Whats the logic behind Google rejecting Max Howell, the author of Homebrew? - <AUTHOR> https://www.quora.com/Whats-the-logic-behind-Google-rejecting-Max-Howell-the-author-of-Homebrew-for-not-being-able-to-invert-a-binary-tree/answer/Max-Howell?share=1 <comment><USER2> Previous Discussions in last few days:

* [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15985775](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15985775)

* [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15981338](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15981338)

</comment><comment><USER3> TL;DR: He did an amazing job in Homebrew of _designing_ software with a fantastic UX. He did a not amazing job interviewing for a software _engineer_ position.

Also: He understands this, though believes Google still should have hired him. ( _Maybe they should: but probably for UX, not software engineering_ )

<comment><USER4> > Also: He understands this, though believes Google still should have hired > him. (Maybe they should: but probably for UX, not software engineering)

There is an insightful reply that touches on this: [https://www.quora.com/Whats-the-logic-behind-Google- rejectin...](https://www.quora.com/Whats-the-logic-behind-Google-rejecting- Max-Howell-the-author-of-Homebrew-for-not-being-able-to-invert-a-binary- tree/answer/Max-Howell/comment/50102136)

As a former Google SWE, I pretty much agree with all of it, especially this:

> The being a dick part is an issue, if you were serious about that :).

Which is a good reminder that technical skills alone can be outweighed by attitude.

<comment><USER3> Hah, yeah. On being a dick, I'm tempted to say "no amount of talent..." but I think it's probably just a geometric, maybe exponential increase, i.e., the necessary talent required to cover your personality deficits increases more rapidly than the deficits.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The hiring process is _extremely stochastic_. Especially at Google, where they err on the side of turning away qualified candidates rather than hiring unqualified candidates. If you apply and don't get a job, it is not necessarily because Google thinks you are terrible or whatever. Not everybody is good at interviewing. Sometimes the interviewer is having a bad day and it comes through on their feedback. None of this has anything to do with having written some software that lots of people use. In addition, LOTS of people have written some useful code. That's not really special.

All that said, I don't want anybody on my team who says "I am often a dick". That's not worth my trouble.

</comment><comment><USER6> There are like ten different package managers for Unix-like systems.

The fact that the author thought (in his famous tweets) that developing one made him an outstanding software engineer was pure hubris. Most of the people reading this comment could have written Homebrew.

It seems like he's come around, which is nice.

</comment><comment><USER7> Worth noting that there are other answers, but this link is to Max's answer.

Other answers, should you desire them, are here: [https://www.quora.com/Whats- the-logic-behind-Google-rejectin...](https://www.quora.com/Whats-the-logic- behind-Google-rejecting-Max-Howell-the-author-of-Homebrew-for-not-being-able- to-invert-a-binary-tree)

</comment><comment><USER8> Google isn't interested in what type of value an engineer brings outside of memorization of popular algos typically studied in CS programs.

It's a bit cult like in that sense, but when you have a monopoly with no government regulation you can spend as much as you would like building the company with the people you like (see Peter Theil's book Zero to One where he writes about this).

I live write by a Google complex and have a number of friends who work there as engineers and we have had chats about the hiring process. Any Google engineer will tell you that whiteboarding A* is not part of his day to day. But it's just culture in the end.

<comment><USER9> (I'm a Googler and opinions are my own)

Interviewing is hard and I don't think any company has it perfect. The nice thing about going into a Google interview is that you can know what to expect. They provide lots of study material and there are multiple books or sites out there that give sample problems that mirror common problems interviewers may ask at Google.

There are certainly negatives to whiteboard coding/algorithm interviews, but all other common methods I've seen also have their own problems. I do feel like the hiring team at Google has evaluated other methods (and continues to look into ways to improve the process), but they have stuck with the white board process. I'd say the hiring team does A/B testing like much of Google, but things have stayed somewhat similar over the years.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> The last time I spoke with Google HR / recruitment was in 2015 and it was a mess.

Halfway through the process of doing eight interviews I was transferred to a new recruitment manager who wasn't given any of my information and essentially I started the process again.

The last and most senior technical interview I had consisted of the person asking me to write pseudo code into a static google document while I could clearly hear them answering emails / writing text messages with their phone. The technical interviewer also asked me if I had ever used Github before, which is ironic because I was cold contacted by their recruitment team due to my open-source contributions on Github.

Never again.

</comment><comment><USER11> I have to say that my interviewing experience at Google was existentially bizarre.

None of the interviewers (I think there were 6) looked like they would rate their mood higher than 3 out of 10 both before and after their time slot. The guy I had lunch with gossiped about how much he disliked it there. The interviews were pedantic to a degree I never thought possible.

You need to hit somewhat of a perfect storm to get interviewers in a decent mood and then upon receiving an offer somehow not be put off by the grey cloud of gloom you witnessed and actually accept it.

</comment><comment><USER12> Who cares?

</comment><comment><USER13> Why does this keep getting re-posted?

</comment><comment><USER14> Why does he want to work at Google?</comment>


Towards an understanding of technical debt (2016) - <AUTHOR> https://kellanem.com/notes/towards-an-understanding-of-technical-debt <comment><USER3> Technical debt isn't debt. Debt has interest, and you can pay it back. You can use debt to grow. In a sense, debt is a good thing - you can timeshift revenue. Businesses are comfortable with debt.

But that's not what we're doing when we create technical "debt".

What we call technical debt is really best analogous to an uncovered short sale. We sold something we didn't own (i.e. technical sophistication and proper design) to get something of value (a shipping product) in the hopes we'd never have to cover the asset (fix the bug, upgrade the dependency, etc. - i.e. cash out before the code hits the fan).

If you win the bet and you never have to cover the position - it's progress for nothing! Awesome! But, if you do have to cover it - disaster! You're forced to pay any price to cover the short or abandon the feature - maybe the whole project. This can happen at any time. Insanity.

In finance we generally don't permit uncovered short positions for a reason - they destabilise markets, and quickly. Transitive dependencies, i.e. systemic risks, abound.

Companies have to start talking about software projects and practices in an actuarial sense - and get insurance to cover their naked shorts and wild technical bets.

<comment><USER4> But according to your description, technical debt _is a_ debt:

\- it has interest: you're paying extra in maintenance, debugging and manual testing for all the shortcuts you've taken

\- it can be paid back by refactoring the bad module. The price of such a refactoring is usually known and, unlike in short sale, won't get to infinity

\- it can be used to grow. Instead of working five years on a perfect solution we build something plausible right now and then keep refining it

<comment><USER5> And that's why debt is a good metaphor: you have to have a plan to repay it, and that interest you pay should be less than the profit you make by taking on the debt.

Take, for example, something like Mozilla's Facebook Container extension [1]. It's fine if they take some shortcuts that allows them to launch that faster if it turns out there's another Facebook scandal in the news - <USER2> faster allows riding the waves of publicity, resulting in more users. Even though the total development effort is more when they have to clean up those shortcuts after launch, the additional effort has been used to grow.

[1] [https://addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/addon/facebook- cont...](https://addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/addon/facebook-container/)

<comment><USER6> Debt is also a good metaphor because, just like finance, it can be used as a beneficial lever that propels you to the next level artificially fast, or it can be used foolishly and end up burying your effort.

I see examples of the latter all the time in the experience of developers and how they approach decisions. I have recently worked on largish (or at least in the 10s of millions of dollars of investment to create) codebases in which developers (recently - like 2013) wrote switch statements that became God classes because they simply were not familiar (at least not in practice) with patterns that avoided it. Consider that one example and imagine the type of havoc that lack of experience creates across the entire codebase. You can say this is a case of ignorance, which it is, but it's the same as the ignorance of some to handle money in a sustainable way. It's like giving a credit card to a kid.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Highlights:

> When we program we're writing down a very explicit and exact description of > a solution to our current best understanding of the problem we're trying to > solve. Over time both the problem we are trying to solve and our > understanding of it will inevitably change, often dramatically. When that > happens some percentage of our very explicit and exact description is now > wrong, and a liability. Taken to the logical conclusion, given time, every > line of code is wrong and a liability that will need to be dealt with.

> A little discussed and poorly understood design goal for code is > disposability.

Criticisms:

\- I'm not sure I agree that these five buckets are very distinct, nor that they encompass all things referred to as "technical debt". They're good examples worth thinking about, but I don't think they're as archetypical as the author does.

\- I've never seen it as an assumption that "technical debt" implies "the people before us did a bad job", something the author spends a lot of effort arguing against. The people before you lay out a runway, which helps determine how quickly technical debt will build up, but even the very best codebases accumulate it eventually.

<comment><USER8> I was struggling with that last but as well. Sure, in some cases the people before did a bad job, but in my experience that occurs way less often than engineers simply developing for the requirements that they understand, which evolve over time, that is, both the requirements and the understanding.

It is possible to create very extensible software architectures, I've met many engineers that will spend a great deal of time anticipating future needs, but in many cases this constitutes premature optimization.

<comment><USER7> Something I've only recently started to grasp is that good code isn't about taking abstraction and extensibility to the very maximum, it's about picking the right _amount_ of abstraction to fit the amount of change the code will likely face in its lifetime. Abstraction isn't without its own cost. Unfortunately, all of these design decisions - even the meta-decisions like degree of abstraction - are relative to the project and many of them have to be made at the outset, where you're only guessing what the future will bring.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> From the article.

 _You can address issues that are damaging to productivity, operability and morale, but only way to "fix technical debt" is "rm -rf"._

I think he was saying this ironically, but this is a very real possibility sometimes. There were often times I've found (and wrote) code dealing with cross cutting concerns that weren't core to our business and I ripped it out and used a popular third party (open source) package.

