Hey Apple, Please Be Nice and Share MacRuby - <AUTHOR> http://merbist.com/2011/03/07/hey-apple-please-be-nice-and-share/

<comment><USER3> These things typically start out as a private framework for an iteration of the OS. My guess is that MacRuby will need to hit a nice and stable 1.0 before Apple commits to maintaining it as a built-in public OS X framework. I think it'll happen eventually, though.

<comment><USER4> But at the same time they use it in their new OS, isn't that a double standard?

<comment><USER5> Yes. If it's their code, they're not obligated to be equitable.

<comment><USER6> They're under certain obligations of the Ruby license, no? Wikipedia claims MacRuby is "based on Ruby 1.9." Ruby 1.9 is distributed under GPL and the Ruby License, which states:

      2. You may modify your copy of the software in any way, provided that
         you do at least ONE of the following:

           a) place your modifications in the Public Domain or otherwise
              make them Freely Available, such as by posting said
    	  modifications to Usenet or an equivalent medium, or by allowing
    	  the author to include your modifications in the software.

           b) use the modified software only within your corporation or
              organization.

           c) rename any non-standard executables so the names do not conflict
    	  with standard executables, which must also be provided.

           d) make other distribution arrangements with the author.

<http://www.ruby-lang.org/en/LICENSE.txt>

Not sure how this is compatible with "Apple apparently decided to not share MacRuby with other OS X developers" but I do not know much of MacRuby, maybe someone else can weigh in.

<comment><USER7> This guy isn't complaining about source code or licensing issues.

He's complaining that MacRuby isn't in a shared location, like say libc or some other standard library. He wants to just be able to type 'macruby foo.rb' (or whatever) and have it work an any Apple anywhere, so he doesn't need to distribute his own versions of the library.

Hardly the end of the world. And if apple did include it, then people would just complain that they only had 0.9 instead of 1.1 or whatever.

Anyone who remembers the days of redhat being stuck on a particular python version because all the internal tools used 1.5 might even think it's a good idea to make the system copy private.

If they're using an unmodified copy, then section 3 applies, which means they basically only need to the macruby site somewhere in the docs:

      3. You may distribute the software in object code or executable
         form, provided that you do at least ONE of the following:

           a) distribute the executables and library files of the software,
    	  together with instructions (in the manual page or equivalent)
    	  on where to get the original distribution.

           b) accompany the distribution with the machine-readable source of
    	  the software.

           c) give non-standard executables non-standard names, with
              instructions on where to get the original software distribution.

           d) make other distribution arrangements with the author.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> They would be better off shipping MacRuby with their application which is probably why Apple made it private. Now that disk space and bandwidth at this scale is essentially free you are better off testing with the exact bits that will be present at runtime.

</comment><comment><USER9> What is with people and continually violating the NDA? Especially when they aren't anonymous?

I've seen so many messages from people on Twitter that I follow about what Lion contains, and what it does not. There is a pretty strict NDA in place covering the prerelease software, and there's exactly one forum (well, two, if you count Radar) where you can voice your concerns.

It's a sad state of affairs when people do not care about the contracts that they sign. It'll lead to further secrecy in the future, and it's just disgusting how lax some people are being re: the new OS.

<comment><USER10> People's laxity towards Apple's NDAs more or less reflects Apple's laxity in deciding whether to declare a piece of software is under NDA. I mean, the iPhone SDK was under one for _months_ after it was released to the public. As one developer put it, "I'm sitting in a public conference session hearing about the iPhone SDK that anyone can view on Apple's website, but I can't talk about what I'm hearing to the guy next to me."

Apple isn't remotely selective in applying NDAs. When anyone can get at the information, there's nothing actually private about it. If there were any kind of secrecy to begin with, people would be more concerned about preserving it.

It's like when folks post to mailing lists with signatures reading "THIS MESSAGE IS CONFIDENTIAL AND ONLY MEANT FOR THE NAMED RECIPIENT." People start to take it less seriously.

<comment><USER11> > It's like when folks post to mailing lists with signatures reading "THIS > MESSAGE IS CONFIDENTIAL AND ONLY MEANT FOR THE NAMED RECIPIENT." People > start to take it less seriously.

A perfect analog to the grandparent's point.

