cities (and the most captured landmark in each) emerge, but > also so did the most common angles for shooting each place._

There are some American cities in the top twenty-five; and some Californian cities there; and San Francisco is listed at number 3, but for Union Square, not the Golden Gate Bridge.

This[1] AOL page has another list of US sights. ([http://news.travel.aol.com/2009/08/27/must-snaps-americas- mo...](http://news.travel.aol.com/2009/08/27/must-snaps-americas-most- photographed-landmarks/)) - they say it's the Coit Tower.

[1] A bafflingly bad page! Here's the tiny text-reading box on my display. ([http://imgur.com/aRPqWr5](http://imgur.com/aRPqWr5))

<comment><USER30> Why did you say "there are some American cities...and San Francisco is listed at number 3" and not mention:

      1st most photographed city: New York
      Landmark: Empire State Building.

Updated:

Found the source[1], the golden gate bridge did not make their list of top 7 in san francisco. Which could be due to the methodology but it is important to note that there is a problem of selection bias in the article, which may artificially inflate SF's prominence. Its worth pointing out that for NYC landmarks the apple store was ranked higher than liberty island (AKA statue of liberty). Francophiles can rest easy, the Eifel Tower crushed the competition.

[1] [https://www.cs.cornell.edu/~dph/papers/photomap- www09.pdf](https://www.cs.cornell.edu/~dph/papers/photomap-www09.pdf)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> Awful choice of font colour.

<comment><USER32> Better than pure white though. Too much contrast is problematic for some people.

<comment><USER31> On my screen however, I literally couldn't read it without selecting all the text.

<comment><USER20> Consider: [https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/color- toggle/](https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/color-toggle/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> He missed the part of the story where he has to get back down!

<comment> martin-adams Maybe he's still there.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> Performance art from the Williamsburg Bridge:

[http://gothamist.com/2011/11/19/video_see_the_williamsburg_b...](http://gothamist.com/2011/11/19/video_see_the_williamsburg_bridge_a.php)

If you enjoy these sorts of stories, you'll love watching Man on Wire -- [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Man_on_Wire](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Man_on_Wire)

</comment><comment><USER34> Mesmerizing. Apart of the glitz, I think of living in a city, is exploring.

When I was young with friends in SF (we were around 12), I remember the most adrenaline pumping thing we did was walk in the muni tunnel off I think Duboce (back in 01', so I'm not sure of the right names) and we'd always climb to roof access in the condo where they lived.

</comment><comment><USER35> There's a lovely little book by John Law which includes climbing this bridge, back in the 70s: [http://www.furnacepress.com/publications/law.html](http://www.furnacepress.com/publications/law.html)

</comment><comment><USER36> Why does every photographer have to use that "make colors look like xbox games" effect on their photos? I much rather look at unprocessed photos that have not been distorted by color enhancing filters.

</comment><comment><USER37> Someone has an idea to find what camera he used? I tried to find it on flickr and google.image but there is nothing. I really like how it captured the colors and the light.

</comment><comment><USER38> You can get a permit for this and do it legally: [http://www.parksconservancy.org/visit/tours/golden-gate- brid...](http://www.parksconservancy.org/visit/tours/golden-gate-bridge.html)

<comment><USER39> Looking at those photos it seems like they just have a staged segment where you can get a "climbing the tower" picture taken, not actually climb the tower.

[http://www.flickr.com/photos/parksconservancy/sets/721576304...](http://www.flickr.com/photos/parksconservancy/sets/72157630405662316/)</comment></comment>


For Ben Franklin's Birthday, His First Piece of Printing Reappears - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/16/books/ben-franklin-311th-birthday-first-printing-at-university-of-pennsylvania.html?_r=0 <comment><USER2> >"members of Congress attacking one another with sticks and hot pokers"

....in the good old days....</comment>


Modding a Neo Geo Pocket Color with a Game Boy SP Front Light - <AUTHOR> https://www.igorkromin.net/index.php/2018/07/22/modding-a-neo-geo-pocket-color-with-a-game-boy-sp-front-light/ <comment><USER2> For a period I was amazed by my NGPC - was an a excellent fun device. I got a deal from lik-sang.com (was closed for selling Japanese psp's to America, even though some of the first orders were placed by Sony-USA). Anyway they had a brilliant deal of like $30 delivered for a pocket colour and 6 games, from some old warehouse stock I guess. Even though it was a technically dated device the games were all excellent and battery life was great. Got it before the gba came out, and even when that came along it was still in my opinion, a more fun focused device. Think I sold it to fund my psp (think got closer to £60 which was nice ;))

<comment><USER3> Man I remember this deal on Lik Sang. I was so sorry I didn't pull the trigger. What a great site that was.

<comment><USER2> There was some awesome tech on there - I discovered the site looking for vcd players and was amazed by some of the stuff you could get there like a hardware 'pocket' nes. I say pocket, the thing was huge, and ran off a camcorder battery even though the screen was tiny. And that reminds me, I also got my gp32 from there - now that was a disapointing handheld!

<comment><USER3> Ah I wanted a GP32 too. The homebrew scene looked so great.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> So sad Neo-Geo and Sega have sunk so low.

I don't really miss their hardware, Sega shot themselves in the foot by releasing too much cash-grab junk over the 90's instead of focusing on their core products.

But the games they made still create this painful nostalgic twinge in my heart. Just HEARING the Dreamcast sound chip affects me.

<comment><USER3> Agreed on the nostaliga, but what cash grabs? The 32x and Mega CD might have been failures, but they were pretty innovative I think. The Dreamcast was also the 90s :)

<comment><USER4> Fair enough. The products could, and probably had, been made in good faith. But, I think the constant barrage of new products from Sega, along with the complicated hierarchy of how the products interacted with each other, burned people out.

Sega releases:

\- Master System: October 1985

\- Genesis: August 14, 1989

\- Sega CD: December 12, 1991

\- x32: December 3, 1994

\- Saturn: November 22, 1994

\- Dreamcast: November 27, 1998

Nintendo Releases:

\- NES: July 1983

\- Super Nintendo: November 1990

\- Nintendo 64: June 1996

<comment><USER3> Now _that 's_ making me nostalgic

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Very good, well done.</comment>