On a higher level, I champion using managed services whenever possible over doing "undifferentiated heavy lifting".

<comment><USER10> Deleted code is debugged code.

<comment><USER11> Mostly true. But removing something can also give you something in return. In this case a simpler and potentially more reliable codebase.

You should throw out old code when any of these apply 1) The code becomes irrelevant 2) The code becomes redundant (you found a way to generalize things) 3) The code is so bad that maintaining it is simply not worth it any more.

These things happen frequently enough that removing code is usually a reasonable action.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> As a previous engineer and now turned product manager. I like to frame these technical investment work items as a pair [Item 1] + [Item 2]. This has drastically improved the understanding and commitment from the rest of the business to fund and allow for "non-feature" work.

Item 1: Security, Performance, Stability

Item 2: Fix, Update, Upgrade, Improvement

Examples: "Security Fix", "Performance Improvement", "Stability Update", etc.

<comment> bjelkeman-again What is the difference between Update and Upgrade?

<comment><USER10> I have usually used "apt-get" as a good guideline: "apt-get update" updates the definitions of available packages, while "apt-get upgrade" retrieves and installs the actual packages. In a nutshell, "update" doesn't change the operation of the system, while "upgrade" probably does. In SemVer parlance, an upgrade is the major version shift.

<comment><USER13> Apt-get upgrade should be the equivelent of a minor version shift. A major version shift would be do-release-upgrade.

Apt-get update doesn't update the system at all, it updates apt.

<comment><USER10> Fair point, I stand corrected -- apt's update/upgrade does not directly map to SemVer version numbers.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I wanted to get angry at this article, but he made some good points. Still, I've found some organizations are more concerned with technical excellence, and others see it as mastrabatory acts that get in the way of being agile to outlive competitors and putting resources only where it will obviously help the business. Obviously a lot of us like to build things that are correct, efficient, safe, and easy to maintain and not just "meets minimum requirements to keep the ship afloat" after so many years in school learning to become good engineers.

It also seems like markets and disasters can seem random from a SWE point of view. You can build a great system and people just might not take to it, or the whole thing could topple over because of a third party component, a really determined hacker, etc.

<comment><USER15> There is a selfish balancing act as well. I've been in two jobs where I'd take on more and more technical debt to deliver new features quickly so we could capture marketshare. Eventually, the technical debt killed agility and project sponsors didnt understand why every little thing took three days to do instead of one.

This left me open to being ousted (e.g., the Product Manager "had a friend" who could surely do everything much faster.) Seems easy from the outside. They got rid of me, hired the friend, who both increased the team size and then re- built from scratch.

Selfishly, it would have been better to more steadily deliver features and balance speed with maintainability -- because sometimes higherups dont understand the tradeoff they are making.

<comment><USER14> Thanks for sharing your story. Did they factor the cost of a rewrite into their calculus? I know sometimes even though a system becomes hard to move forward it would require such an investment to reach feature parity it has a sort of protection against total destruction.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> While I admire the author's attempt to bring structural clarity to a broad concept, greater clarity can perhaps be found by broadening it further still.

Anyone who has refurbished a house will live and breathe examples of technical debt embedded in the workmanship, and the material / design choices around them.

As you discover past shortcuts made by hurried builders, asbestos components or electrical cabling no longer safe to use, you quickly realise that you have to address these issues in a way that doesn't come back to bite you down the line.

As a regular homeowner you are transformed into the perfect dogfooder for House 2.0, and this perspective should inform your (day job) approach to technical debt as it is traditionally defined.

<comment><USER17> I read of a clock tower several hundred years old that was in need of repair / replacement and construction workers realized to match the wood the trees they'd need were thousands of miles away and extremely rare. When they started asking around to see if they could source it with substitutes the groundskeeper said that the tree they needed seemed familiar and brought them to an orchard a few hundred yards away. For generations, a small orchard was maintained from the time the project was started for the day when the timber would need to be replaced.

We don't do this normally in most homes around the world, but families of multi-generational wealth seem to be able to do something similar with their homes because they both have means and will to build an estate that lasts centuries.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Essentially a technical debt is an unvalidated assumption that other unvalidated assumptions are worth pursuing. A hunch about hunches of sorts. The article is full of them describing every way to think about technical debt. And it's practically impossible to neither prove nor disprove the claims of technical debt without a lot of work, making it super easy to justify anything with technical debt. Naturally it becomes a term of authority and power to sneak in things unlikely to produce anything of value.

Could be a sign that things got too toxic in software development if developers can't even talk openly about experimentation and research.

<comment><USER19> Technical debt concerns are not necessarily 'unvalidated' \- at least not to the extent that almost everything is a little fuzzy in tech anyhow.

For example: you started a few feature with a few scripts, added a few new things here and there ad-hoc. Now it's growing and full blown and nary impossible to maintain. A more clear understanding of the problem space now exists, and also that a refactor would make sense.

The continued inability to really move forward due to the rag-tag system is a kind of debt, and the trade off/decision has to be made as to wether or not the team needs to take a few steps back before moving forward.

This is really common.

I worked at BlackBerry during their heyday. If you are old enough to remember, there used to be international headlines when the BB email service went down. Everyone in the press was using BB and would harp on it. This is partly because BlackBerry had made a bunch of acquisitions and gun-taped the systems together, as opposed to properly integrating them. There was a real 'cost' to this bad press. The only real and fundamental way to avoid those systematic failures was to do a proper integration which in and of itself was a risky and unwieldy proposition for the company at the time.

I'd argue that was a fairly material and validated form of technical debt.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> We need more definitions. I think it's helpful to distinguish between technical debt patients and technical debt doctors. As a developer (patient), you experience the _symptoms_ of technical debt - slow changes, dev frustration, etc. As a scientist (doctor) you observe this as a naturally occurring phenomena - with a hypotheses, measurement system and literature review. A TD doctor might be your local architect, staff or principal engineer.

There's quite a bit of published literature on technical debt, which appeared quite recently (~5 or 6 years ago). One distinction is between normal technical debt (code level), and architecture technical debt a.k.a ATD (system level) [1]. So far, whether you like the term or not as a patient, it seems useful for scientists to think collectively about the phenomena in these terms.

Some commenters in previous thread say an ideal (reference frame) doesn't exist, from which to calculate the delta of TD currently. The symptoms do exist. That extra few hours it takes to onboard a new developer, fix a bug or whatever are observable. If there exists a possibility to reduce that observable, measurable effort, then that possible future timeline should be the reference frame.

I've risked an appeal to authority in order to transfer better understanding as a random stranger on the Internet. Technical debt seems a topic too fuzzy to fully understand, and that's why I'm pointing out the way scientists are thinking about it. I don't see any other clear path we're going to get industry wide consensus or understanding, if not for the scientific method and institutional support.

That being said, the article did a good job of communicating at least 5 different ways of thinking about TD.

Disclaimer: I'm building an architectural technical debt research tool called RefactorKit.com

1.[https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Terese_Besker/publicati...](https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Terese_Besker/publication/320081646_Managing_Architectural_Technical_Debt_A_unified_model_and_systematic_literature_review/links/59d739150f7e9b42a6b068c0/Managing- Architectural-Technical-Debt-A-unified-model-and-systematic-literature- review.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER21> I usually just see the term technical debt as a way to pedal the latest shiny programming environment. Coming from someone who works with COBOL, Oracle PL/SQL and very old java code (I also work with 3.x python and Rust) the ability to fix code is easier than ever given the amazing tools we have today like modern debuggers and decompilers. Its no doubt hard, as we see, for programmers to write say an emulator for Nintendo, but it is definitely done today and they have no code usually to operate on at all. Also look at game modders who are injecting DLLs. There is entire subgroups of programmers whose day to day is just modifying the worst possible outcome in terms of technical debt (already compiled/optimized/obfuscated code). So anyone who mentions technical debt as an up front refusal to use some technology x to solve a problem, is really just doing premature optimization in a project and I think that is a real problem. To put it another way, any attempt to understand technical debt is to speculate on the future of Comp Sci and/or companies' licensing changes / mergers and is basically a complete gamble.

<comment><USER22> I think it's not that simple. Latest tools often increase productivity. Gamers can afford to spend days and weeks to add some feature to their favorite game. They don't have deadlines and they don't care about QA. It's another thing when you have to fix a bug or add a feature in a limited time with limited resources because business needs it.

<comment><USER21> I try to frame it a bit more with regards to project management, where I feel any discussion of tech debt is bad for the project. To even start talking about it you have to start making many assumptions, for starters the assumption that the project will be successful to then later have to maintain. Then there are many many other assumptions to follow, and I feel that it is generally detrimental for it to even be discussed. It always involves some upfront price/scope/time on a project in trade for some future unknown cost savings. Fair point about the game hacking though they don't always have such constraints, but they do help close the gap by inventing these great new hacking tools!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> This article describes technical debt in code which isn't the only kind of technical debt. It is potentially much clearer from my perspective to understand technical debt in architecture and infrastructure.

The amount of technical debt can be described here by identifying the quickest shortcut as well as the most correct solution, choosing the solution between those two on the spectrum that makes the most sense for current time and staff, and taking the difference between where you landed and the most correct solution. This difference is technical debt.

Taking on the debt does most times get you further faster, but in turn it slows you down in the long run. The longer you wait to pay it off, the more time in the interim you spend making minimum payments that get you nowhere but consume time.

</comment><comment><USER24> Previous discussion on this post: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10887452](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10887452) (2016)

</comment><comment><USER19> I would add risk, essentially security.

Some companies have gone light on this because the liability/cost of failure was not so much.

But at some point, some of those risks become real.