What is it with people being lax towards confidentiality notices, especially when they aren't anonymous?

I've seen so many messages from people on mailing lists reading and replying to mail with confidentiality notices. There is pretty strict language covering these confidentiality notices; they often consist of five or more lines of ALL CAPS text that's hard to miss!

It's a sad state of affairs when people do not care about the contracts that they read. It'll lead to further secrecy in the future, and it's just disgusting how lax some people are being re: confidentiality signatures.

<comment><USER12> > _It's a sad state of affairs when people do not care about the contracts > that they read._

That's where your analogy fell off the rails. Signing an NDA is a binding agreement, while reading an email footer places one under no obligation whatsoever.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Seems a pity to make developers bloat their app size by including the macruby framework over and over in each one. Users suffer in the end—takes up more disk space.

<comment><USER5> That sounds like it could end up costing literally hundreds of pennies.

<comment><USER14> You're forgetting about the significant overhead imposed by every process having its own copy of the necessary libraries loaded into memory, and having to load those libraries from disk every time an app using those libraries is started. If those apps were all using a version included with the OS, all those pages could be shared between processes and only loaded once.

But maybe people don't care about apps starting fast on their macs anymore, since a lot of them come with SSDs :)

<comment><USER15> This is a deliberate design decision in OS X in general, it's been this way for a very long time. OS X is not into the whole DLL Hell Thing.

<comment><USER14> I don't believe you. Apple includes OS standard versions of packages like SQLite and Python, are you of the opinion that developers shouldn't use them?

<comment><USER16> I know Firefox bundles its own sqlite on OS X because the native sqlite is far too buggy.

<comment><USER5> For a long time (maybe even today), the system sqlite3 did a full filesystem sync every time you did an UPDATE.

<comment><USER17> As is required to make sure that there is no data loss. Yes, it is a performance loss as well, but it makes it much better with regard to possible crash scenarios.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> What advantages does MacRuby offer over MRI/YARV or Rubinius?

<comment><USER19> I haven't found much other than cocoa support. Which I can't get too excited about, a simple macruby app that does nothing but open up one window takes nearly 30 seconds to launch on my Core i5 macbook pro...

<comment><USER20> I'm using a 5 year old iMac here (running 10.6) and it's close to instant. no discernible delay over opening any other app.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> webkit2 is also a private framework in Lion, a la iOS...

</comment><comment><USER15> MacRuby being private doesn't matter if the code is still open-source - <USER2> build your own version and ship it. You don't need to use Apple's builtin version.

<comment><USER22> i guess it matters if you are publishing an app of 100k but you have to include 40MB of additional libraries that are _already_ in the os

<comment><USER23> ... and that won't be updated when Apple issues their updates

Basically, you'll be maintaining and distributing your very own fork of MacRuby.

<comment><USER24> The flipside of that is actually pretty important too: Apple can rely on their "private" version of Ruby not being randomly updated underneath them because the user wanted to install cool-rails-app-de-jour.

This is pretty important if Apple are planning on using Ruby for important OS tasks.

(and now I'm officially feeling old - who else remembers this exact same argument from over a decade ago? Did the "private" Sun perl binaries catch anyone else out? How many times did I cause myself trouble forgetting to type #!/usr/local/bin/perl instead of #!/usr/bin/perl ?)

<comment><USER23> You shouldn't be able to update the system's MacRuby (or anything else, for that matter). Doing this is pretty suicidal.

And your old Perl problem is a Python problem for me. Too many Red Hat servers have 2.4 installed where Python is supposed to be. I have to build my own and call it from the /usr/local tree

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> "Hey Apple, please by nice..." is a sure path to disappointment

<comment><USER26> Since the release of the Mac, Apple has had its share of subservient fans. But it really is sad how Apple has them begging and pleading at this point.

As other commenters have pointed out, somebody somewhere may been under an NDA for this feature of Lion.

So Apple's response could very well be a DMCA takedown of this poor guy's site. Or they may just send the police to his house and seize all his computers like they did the guy from Gizmodo.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> IIRC, Apple was never particularly friendly towards free software. They abide by their obligations under the licenses they have to comply with, but not much more.

The only reason they rely and build upon free software is because it saves them some work.