The costs aren't always apparent, because that's the nature of 'black swans' \- but the systematic risk is.

</comment><comment><USER25> I will go even further - all code is bad and probably broken. Why bad - because if you put 10 engineers in the room and ask them to look at it, they will argue about personal preferences and not about what code actually does. And you can always improve what you wrote, which means current state is far from good.

STechnical debt is not a universal thing. You can have a debt free code, then new hire will argue that whole thing is going to collapse and needs to be rewritten. Even when rewriting it brings 0 ROI and it actually good as it is. I've seen fair share of engineering initiatives that were complete waste of time, caused by attempts to fight "tech debt".

The only good use of technical debt is to manipulate business folks into approving projects you want to work on. And I'm guilty of using it that way.</comment>


Y Combinator to Start Doling Out $60M Next Year to Study Universal Basic Income - <AUTHOR> https://gizmodo.com/y-combinator-plans-to-start-dolling-out-60-million-nex-1828630617 <comment><USER2> This page has the plan [https://basicincome.ycr.org/our- plan/](https://basicincome.ycr.org/our-plan/) and FAQ [https://basicincome.ycr.org/faqs/](https://basicincome.ycr.org/faqs/) The PDF is linked in the Wired article and the URL on the second page in the PDF.

There's also a podcast from January 2018 [https://basicincomepodcast.com/podcast/y-combinators- basic-i...](https://basicincomepodcast.com/podcast/y-combinators-basic-income- study-featuring-elizabeth-rhodes/)

</comment><comment><USER3> Is there a publication explaining how they plan to go about the study? The money should be delivered by helicopter.</comment>


How much can forests fight climate change? - <AUTHOR> https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-00122-z <comment><USER2> Before jumping into detailed discussion of the points raised in the publication here, including "trees leak methane in the Amazon" \-- is it possible that this article is getting _promoted_ because it feeds into a "they dont know what they are talking about" meme of anti-science know-nothing'ness ?

There appear to be several sets of weasel-words candidates .. Such as "many scientists applaud X but some urge caution" without naming either side's strengths and weaknesses, notable refutation on either side, or any raw counts of how many "some" are...

Recently it was discovered that USA oil and gas industry self-reporting of methane emissions on extraction in the Permian Basin might be five times less than actual numbers, and might have doubled in the last two years. This was detected by satellite sensors and NGO analysis.

[http://www.edf.org/NewMexicoMethane](http://www.edf.org/NewMexicoMethane)

<comment><AUTHOR> OP here. No climate scientist, just someone who's been following climate change for a couple decades. Not a climate change denier by a long shot, if anything I've actually already made a bunch of large life decisions under the assumption that climate change is going to change this world quite a bit in the next few decades.

The main accusation you make, that I (and other who are promoting this article) are suggesting that the scientists don't know what they are talking about, I actually plead guilty for that. I really do think we don't know what we're talking about anythign other than the primary assertion that we are warming this planet through our actions. I don't believe we actually have a real handle on the rate (we could be drastically under or overestimating) of climate change, and I definitely don't think we have an inkling on whether geoengineering efforts would work the way we expect it to.

The main light bulb for me from this article is it has made me consider even planting trees as a geoengineering effort, as vicarious as other proposals like dumping iron in the ocean or particles into the stratosphere. Right now I would consider any effort at controlling global warming other than actually just reducing emissions as geoengineering.

The most apt analogy I have found for geoengineering efforts like this was given by the comedian Bill Burr in a podcast, where he shits on a Ted talk about genetically engineering malaria mosquitos ([https://youtu.be/vEZ0z0WSrUA](https://youtu.be/vEZ0z0WSrUA) ).

I have seen similar over-confidence among my fellow scientitsts in biology, in complicated subjects like cancer, immunology and metabolism. Time and again, people will assert they have understood a system, make a drug, and it won't work, and then they will blame the failure on the same complexity they said they had conquered.

We have made tremendous progress on all these scientific fronts (biology, climate science, etc) but the systems under study have become so complex, I would consider it a criminal offense if any scientist makes a claim that they really have figured out all the ramifications of their geoengineering plans. Criminal because I am worried that any major geoengineering effort if it goes wrong might be irreversible. Orders of magnitude more studies are needed IMO to make sure we understand these systems, and I don't think we are going to invest that effort until things get far, far worse. Until then I would prefer we err on the side of caution.

Btw it's not just methane, they actually talk about a bunch of other potential issues (like VOCs) in that article. Also, this is nature mag, if you think nature mag is anti-science or climate change denying I'm not sure who else you think is your ally.

<comment><USER3> > we could be drastically overestimating

Would you mind explaining this bit? Besides [1], which hardly changes the big picture and came out literally last month, what evidence have you seen in the last couple decades of following climate change that suggest to you that the likelihood that we have been "drastically overestimating" the rate is anything comparable to the likelihood that we have been correct (if not underestimating)? From as far back as I can remember, the predictions have only stayed about the same or gotten more dire. They used to say weather patterns would get more intense, with more storms etc., and they indeed have. They say sea levels would rise and I really have no reason to believe they cannot calculate the rise correctly. I would think that if climate scientists had no idea what they're talking about, we could point to their erroneous predictions and prove them wrong?

[1] [https://www.nationalgeographic.com/environment/2019/03/one-p...](https://www.nationalgeographic.com/environment/2019/03/one- part-of-greenland-ice-growing/)

<comment><AUTHOR> I definitely am not refuting the estimates by climate scientists about our worsening climate rates; I will totally assume that the rate they suggest is the expected value until proven otherwise.

However, I will also not be surprised if things get far worse extremely fast, or if they actually suddenly start getting better (or slowing down). My only rationale for this belief is that as we go into warmer and warmer climate, we are also going into a territory that the scientists themselves have no real data for - literally uncharted territory. I'm sure they have run models to extrapolate their predictions but the actual fact that we are already experiencing climate that has not been seen for however amount of time means any prediction has to be taken with a slight grain of salt.

Practically speaking, we always hear of the finding that global warming might release methane bodies or it's turning into a runaway chain reaction. We don't even know how many other chain reaction scenarios exist that have not even been considered. Similarly (though with orders of magnitude less likelihood even for me), there exists possibilities that excessive warming into uncharted temperatures might trigger some feedback that might slow this warming too. I'm not counting on it but I am not ready to % exclude it yet either.

<comment><USER4> > there exists possibilities that excessive warming into uncharted > temperatures might trigger some feedback that might slow this warming too.

I very much doubt this is the case.

What is happening to the world can be explained by science and using scientific principles the changes can be predicted by modelling.

The hard part is creating the model, only because the problem domain is very complex. But what we have seen, is over time that modelling has been getting better.

Now if there was some _possibilities that excessive warming into uncharted temperatures might trigger_ some sort of cooling effect then surely that would have come out in the modelling.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The math doesn't work out. Since the beginning of the Industrial revolution humankind has emitted about 550 GtC (gigatons of carbon) into the atmosphere. All plant life on earth contains about 450 GtC. Assuming all of it is forests (which isn't the case, a lot of it is algae, plankton and weeds) and assuming 100% capture rate (which also isn't the case due to forest fires, rotting and reduced albedo), earth's tree cover would more than double to capture all carbon emitted so far.

Clearly, that is not realistic. A more realistic (but still implausibly ambitious) goal would be increasing the earth's forests by 10%, storing 45 GtC for us. Well, it is better than nothing but at the current (increasing!) rate of 10 GtC emissions added per year that nets us another 4.5 years.

[https://www.vox.com/science-and- health/2018/5/29/17386112/al...](https://www.vox.com/science-and- health/2018/5/29/17386112/all-life-on-earth-chart-weight-plants-animals-pnas) [https://www.co2.earth/global-co2-emissions](https://www.co2.earth/global- co2-emissions)

<comment><USER6> I've come to terms with the fact that nothing is going to stop anthropogenic climate change and we'll just have to adapt to it. It's not a technical problem but a political game-theoretic problem.

Major CO2 cuts would require a global all-cooperate (in a game theory sense) scenario and that's unlikely given that the payoff is very high for defecting. This is because global cuts in fossil fuel use would make fossil fuels incredibly cheap, increasing the economic advantage for nations that use them. This is going to be hugely appealing to developing nations with large populations. We already see this with China and India and pretty soon you're going to see it in Africa.

The only way I can see CO2 emission growth halting or reversing is a huge breakthrough in energy generation that results in something dramatically cheaper _and easier to deploy and scale_ than fossil fuel. It would take Mr. Fusion (Back to the Future reference), solar and batteries that are just absolutely dirt cheap, or something equivalently awesome. I don't see anything like this arriving before CO2 hits 800-1000ppm.

We are pretty adaptable. A bio professor of mine was fond of saying that humans are like cockroaches and that this was a compliment coming from a biologist. We should be preparing to move Miami.

<comment><USER7> > that's unlikely given that the payoff is very high for defecting.

Trade policy (e.g. through the WTO) can be designed in a way that allows countries to internalise the damage caused by greenhouse gas emissions by imposing higher tariffs on countries that do not cooperate.

<comment><USER8> But you still need everyone else to cooperate. And in a multipolar world (or at least a world with some viable political blocs outside of the US led order) that will be difficult to say the least.

<comment><USER9> What makes you think the US is not the defector?

<comment><USER6> Most of the world is defecting at the moment. Few are truly serious about cutting emissions dramatically.

The US is relatively high (but by no means the highest) in per capita CO2 while China is the #1 emitter in total and also per dollar GDP (last I checked). The per dollar GDP number would make China the largest emitter in terms of carbon intensity of its economic activity.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I read The Hidden Life Of Trees a while back. I believe the author suggests that old growth forests are bigger carbon sinks because they have deeper humus [1]. I don't know the merits of that idea but it helped me realize that when people talked about forests, I was only thinking about the trees themselves, not taking the soil into consideration, too. If that idea has merit and the research does eventually conclude that forests are a carbon sink strategy, then it suggests that preserving old growth forests might be more effective than planting new ones.

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

<comment><USER11> It's not just the humus, an aged forest also has at least 7 layers of carbon sequestration.

[https://geographyiseasy.files.wordpress.com/2013/12/layers-i...](https://geographyiseasy.files.wordpress.com/2013/12/layers- in-the-tropical-rainforest.jpg)

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Forest are much more than store carbon. Them affect the local climate, and maybe(??) the global(??). Help the local fauna. Clean the air of more than just pollutants, make the soil more fertile, combat erosion, help the river flow to not get so dry, and that is from the top of my head with my limited understanding of the subject.

Combined to NOT deforest so hard, and is a win.

Forest are a force multiplier.

</comment><comment><USER13> Trees are batteries that store carbon. The carbon is restored into the atmosphere when a tree dies and decays, or is burnt.

A long time ago trees didn't decay because the Earth didn't have "fungus" that made them rot and decay. So they just piled on top of each other and turned into coal.

Plant more trees. [https://onetreeplanted.org/](https://onetreeplanted.org/)

<comment><USER14> > Trees are batteries that store carbon. The carbon is restored into the > atmosphere when a tree dies and decays, or is burnt.

By extension, wooden building materials are carbon batteries as well. Plant more trees _and_ build more things out of wood.

<comment><USER15> Beside the reasonable point that building out of wood allows "sequestrating" carbon long(er?) term, are there studies working the maths out and confirming that?

It seems the intuitively clear solutions often can be deceiving since there are hidden aspects balancing things out and I'm wondering if it's the case here.

<comment><USER16> A study is not really required to confirm that wooden constructions contain and retain their carbon. Even over many hundreds of years the wood in Tudor houses is chemically stable (without preservatives - as long as it has correct ventilation)

Studies may look into possible mistakes or optimizations that could be made, but the basic material reality is evidenced in plain sight.

<comment><USER15> Right, and I asked (or tried to, at least!) about that latter question: stuff like transport, isolation, etc that could make wood less interesting than other construction materials, environmentally.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I rarely, if ever, see people talking about ~bidirectional benefits (think two variables, or force moment).

Having people planting and caring more about forest will not only help absorb a bit of CO2 but also make these people do less emitting.

Is it useless on a large scale ?

</comment><comment><USER18> So in that case, rather than seeing forest planting as a complete all-in-one solution to climate change, should we instead see it as just one component of a greater solution? Use trees to solve the carbon sequester problem, look to other technologies for solutions to the albedo and heat absorption problems?

</comment><comment><USER19> I think from long time scientists are studying the topic of Ocean Seeding and Iron Fertilization.

Video on Ocean Seeding - [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xofhzc1NZ8s](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xofhzc1NZ8s)

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

</comment><comment><USER20> You have to cut down the trees at maturity and preserve them and re plant in order to actually reduce carbon in the atmosphere. We should probably be doing this (as long as we're careful not release more co2 than we capture doing all this)... But we should also be putting government money behind scaling climeworks and other direct carbon capture tech... We should also be seriously studying other more drastic measures.

<comment><USER21> Increasing the total biomass of trees also reduces atmospheric CO2, even if you just let the natural cycle of life go on.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> If the albedo effect is so big can't we just paint the oceans white? How many ping-pong balls would it take to stop global warming? Or maybe empty water battles connected into rafts and painted white?

</comment><comment><USER23> How much can climate change help forests?

</comment><comment><USER24> > Unger says she received death threats, and that some colleagues stopped > speaking to her.

That is totally fucked up. I don't recall hearing about death threats against scientists pre Internet. Maybe against some research on primates, but I'm not sure. Yet another consequence of Eternal September :(

> "I have heard scientists say that if we found forest loss cooled the planet, > we wouldn't publish it."

That is also totally fucked up. But I guess that it's not that surprising. I mean, Kuhn and all.

<comment><USER25> > I don't recall hearing about death threats against scientists pre Internet.

Galileo? I imagine Darwin had his fair share. And those are obviously just the most famous examples.

<comment><USER24> It was the Catholic Church that went after Galileo, not individual haters. And based on some searching, I find nothing about threats against Darwin. Indeed, it seems that he was quite the popular figure, at least in the UK. Even after he declared agnosticism.

Recently, of course, Christian and Muslim haters have threatened people who support evolution.

<comment><USER26> I haven't heard of any threats directed against Darwin personally. If this is so, one possible reason is that he was extremely circumspect in the timing of publication, since he was well aware of its likely social and theological impact.

Darwin's personal preference to not be an asshole, was one reason _On the Origin_ took twenty years to reach publication.

After publication, Darwin was fortunate to acquire celebrity bull-dogs such as Huxley, who would take up the cause and allow Darwin to continue his gentlemanly pursuits, out of the direct firing line.

<comment><USER24> Maybe he didn't get death threats because the sorts of idiots who make death threats didn't read his stuff. And maybe because pastors were too civilized to encourage their flocks to make death threats.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Jobs Charted by State and Salary - <AUTHOR> http://flowingdata.com/2014/07/02/jobs-charted-by-state-and-salary/ <comment><USER2> I know there is huge variance for how much software developers make. Curious about what the variation for doctors in the same specialty is.</comment>


Opera: Introducing native ad-blocking feature for faster browsing - <AUTHOR> https://www.opera.com/blogs/desktop/2016/03/native-ad-blocking-feature-opera-for-computers/ <comment><USER2> I think people are underestimating how big this is. When Brave did it you could excuse it as the action of a startup looking for attention; Opera now legitimizes ad-blocking as being a feature that should be on by default. This is similar to what went down with pop-up blockers, it quickly became a must- have feature.

I wouldn't be surprised if Safari was next and to ship their own content blocker in iOS and have it on by default.

The question is, how much will this trend cost Google?

<comment><USER3> Qihoo(360) will get all your privacy. A notorious and shameless company. Have you ever think about why Qihoo made this dicision?

<comment><USER3> I believe all the website will fight back soon, if opera is detected, then display a message "opera is not supported"

<comment><USER4> Spoof the Chrome User-Agent.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I didn't minds banner ads and the one or two side bar adds. But then came the between content adds and the clickbait. Also the tracking etc. Sorry, but when adds look more like virusses and some are then I don't want to take the risk. When a website however gives me a warning about my addblocker then I disable it to see how it looks like without addblocker on that website. (I once had a site ask me this and then I got horrible adds with sound and autoplay and loops, that site went back to being blocked very fast)

</comment><comment><USER6> I am not sure how to react. On the one hand, it seems like a good thing at the first sight. On the other, with ad-blocking becoming more and more mainstream, and the discussion looking more like clashes and agreements between companies, wouldn't advertisements find new ways of seeking attention, eventually evolving into something that we cannot escape?

What if they find a way to ban ad-blocking? What if web becomes completely binary, somehow making ad-blockers obsolete?[1][2]

What do you think?

[1]: [https://hacks.mozilla.org/2015/12/compiling-to- webassembly-i...](https://hacks.mozilla.org/2015/12/compiling-to-webassembly- its-happening/)

[2]: [http://techcrunch.com/2015/06/17/google-microsoft-mozilla- an...](http://techcrunch.com/2015/06/17/google-microsoft-mozilla-and-others- team-up-to-launch-webassembly-a-new-binary-format-for-the-web/)

<comment><USER7> That's highly speculative and phrased in a way impossible to answer:

> eventually evolving into something that we cannot escape?

What I think: if they find a way to block adblockers, we'll find a way to block the adblock blockers! It looks like a fight that will keep going on for some time. Until they make ads so good that they are indistinguishable from good content, then we'd won [1]

I now block the blockers naturally, just not following those pesky links. I would love some statistics for instance, from the times Forbes and others are in the top HN page before vs after they completely started blocking adblock.

[1] [https://xkcd.com/810/](https://xkcd.com/810/)

<comment><USER8> I think the "something that we cannot escape" the OP is describing is already here in the form of "native ads", which are advertisements presented as articles. Buzzfeed does a lot of them, and there's a non-zero cognitive load in differentiating (since they look so much like articles).

I'm really not sure they're better than ads. They're certainly more deceiving.

<comment><USER9> That's where curated media comes into play. No-one's going to upvote an article that's literally just filler text.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Ironic, considering Opera has their own ad network[1]...

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

<comment><USER11> Its only ironic if its blocked as well. Is it?

<comment><USER12> From the comments:

> _opera.com is whitelisted by default, but you 're free to remove it from the > whitelist. There are no hard-coded exceptions to allow Opera or Opera > Mediaworks ads through._

[https://www.opera.com/blogs/desktop/2016/03/native-ad- blocki...](https://www.opera.com/blogs/desktop/2016/03/native-ad-blocking- feature-opera-for-computers/#comment-2561805926)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> "We are the first major browser vendor to integrate an ad-blocking feature"

Firefox had it first. Enabling it's tracking protection makes almost all ads go away (because ads track you).

They're also forgetting Brave.

<comment><USER14> Firefox's "tracking protection" only works in private mode, right?

<comment> dao- You can enable it for non-private windows by setting privacy.trackingprotection.enabled to true in about:config.

<comment><USER15> I hate that this is not more visible, like in the Preferences pane.

<comment><USER16> It's not in the release channel, but for Nightly the option is there on the Preferences page and has been for quite some time.

<comment><USER15> I use Firefox Developer Edition and it's not there.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Interesting comment from one of the blog moderators:

> We don't prioritize in any way our ads network. The most important is speed > and user experience. We are not in the extortion business model as ABP.