<comment><USER27> Apple does contribute beyond what is required. They are not required to post their updates to LLVM+clang, but they do. launchd was considered for Ubuntu before they licensed it under Apache (it was under APSL at the time). They didn't have to hire the CUPS dev to work on it. If you go through Apple's OSS listing [1], if it has the APSL license, that's something they released themselves.

[1] <http://opensource.apple.com/>

<comment><USER23> > They are not required to post their updates to LLVM+clang, but they do

You open-source the projects you don't consider strategic assets and/or projects that would cost too much or take too long to develop internally. Open-sourcing is a tool - a development model. That's also why NeXT based its OS on Mach and BSD (and licensed Display PostScipt) - because that shortened their time to market and allowed them to build a computer will a full operating system with enough competitive differentiation to survive for some time (and be resurrected later in the form of OSX)

NeXT was very reluctant in sharing their GCC front-end but was eventually forced to comply with the GPL. Apple has no such obligations with LLVM-clang.</comment></comment></comment>


Web Design in 4 Minutes - <AUTHOR> https://jgthms.com/web-design-in-4-minutes/ <comment> F-0X Can I really be the only one who clicked the link and _enjoyed_ the plainness?

</comment><comment><USER2> Great way to teach a lesson, and a great promotion!</comment>


Switch Your Databases To Flash Storage - <AUTHOR> http://highscalability.com/blog/2012/12/10/switch-your-databases-to-flash-storage-now-or-youre-doing-it.html <comment><USER2> _Wear patterns and flash are an issue, although rotational drives fail too. There are several answers. When a flash drive fails, you can still read the data. A clustered database and multiple copies of the data, you gain reliability – a server level of RAID. As drives fail, you replace them._

Unlike magnetic disks, SSDs have a tendency to fail at a really predictable rate. So predictably that if you've got two drives of the same model, put them into commission at the same time, and subject them to the same usage patterns, they will probably fail at about the same time. That's a real problem if you're using SSDs in a RAID array, since RAID's increased reliability relies on the assumption that it's very unlikely for two drives to fail at about the same time.

With an SSD, though, once one drive goes there's a decent (perhaps small, but far from negligible) chance that a second drive will go out before you've had a chance to replace the first one. Which makes things complicated, but is much better than the similarly likely scenario that a second SSD fails shortly after you replace the first one. Because then it's possibly happening during the rebuild, and if that happens then it really will bring down the whole RAID array.

That said, if you're careful then that predictability should be a good thing. A good SSD will keep track of wear for you. So all you've got to do is monitor the status of the drives, and replace them before they get too close to their rated lifespan. If you add that extra step you're probably actually improving your RAID's reliability. But if you treat your RAID as if SSDs are just fast HDDs, you're asking for trouble.

<comment><USER3> Assuming this predictability is not a good idea in my experience. SSDs fail in various ways, some may be predictable and some are completely unpredictable. It is also not true that an ssd failure means it simply goes to readonly mode. I've seen plenty of SSDs failing unexpectedly and are no longer readable, returning sense key 0x4 (HARDWARE ERROR) and the only recourse is to ship them out.

The risk of correlated failures is indeed non-trivial in SSDs and plain RAID is riskier, be sure to keep a watchful eye on your arrays.

<comment><USER4> We've currently got about 3500 SSDs in production across our clusters. I worry about them deciding to all fail at once, so far they have been sporadic failures (about 1/2 of which leave the drive unusable).

<comment><USER3> Are they all the same model? How long have they been running? Is it a relatively similar load on all of them? Can you share smart attributes for them? (in private if needed)

On a very low fire I'm trying to create a disk survey project (<http://disksurvey.org> ) and such information is of great interest to me.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I'm surprised that the author didn't capture what I consider to be the most important component of HDD/Flash/Memory Balancing - frequency of access.

The rule of thumb that I've heard thrown about is, "If you touch it more than once a day, move to flash. If you touch it more than once an hour, move to memory."

While we can debate where that actual line falls based on both the price and performance of the various media (And, as the price of flash drops, it may be more like, "once every couple days) - it's important to note that frequency of access is critical when determining which media to put your data on.

We have some 50 TB+ Data Sets that are queried weekly for analytics, that don't make a heckuva lot of sense on flash storage. Contra-wise, our core device files are queried multiple times a second, and so we make certain those database servers always have enough memory to keep the dataset in memory cache, even if that means dropping 256 GB onto those database servers for larger customers.