<comment><USER18> Related, somewhat, but what are good alternatives to ABP??

<comment><USER19> uBlock origin

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> No comparisons to uBlock Origin? That's the state of the art, no ABP.

<comment><USER2> No hard evidence, but in some light testing this morning Opera is blocking more ads than uBlock Origin. They might calculate differently though.

<comment><USER21> > Opera is blocking more ads than uBlock Origin

Source? Or at least some specific details on how I could reproduce myself this?

In case the number of network requests was used to measure this (assuming Opera reports the number of _network requests_ blocked), one must be careful with this specific measurement.[1]

[1] [https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/About-%22This- other-e...](https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/About-%22This-other- extension-reports-more-stuff-blocked!%22)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Ad blocking is great but we are forgetting that most people will not pay to use a website. Advertisers are going to figure out a away around these things and we'll still end up with ads but at the same time we are going to see many ad supported websites disappear.

<comment><USER23> This seems like you're assuming the conclusion. When you say, "readers won't pay for sites [and sites cost money]", there are only a few solutions, and they all involve non-readers paying for the reader<->site interaction.

As a result, your only solution is hand-wringing about ad blockers, which probably won't result in "advertisers are going to figure out a away around these things", because browsers have __complete __control over what is displayed.

If you don't do this, things get more interesting:

\- "People won't pay for sites" -> make sites that they will pay for.

\- "non-readers paying for the reader<->site interaction" -> how can this be consensual, positive? (there are approximately seventy-three people, total, who enjoy web ads. Superbowl doesn't count.)

\- "[ad supported websites are a good thing]" -> can they be supported publicly?

\- "ad supported websites disappear" -> maybe in some cases that isn't bad.

\- "ad supported websites disappear" -> "most people will not pay to use a website" stops being true.

<comment><USER24> Some small websites won't survive, unless they create free content. Newspaper sites will die, save one or two.

People don't want to have to subscribe to 10 different sites, so I suspect it will go the way of a single pay network that owns several pay websites. It will end up being Comcast of the internet, who controls which websites you can access for $99/month.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> While this may be nice for the end user, the fact that Opera is in the process of being bought out by a Chinese consortium for $1.2B makes me think Opera will soon block more than ads, and will also track users.

<comment><USER26> Yeah, right beacuse Windows, Chrome, Android don't track users /sarcasm

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Personally I will always be quite uncomfortable when the blocking of ads/tracking/data mining is provided by those with (not necessarily direct) links to the ads/tracking/data mining industry. My view on this is that this is the least worse solution for them to deal with the reality of more and more people using blockers, the worst being the solutions for which the ads/tracking/data mining industry has no say at all -- rather keep _some_ control over none at all.

</comment><comment><USER27> "It seems you are using Opera. Please use a different browser if you want to view our content."

<comment> sean-duffy To which the response should always be to use the same browser to view different content!

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> On a brand new install, there are a bunch of whitelisted sites (news and otherwise) I had to remove manually. I'm curious why they are allowing ads on places like NYTimes by default?

<comment><USER29> Cause people need to make money? Most people don't have a problem with small ads here and there, what people have a problem with is 75 ads on a page with 2 paragraphs of useful content and 17 download buttons that are ads and only one small link with the actual download.

<comment><USER28> Yes, but I should be the one to choose, not Opera. They already have ad blocking _turned off by default_ why make people turn it on twice (switch on, then remove site from whitelist) and why decide FOR me which sites I'm supporting by whitelisting?

(Not that I actually do that, but hey some people are nice enough to whitelist so I'm making the argument for them. I block all ads and am fine with businesses going under because of it)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Hmmm...Isn't Opera in the process of being taken over by China's Kunlun and Qihoo? With their history, I doubt this will end up being in the users best interest.

</comment><comment><USER31> Biggest problem with with ads is tracking (privacy). Performance is an issue, but I'm not surprised that opera is making it sound as that's really the problem. Privacy concerns are mentioned briefly. Mozilla aporoach to ad blocking is truly user/consumer oriented, not just a lame attempt to still control and revenu from the whitelisting market.

<comment><USER32> That might be the case, but I don't think it is. In my experience, people dislike adverts on the web because they are obtrusive, obnoxious, and slow. Tracking is fairly low down the list of complaints.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> For whatever the default exception list is quite large and clearing it required pressing X for each list entry and the list shrinking in height didn't help because one had to move the mouse cursor around after each delete. Otherwise it seemed to work well. Good on you, Opera!

</comment><comment><USER34> 75% of opera revenue in the 4th Q came from ads. I mean it doesn't seem like the best business move.

<comment><USER35> So don't block their own ads? Admittedly the whole situation is clearly devolving / heating up now. It's going to be interesting.

<comment><USER34> I wonder if they do. Maybe someone who uses opera can comment.

<comment><USER36> Elsewhere in this discussion, an Opera blog moderator was quoted as saying they "do not prioritize their own ad network in any way."

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11258292](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11258292)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> > A smarter approach to ad-blocking

> Opera's ad-blocking feature is deactivated by default.

Not so smart, it seems.

</comment><comment><USER21> Opera 37 dev version is available for linux, so I installed it to perform my own measurements.

The example given in Opera's blog post is not very useful, they tested a lightweight page with only one network request blocked. That page loads fast even without a blocker. I preferred testing high-traffic, heavy front pages.

The tool to benchmark page load speed is the one I wrote, found at: [http://www.raymondhill.net/ublock/pageloadspeed.html](http://www.raymondhill.net/ublock/pageloadspeed.html) (available on GitHub[1]).

Settings:

Chrome 50 + uBlock Origin 1.6.4 with default settings.

Opera 37 in ad-blocking mode, I did not touch the built-in whitelist.

For both browsers, click-to-play was enabled. I disabled the blocking of 3rd- party cookies for both browsers, this is necessary for the page load speed tool to make benchmarked web pages render properly sometimes.

For each site benchmarked, I opened a new tab for the page load speed tool.

I also tested a web page with nothing to block at all, to test for a case where the CPU cost of the blocking engine can't be offset by the gain of not loading blocked resources.

I did not interact with the pages once they loaded, to be sure I benchmarked exactly the same thing. Sometimes merely hovering the mouse over a page can cause javascript code to execute, etc. I didn't want this to happen. From what I could observe, pages looked similar in both browsers, except that there were Taboola ads on Business Insider with Opera, not present with Chrome+uBO (taboola.com is blocked by Peter Lowe's filter list, which is selected by default in uBO).

Results:

[http://cnn.com/](http://cnn.com/)

\- Chrome 50: Average (valid): 351.65 ms (11/17 iterations)

\- Opera 37: Average (valid): 409.94 ms (11/15 iterations)

[http://www.washingtonpost.com/](http://www.washingtonpost.com/)

\- Chrome 50: Average (valid): 933.18 ms (11/14 iterations)

\- Opera 37: Average (valid): 1115.15 ms (11/14 iterations)

[http://www.businessinsider.com/](http://www.businessinsider.com/)

\- Chrome 50: Average (valid): 1188.54 ms (11/14 iterations)

\- Opera 37: Average (valid): 1494.69 ms (11/17 iterations) (had clickbait Taboola ads)

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

\- Chrome 50: Average (valid): 258.51 ms (11/14 iterations)

\- Opera 37: Average (valid): 281.82 ms (11/12 iterations)

Note that if you run your own benchmarks using above tool, you can't compare results with someone else's results, as your connection speed may vary with each computer. The results are comparable for the same computer+site with different browsers, or same browser but different blockers, or same browser same blocker but different blocker settings, etc.

[1] [https://github.com/gorhill/pageloadspeed](https://github.com/gorhill/pageloadspeed)

<comment><USER38> What about the same Opera build with uBlock Origin vs the built-in blocker?

<comment><USER21> Here:

[http://cnn.com/](http://cnn.com/)

\- Opera 37 + uBO: Average (valid): 2280.89 ms (11/16 iterations)

\- Opera 37 + built-in: Average (valid): 2113.47 ms (11/12 iterations)

[http://www.washingtonpost.com/](http://www.washingtonpost.com/)

\- Opera 37 + uBO: Average (valid): 1135.04 ms (11/15 iterations)

\- Opera 37 + built-in: Average (valid): 1072.35 ms (11/12 iterations)

[http://www.businessinsider.com/](http://www.businessinsider.com/)

\- Opera 37 + uBO: Average (valid): 1517.48 ms (11/15 iterations)

\- Opera 37 + built-in: Average (valid): 1489.73 ms (11/17 iterations)

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

\- Opera 37 + uBO: Average (valid): 304.43 ms (11/13 iterations)

\- Opera 37 + built-in: Average (valid): 274.84 ms (11/16 iterations)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> I would argue /etc/hosts based blocking is faster

<comment><USER40> When you need a hosts file as big as you need for good ad blocking it can get pretty slow.

<comment><USER28> I think this is the case on older Windows versions but is negligible now on most systems (and apparently fine on Linux, etc., going by replies to a similar post I made a while back)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> How are these websites supposed to make money without ads? Most of them rely on ads to stay afloat, and have been denied from adsense. Whats the plan?

<comment><USER42> What does give a website the right to include adware or malware and the like into the legitimate UseCase of viwing it? Even if it is just the Ad Network isn't it neglect on the websites part?

<comment><USER43> All ads are not adware malware and ad blockers aren't blocking just the bad ads.

<comment><USER44> _Some_ ads are not malware.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


iPhone: The bet Steve Jobs didn't decline (2008) - <AUTHOR> https://counternotions.com/2008/07/16/bet-iphone/ <comment><AUTHOR> "Incidentally, you've recently been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer."</comment>


Stripe founders are the youngest Irish billionaires on paper - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-11-28/stripe-founders-are-youngest-irish-billionaires-on-new-valuation <comment><USER2> Rather than fret about the valuation, it's useful to look at the big picture and ask what stripe has created: an incredibly valuable product in a massive market with lots of potential. It's also rapidly capturing the value it has created: its running ahead of projected revenue and has become the preferred provider for giant companies: [http://fortune.com/2015/07/28/stripe- visa/](http://fortune.com/2015/07/28/stripe-visa/)

You can have a long discussion about the real or implied valuation, but the truth is this company has a great product and terrific momentum. Who's going to stop it from becoming the next paypal?

<comment><USER3> But the easy-to-use API is 90% of the great product, isn't it? Because I noticed most other payment processors offer similar APIs now. PAY.ON develops a white-label platform for third-parties, so now my online bank offers me RESTful payment processing for Visa and Mastercard and I think they even support PayPal.

<comment><USER4> I haven't seen a single payments API made as clean or simple as Stripe's. The magic is in what you _can't_ do with it imo.

The solutions from old style banks adopting nicer looking APIs still force you to mess around with setting up your own acquiring bank account, etc.

<comment><USER3> Yes, you have to open a free business bank account (but most companies need one anyway) and then you apply for the payment processing. I should have added a link to the platform in my initial post. [1]

It might not be as easy to use as the Stripe API, but it offers you many more payment options. Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying that this will put Stripe out of business, I'm just saying there seems to be a change in the payment processor landscape and in a few years, people might take these simple online payment platforms for granted.

[1] [https://docs.aciworldwide.com/](https://docs.aciworldwide.com/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Startup valuations drive me crazy. Preferred stock is not common stock!

This article says they sold a 1.6% stake, derived by taking the amount raised divided by the valuation. Once again, preferred stock is not common stock.

<comment><USER6> Amen. You'd have to be even more concerned when staff etc use this valuation when considering value of equity grants etc.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Yet another case of European founders that moved to San Francisco and became succesful.

They tried to start in Ireland, but without much success (e.g Enterprise Ireland hasn't allocate them funding to previous vencture).

<comment><USER8> Hm, I wonder what visa they used to move to SF.

Right now, there's no startup visa of any kind. The closest thing is the EB-5 investor visa, but that requires investing $500k-$1mil _of your own money_ (not investor money). And, the H-1B work visa prohibits starting your own company and self-sponsoring.

If they figured out a way to move here and start a company under the current U.S. immigration system, it would benefit a lot of people to know how they did it.

<comment><USER9> I don't know their story, but I imagine that they took similar route as others: \- start on ESTA or B1/B2 \- switch to E2 \- once successful-ish go for O-1

Actually these days there are lawyers specialized on obtaining O-1 in a pretty short period of time (3-5 weeks) for founders that get into incubators or raise >$300k.

<comment><USER8> Working on ESTA or B1/B2 would actually be considered "working without authorization" as neither permits gainful employment or self-employment (incl. remote/contract work).

The O-1 seems more plausible. You do have to be very impressive to get an O-1, but raising $300k in funding probably qualifies you.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Since Patrick and John have as much distaste for bullshit as the rest of us, I don't think they'll mind if we excise the silly euphemism "billionaires with funding" from the title.

Also, this is kind of a weak article that doesn't add much if any information. [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13037654](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13037654) was a big thread on the actual recent story.

<comment><USER11> And thanks for adding "Paper" in its place, too.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Silicon Valley entrepreneurs who are immigrants. Another to the list!

<comment><USER13> What is the reason for your distinction?

The United States is a nation of immigrants. To quote John F. Kennedy:

"Every American who ever lived, with the exception of one group, was either an immigrant himself or a descendant of immigrants"

<comment><USER14> He was wrong about the exception though.

<comment><USER13> Indeed, it was most certainly the only group that arrived by foot and a ice bridge :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> That's great. Always proud when entrepreneurs create a great product that has seamless integreation with other platforms and improves efficiencies.

Whats not to love about this?

</comment><comment><USER11> Not to diminish the accomplishments, but "Youngest Irish Billionaires with Funding" is an overly narrow superlative. ([http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/OverlyNarrowSuper...](http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/OverlyNarrowSuperlative))

<comment><USER16> I think the intended grouping of that sentence is (((Stripe founders) are (youngest Irish billionaires)) (with funding)), i.e. they're simply the youngest Irish billionaires, not the youngest Irish billionaires with funding. Still a fairly narrow superlative, but less ridiculous than the original interpretation. "Youngest Irish billionaires" is the lede, "with funding" is the actual news story - they're announcing Stripe's funding round.

<comment><USER11> Normally I would agree with this interpretation, except that Bloomberg did a proper story on Stripe's new funding a few days prior: [https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-11-25/payments-...](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-11-25/payments- startup-stripe-valued-at-9-billion-in-new-funding)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> They still can't process my card.

</comment><comment><USER18> So. If I value a company, of which I own 100%, at 1B, does that make me a billionaire?

<comment><USER19> If others are willing to trade ownership in your company such that 100% equaled 1 billion then the answer would be yes. Valuations are made based on exchanges relative to the whole's worth. That's a simplified way of how public stock markets work too.

<comment><USER20> So if I buy a 0.0000000001% stake in his company for $1, then suddenly it really is worth $1B?

I'm suddenly reminded of his onion article[1]:

> _U.S. Economy Grinds To Halt As Nation Realizes Money Just A Symbolic, > Mutually Shared Illusion_

1\. [http://www.theonion.com/article/us-economy-grinds-to-halt- as...](http://www.theonion.com/article/us-economy-grinds-to-halt-as-nation- realizes-money-2912)

<comment><USER21> Basecamp is valued at 100 B$: [https://m.signalvnoise.com/press-release- basecamp-valuation-...](https://m.signalvnoise.com/press-release-basecamp- valuation-tops-100-billion-after-bold-vc-investment-c221d8f86ad7#.4gvg4umsd)</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Brotli is now supported in most browsers - <AUTHOR> https://certsimple.com/blog/nginx-brotli <comment><USER2> Author here!

Brotli's awesome - it's the next best thing after HTTP/2 to add free speed to your site - but when researching this article (which we used for our own Brotli deployment at CertSimple) I found there's a lot of misleading stuff in many Brotli tutorials:

\- 'Brotli is slow' is only true at maximum settings (11). 'Brotli is too slow for dynamic content' is definitely wrong. At setting 4, Brotli is faster AND compresses better than gzip.

\- If nginx is not on the same server as your JS bundles - eg, you have an nginx load balancer using proxy_pass to send traffic to your app servers, and your app servers just run node/ruby/elixir/python etc, brotli_static won't help. Use a language-specific module - like Shrink-Ray for node - instead.

\- If you do use nginx, 'brotli_types *;' is silly: Brotli is for JS, HTML, SVG, JSON and XML. JPEGs, PNGs, MP4s etc already have format-specific compression that's better than brotli and compressing these types just wastes CPU and might even end up making them bigger.

\- If you do use nginx, you don't have to build Brotli from source, For Ubuntu 16.04:

        sudo apt-add-repository -y ppa:hda-me/nginx-stable
        sudo apt-get update
        sudo apt-get install brotli nginx nginx-module-brotli

Packages are provided by cryptofuture who's an excellent maintainer.

\- Using nginx load balancer for brotli? Disable compression on your app servers - nginx won't recompress something if it's already compressed.

If HN folks can recommend good Ruby/Elixir/Python/Go/Rust Brotli modules I'll add them to the article too.

<comment><USER3> For Rust [https://github.com/dropbox/rust- brotli](https://github.com/dropbox/rust-brotli)

<comment><USER2> Cheers Steve, added.</comment></comment></comment>


WP Engine is hiring PHP engineers & sys ops - <AUTHOR>

Job Listings: https://wpengine.resumetracker.com
Our company: http://wpengine.com
Our previous HN thread: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1731698
Since launching in July we've grown at an extremely fast pace. We're now serving over 500 million hits and 30 terabytes of data transfer per month. Thus far it's been the three of us and our amazing advisors keeping the engines running. We'd like to add a few new talented members to our team to help us build new tools, make our platform faster, and provide the best experience possible to our customers.
If you're interested in working with a close-knit, fast-growing and successful start-up with a passion for WordPress, open source, and creating helpful products we'd like to hear from you!
WP Engine is based out of Austin, TX and we are primarily looking for candidates to work on-site. However we will consider exceptionally qualified/experienced candidates for remote work with some travel to HQ in Austin.
Please apply via https://wpengine.resumetracker.com, and feel free to ask any questions here! <comment><USER2> Not to sound overly skeptical, but Woha! 500 million hits and 30 TB of data in November ... at the rate of 2 new customers per month in October? [1]

That's extraordinarily commendable! (Or perhaps it's a typo?)

[1] <http://blog.asmartbear.com/reputation.html> "WPEngine got two new signups. Only two. [...] Not exactly the massive boost you or I was expecting. I figured on 10-20 new customers at minimum and dreamed of 50. I was wrong by an order of magnitude."

</comment><comment><USER3> May I ask what your definition of a hit is? Is it every file being requested? Or...?</comment>


Show HN: Tufte Ghost – A Ghost Theme Inspired by Edward Tufte's Ideas - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/dvdhllbrg/tufte-ghost

<comment><USER2> Quite hard to read for me. Maybe because everything has the same color although I am not 100% sure.</comment>


Mussels test positive for opioids in Seattle's Puget Sound - <AUTHOR> https://www.bbc.com/news/amp/world-us-canada-44256765 <comment><USER2> This is pure clickbait. Sure, opioids are detectable in mussels from Puget Sound. That reflects the sad fact that Puget Sound is horribly polluted. I suspect that levels of some pollutants are high enough to damage human and ecosystem health. Organomercury compounds, for example. But what gets the focus is opioids. Because it's good clickbait.

Edit: Following pesfandiar's link about caffeine pollution in the Pacific Northwest, I found this about Puget Sound:[0]

> Of all the flavors trickling downstream, artificial vanilla dominates the > sound, Keil said. For instance, the team found an average of about six > milligrams of artificial vanilla per liter of water sampled.

Yes, 6 mg/L in water! That's not trace contamination. But "Puget Sound is vanilla flavored!" isn't so scarey, I guess.

0) [https://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2009/11/091112-drin...](https://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2009/11/091112-drinking- water-cocaine.html)

<comment><USER3> We know there's pollution. However, we do not expect it to be a prescription drug. This isn't a factory dumping lead or some other chemical. This is enough individuals pissing oxy / opiods that it shows up "down stream."

This isn't click bait silly. This is another wake up call. So wake up.

<comment><USER4> I wouldn't be shocked if prescription drugs were detected in every body of water that is being used for human waste.

Wake up to what, exactly?

<comment><USER2> Also recreational drugs.

> In a new [~2009] review study, Castiglioni and colleague Ettore Zuccato > found that illegal drugs have become "widespread" in surface water in some > of Europe's populated areas.

> Likewise, in 2005, Zuccato found that a daily influx of cocaine travels down > the Po River, Italy's longest river.

[https://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2009/11/091112-drin...](https://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2009/11/091112-drinking- water-cocaine_2.html)

<comment><USER5> The same is true for sewer water in Dutch cities (Amsterdam, Utrecht, Eindhoven, etc). Scientists can trace which drugs are popular where.

EDIT quickly found some sources (in Dutch) [1] [2] [3] [4] [5]. Some are double, but its been tested for a while. Also, at least [3] and [5] are based on European investigation so English source should be available too.

[1] [https://www.kwrwater.nl/projecten/drugs-in-het- riool/](https://www.kwrwater.nl/projecten/drugs-in-het-riool/)

[2] [https://nos.nl/artikel/2148110-rioolonderzoek-meer- cocaine-g...](https://nos.nl/artikel/2148110-rioolonderzoek-meer-cocaine- gesnoven-in-utrecht-en-eindhoven.html)

[3] [http://www.omroepbrabant.nl/?news/213383832/Waterschap+gaat+...](http://www.omroepbrabant.nl/?news/213383832/Waterschap+gaat+speed-+en+xtc- afval+in+riool+onderzoeken.aspx)

[4] [https://www.parool.nl/amsterdam/meeste-cocaine-in- amsterdams...](https://www.parool.nl/amsterdam/meeste-cocaine-in-amsterdams- rioolwater~a4578463/)

[5] [https://www.ed.nl/eindhoven/cocaeniuml-ne-en-amfetamine- rest...](https://www.ed.nl/eindhoven/cocaeniuml-ne-en-amfetamine-resten-in- rioolwater-blijkt-uit-europees-onderzoek~a7b7cbea/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I live on the water in West Seattle close to a park, and by the shore we found some seaweed that we wanted to harvest and maybe, potentially eat.

I got curious about where in the sound is safe to eat things from. Pretty much the entire sound is polluted and a hazard.

[https://fortress.wa.gov/doh/eh/maps/biotoxin/biotoxin.html](https://fortress.wa.gov/doh/eh/maps/biotoxin/biotoxin.html)

<comment><USER7> My Japanese anthropology professor once told us a story about when he and his wife went to Japan for a research trip with his wife sometime in the 70s or 80s.

In Japan, when you move into a new apartment, it's customary to give a gift to your neighbors. Being a new professor, he and his wallet welcomed any chance to save a little money. When he and his wife were walking along a beach in the Tokyo Bay area, they noticed a ton of shellfish.

Thinking this would be a great gift and a budget dinner, they got some buckets, went back, and started pulling up shellfish for dinner and for their neighbors as a present.

The Tokyo Bay was much more polluted in that era (not that I know whether it would be safe to do this now), so when everyone ate those shellfish, apparently everyone got terribly sick.

So yeah, I'd be super leery of edible things in those kinds of areas in general. :(

<comment><USER8> Pollution in Japan caused a number of issues in the 60s, things were probably starting to get better in the 70s when their environmental agency was formed, but no doubt issues remained.

This maybe of interest as a reference:

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Big_Pollution_Diseases_...](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Big_Pollution_Diseases_of_Japan)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> >high enough oxycodone levels for the shellfish to test positive

That doesn't really tell me anything. Are they testing by taste or by some fancy test that can detect down to 1 ppq?

<comment><USER10> Just to do the Fermi problem math for fun, how much heroin is needed to reach detectability in Puget Sound?

Assume 1 ppq detection rates (like many spectroscopic methods claim to do).

Puget sound is 110 km^3 or 1.10E14 liters of water. That's 6.05E15 moles of water. At one ppq (1E15), you need 6.05 moles of heroin. This comes out to about 2.2 kilograms.

Now in terms of doses, that's a _lot_ of doses. But that's not a lot if a drug runner could have just tossed a single brick in to reach that concentration (or emptied a single car boot in haste).

<comment><USER11> But this is coming from human waste, how much of a filter does the human body act on heroin?

If a person puts a gram of 100% pure heroin (another good question might be how purity affects the measurements) in to their body, how much will come out the other end?

Also, from a chemistry perspective, how does water bring a solvent affect opioid molecules existing? Would the water or various things in the water break down the molecules into other non detectable molecules?

<comment><USER10> True. So if we presume all the opoids are from human bodily waste, we would need divide by 10% (the amount excreted out): [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oxycodone#Metabolism](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oxycodone#Metabolism)

Probably the molecule does break up with a certain half life, either due to sun, or other animals metabolising it, etc. Then that 2.2 kg brick needs to be replaced once every two half-lives.

[https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2991390/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2991390/) Gives really hand-wavy half-life of many drugs in the environment as about 500 days, so the brick needs to be replaced every 1000 days.

Also 1 ppq is the lower bound. I think 1 ppt is quite reasonable for many methods though, so that can multiply the limit by 1000x.

All the factors above can increase the threshold amount of opoids, but here are some factors that can decrease it substantially:

There are people who dump unused drugs in, so that needs no attenuation factor.

Also, mussels are filter feeders, and oxycodone might accumulate in them substantially more (like 1000x+) than the background.

Finally, where they collected the mussels is probably correlated with sewage drains due to ease of human access, so the effective "volume of distribution" can be way less than the 110 km^3.

All that is to say, the real statistics are in the overdose calls for opoids. The headline is still an interesting cocktail-party line, but probably should be taken as a statement just by itself.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Key para...

"What we eat and what we excrete goes into the Puget Sound," Jennifer Lanksbury, a biologist at the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife, told CBS News affiliate KIRO.

...so enough crap going into the water from the local population to be picked up in the Mussel samples... Crazy!

<comment><USER13> Waste water treatment doesn't remove drugs, so they make it out into the water, and the filter feeders pick it up.

<comment><USER14> I'm surprised the chemicals don't quickly break down in the salty sea water. Do ocean environments affect half-life of pharmaceuticals differently?

<comment><USER15> Water shields double bonds from UV light preventing them from breaking down. For examples of this look no further than PCBs (polychorinated biphenyls, not circuit boards)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> As a member of the community to whom this particular mussel economy is very important, this is disconcerting. At the same time, it's worth mentioning that the mussels in question were cultivated out here in cleaner waters and then _transported_ to urban shorelines.

The results are a possible window into what's to come if we don't curb our rate of pollution in the region, but not representative of what's currently in the mussels that get to your plate.

</comment><comment><USER17> I've been studying / beginning to practice permaculture for a little while now and one thing that is often discussed is the subject of human waste.

When you take food out of the ground and consume it, you've removed some fertility from the ground. Either you have animals put it back in as manure, or you use some kind of synthetic fertilizer.

When the food goes through your body, you're also generating manure. But typically we ship it off to some central location where it becomes a massive collection of toxic waste.

The permaculture argument is that if we kept as much of that waste on site as possible, we'd be recycling nutrients rather than not only wasting them, but creating toxic hazards due to the size of the collections.

On a small scale, think of how fertile the ground over a septic field is — wildflowers and grass will grow like crazy.

The more, er, devoted will go as far as installing composting toilets.

The reason I think this is relevant is that when the waste stays local, you're much more conscious about what's in it. If you have a septic system, you really don't want pills going into it — especially if you also have well water. When it's being flushed to some unknown location it's easy to not give it a second thought.

</comment><comment><USER18> Does this 100% mean that humans are consuming high amounts of these opioids or could there be another explanation? Like someone dumped a boat of pills into the sound.

<comment><USER19> Depends on how many mussels they're eating...

More seriously, unless you're looking for an indirect measure of consumption, does it matter? Human action either way, and it is there either way.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> on the up side at least it may make them as happy as clams[1] reproducing per the 1998 Ignobles[2]

[1] [https://www.thefreelibrary.com/Prozac+works+on+clams+and+mus...](https://www.thefreelibrary.com/Prozac+works+on+clams+and+mussels.-a020212410)

[2] [https://www.improbable.com/ig/winners/#ig1998](https://www.improbable.com/ig/winners/#ig1998)

</comment><comment><USER21> What's interesting is that opiods are probably not Seattle's most prominent poison of choice with traces in Puget Sound: [https://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2012/07/120730-caff...](https://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2012/07/120730-caffeinated- seas-pacific-northwest-caffeine-coffee-science/)

</comment><comment><USER22> Is oxycodone altered in anyway by human consumption or do we excrete the same substance that is put into our veins?

I don't know enough about pharmacology, but I would think that this is more indicative of the dumping of unused opioids than use of.

<comment><USER23> _When humans ingest opioids like oxycodone, they ultimately end up excreting traces of the drugs into the toilet. Those chemicals then end up in wastewater. And while many contaminants are filtered out of wastewater before it 's released into the oceans, wastewater management systems can't entirely filter out drugs. Thus, opioids, antidepressants, the common chemotherapy drug Melphalan -- the mussels tested positive for all of them._

Source: [https://www.cbsnews.com/news/mussels-test-positive-for- opioi...](https://www.cbsnews.com/news/mussels-test-positive-for-opioids- seattle-puget-sound/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Could also mean people are throwing them down the drain. Seems that standard issue for post op pain prescription here in PNW is 20 oxy. I don't know anyone who has taken more than a few. 20 is a lot.

<comment><USER25> > I don't know anyone who has taken more than a few.

You don't need to know people who "take more than a few" for them to actually exist. At this point, the opiate problem in the US is pretty much an established fact and most certainly does not boil down to people just washing their spares down the drain.

<comment><USER26> I think the above commenter was trying to emphasize how much oxy that is rather than trying to deny the opiad crisis.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Not too long ago sex hormones were detectable in seawater. Apparently some women excrete of their birth control medications. Human drug use has far reaching side effects.

</comment><comment><USER28> Another worthless, alarmist, innumerate article. Without data on the levels of opioids found, this article is _worthless_ ; it literally has no value, so to speak.

</comment><comment><USER29> What a waste of drugs on an animal that doesn't even have a central nervous system

</comment><comment><USER30> TL;DR filter feeders concentrate chemicals, and we have very sensitive equipment.

Clickbait kid science.

</comment><comment><USER31> I knew it! They always seemed way too happy and peaceful.

</comment><comment><USER32> Carrying drugs inside their body is a common moule bussiness, yup. Hence their name.

</comment><comment><USER33> I wonder if a mussel can get high

</comment><comment><USER34> The opioid crisis is out of control. Even mussels are ODing.

</comment><comment><USER35> As if we needed more reasons to not eat seafood. Oceans are too contaminated, especially that part of the world.

</comment><comment> Iwan-Zotow Microsofties or Amazones?

<comment><USER36> Expedians.

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> They're musseling into the Seattle opioid industry?

</comment><comment><USER38> As someone who has had frequent kidney stones, I have found that many painkiller prescriptions are unnecessary. Kidney stones are more painful than childbirth and I've been hospitalized for then before. But prescription painkillers rarely get rid of the pain.

People seem to be reluctant to mix medications for fear of drug interactions. They want a strong dose of one substance.

But nothing has worked for me better than mixing acetaminophen with ibuprofen or with naproxen. All are cheap, available over the counter, and have fewer side effects than prescription pain killers.

I also find that, after the initial pain subsides, I can more quickly reduce the dosage of these drugs than I could with prescription painkillers.

By all means, use oxy if you need it. But please consider trying alternatives first so you can avoid addiction.

<comment><USER39> > mixing acetaminophen with ibuprofen

It's a well-documented (in scientific literature) phenomenon that the mix of a standard dose of both acetaminophen and ibuprofen provides the same or better pain relief as opioids. This is what medical schools currently teach. You can read Maxigesic sales forecasts if you'd like a glowing review.

> use [OxyContin] if you need it

As far as I know, no one "needs" it (for pain relief, unless already addicted). By suggesting so, you're creating a placebo effect.

> [@Kenji] it depends on the person

Responding to a dead sibling comment: There are some differences observed for anesthetic response. The "red head rule" is interesting and suggests that different people might have different responses to various drugs. However, I'm not aware of any differentiation known for acetaminophen or ibuprofen response.

[https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1362956/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1362956/)

<comment><USER40> _mixing acetaminophen with ibuprofen It 's a well-documented (in scientific literature) phenomenon that the mix of a standard dose of both acetaminophen and ibuprofen provides the same or better pain relief as opioids_

If you had said _some_ types of pain, I would agree, but your statement as-is is not accurate.

If just had a leg amputated or some other major surgery, I doubt you'd be ok with just Tylenol and ibuprofen.

The only info could find concluded it better for dental pain.

<comment><USER39> True. Interestingly, from what I've read, people often rate dental pain worse than other kinds when asked "How much pain are you in, from 1 to 10?" Nasty toothaches and kidney stones are just about the worst pain someone can experience. Maybe the data on losing limbs isn't good because the question gets asked at the wrong time.

Also, a large portion of the opioids prescribed are for dental pain. At least historically.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


ShellCheck – linting/static analysis tool for sh/bash scripts - <AUTHOR> http://www.shellcheck.net/

<comment><USER2> This looks quite useful. Wondering how it plays with custom commands.</comment>


Be People Smart or Perish - <AUTHOR> http://michaelohene.blogspot.com/2012/02/be-people-smart-or-perish.html

<comment><USER2> Gotta love these sensationalist titles. No, you will not perish if you're not people-smart. There are plenty of entrepreneurs that have won by, you know, enterprising in areas where their lack of people skills didn't hold them back. Some of them went on to run social networks..

<comment><AUTHOR> Zuckerberg? Okay, I guess... but I don't know...you were not specific.

Perish does not literally mean die, it's a play on the saying "Publish or Perish" meaning you don't advance.</comment></comment>


Haskell vs. Erlang for bittorent clients - <AUTHOR> http://jlouisramblings.blogspot.com/2010/04/haskell-vs-erlang-for-bittorent-clients.html

<comment><USER2> This is how language comparisons should be.

He's got a few years with both languages and he writes it after he's made something substantial in them. He tells us up front that he's subjective and that he loves static typing so we can take his words the correct way: with a grain of salt.

Out with the boring feature comparisons table-style and in with a fluid, with lack of a better wording, talk about his positive and negative experiences. For the things that matter are not syntax, dynamic or static typing but how the developing process is. Tools, debuggers and techniques are far more important and I think he did a fine job describing them.

If I wanna be picky about anything then it would be about his conclusion, it felt like he didn't reach anything definitive. But then again it's a breath of fresh air against the otherwise so flamy language discussions and what do I know? Perhaps both Erlang and Haskell are good languages! _Gasp_

<comment><USER3> I checked again recently, and no computer language was handed down to use by an ascended being. Thus, I believe that all programming languages involve trade offs.

I like these sorts of comparisons because he actively discusses what he gained and lost with each language, and where the other language would have done better or worse.

I think the conclusion was fine, but just not as strong as we might have been used to. Ultimately, it comes down to a preference, where a preference is defined to be the sum total all the different axes on which you want to optimize, from LoC to IO efficiency to prettiness to just-makes-sense.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I appreciate how he spends the first minute establishing that he's a much better programmer than me.</comment>


"The protocol-relative URL is now an anti-pattern" - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/paul_irish/status/588502455530311680

<comment><USER2> [http://www.paulirish.com/2010/the-protocol-relative- url/](http://www.paulirish.com/2010/the-protocol-relative-url/) for those who care to read what this person is actually trying to say rather than the Twitter linkbait.

</comment><comment><USER3> Using t.co {url shortening|redirection} in his tweet is an anti-pattern which i found ironic

<comment><USER4> Twitter does this with every URL, Paul Irish did not (as you can see by the fact the link text is the actual URL). It's so that there's more room in the Tweet for the rest of the message.

<comment><USER5> A very hack-ish way to fix this would be to just force HSTS on t.co and get on the HSTS preload lists in Chrome/Firefox/[..]. That way even though the link would be to t.co, the browser would never make the request to the http domain itself.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Why not link to the linked article instead of a tweet?</comment>


Hacker News ranking formula license - <AUTHOR> Can Hacker News ranking formula be used in commercial project? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1781013 <comment><USER2> A published mathematical formula is not protected by any form of IP. You can't copyright the math, it's not a patented invention, and it's not a secret. So long as you implement it in code yourself, you do not need permission or a license to use the same score calculation.

</comment><comment><USER3> Maybe math from a larger site is more insightful too. Just because the HN algorithm is wrapped in parens doesn't make it overly special.

[https://github.com/reddit/reddit/blob/master/r2/r2/lib/db/_s...](https://github.com/reddit/reddit/blob/master/r2/r2/lib/db/_sorts.pyx)</comment>


Ask HN: Graduating high school this spring, college or a coding bootcamp after? - <AUTHOR>

Hey Hacker News!<p>Wanted to get some input from a community familiar with the tech world about a decision I'm trying to make. I want to go into software/web development for a career, and with high school finishing up for me it seems I have two fairly reasonable paths I could take. One would be attending university and obtaining a bachelor's or master's degree in CS, the other is attending one of the well-regarded bootcamps or similar schools such as Hacker School in NYC. I've applied to a few of the bootcamps and have a few interviews coming up, but I'm not sure if attending one of these and building up a coding portfolio of my own is equivalent to a college degree in the tech industry, even if it probably should be equivalent or better. Another factor is the time and money involved. 3 months in a bootcamp or hacker school and less than $20,000 cost vs. 4 years of university and probably $60,000-80,000 of debt upon graduation. What do you guys think? Any input is appreciated! <comment><USER2> Personally, I think a bootcamp or hacker school is best for people looking to make a career change. You're still young, if you can afford college I would go to a school with a good tech reputation, make friends, have fun and code in your free time.

</comment><comment><USER3> I dont think neither are appropriate. You wont learn much from a rushed bootcamp and in college they only teach you basics. I strongly suggest learning on your own.</comment>