<comment><USER6> Jim Gray wrote a classic paper about this. "The 5 Minute Rule for Trading Memory for Disc Accesses and the 5 Byte Rule for Trading Memory for CPU Time". <http://www.hpl.hp.com/techreports/tandem/TR-86.1.pdf>

There is an updated version that also talks about SSDs. [http://cacm.acm.org/magazines/2009/7/32091-the-five- minute-r...](http://cacm.acm.org/magazines/2009/7/32091-the-five-minute- rule-20-years-later/fulltext)

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> The PostgreSQL mailing list is having a conversation right now about using SSDs. This seems like a very important comment for anyone considering them:

        http://archives.postgresql.org/pgsql-general/2012-12/msg00202.php

Basically, you need to make sure that you buy SSDs with a capacitor that allows the drive to flush what it needs in event of abrupt power loss.

EDIT: Looks like the list archives didn't preserve the thread very well, so here is the original question for anyone interested:

        http://archives.postgresql.org/pgsql-general/2012-11/msg00427.php

<comment><USER8> Is this because PostgreSQL's file format will become hopelessly confused and unable to restart if flush doesn't work?

A lot of applications can lose the last 100ms of writes, especially if its rare because of a k-safe cluster design, as long as you don't have a corrupted file format. A good transaction log based system will recover - as the author's should.

<comment><USER9> It's not only a case of file formats.. a few years ago one of the Linux kernel developers (Theodore Tso IIRC) made a post regarding drive behaviour under power loss, and the results were pretty insane.

For example when a rotating drive fails, you might lose +/- 4kb around the previous sector under write, whereas with particular SSDs, he witnessed 1mb chunks zeroed out every Nmb across the entire drive. That kind of thing, you simply can't work around in software

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I love my consumer SSD backed database, but don't get visions of 380,000 IOPS on a real workload quite yet. Like any radical performance increase on just one component it's more likely to just reveal a non-disk latency bottleneck somewhere else in your system.

Be aware that the performance characteristics of flash are very unlike spinning disks, and vary widely between models. You will see things like weird stalls, wide latency variance, and write performance being all over the place during sustained operations and depending on disk fullness. I chose Intel 520s because they performed better on MySqlPerformanceBlog benchmarks than the then-current Samsung offering [1] and because of OCZ's awful rep [2]. I hit about 5K write IOPS spread across two SSDs before my load becomes CPU-bound, which is nowhere near benchmark numbers but pretty sweet for a sub-$1k disk investment.

It's also my understanding that non-server flash drives like recommended by the article do not obey fsync and are suspect from a ACID standpoint. RAID mirroring does not fix this--if integrity across sudden power loss is critical you might not be able to use these at all and will have to find a more expensive server SSD.

[1] [http://www.mysqlperformanceblog.com/2012/04/25/testing- samsu...](http://www.mysqlperformanceblog.com/2012/04/25/testing-samsung-ssd- sata-256gb-830-not-all-ssd-created-equal/)

[2] [http://www.behardware.com/articles/881-7/components- returns-...](http://www.behardware.com/articles/881-7/components-returns- rates-7.html)

p.s. the RAM benefits the article mentions are real and potentially huge. My query and insert performance has gone from having heavy RAM scalability issues to it hardly mattering at all. This is all on MariaDB on a non-virtualized server; I'm looking forward to better SSD-tuned databases in the future doing even better.

<comment><USER11> The "weird stalls" can be attributed to GC on lower end SSDs:

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garbage_collection_(SSD)#Garbag...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garbage_collection_\(SSD\)#Garbage_collection)

<comment><USER3> There are several background operations that happen on ssds, low or high end doesn't matter they all need them. I've seen quite a few supposedly high-end ssds that show abysmal behavior with wide variations in performance across time.

SSD qualification is a tedious job.

It's not even just about performance of the SSD the other points to care about are non-trivial if you intend to use lots of SSDs for important tasks. I collected some questions to consider at [http://disksurvey.org/blog/2012/11/26/considerations-when- ch...](http://disksurvey.org/blog/2012/11/26/considerations-when-choosing-ssd- storage/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> My favorite quote:

"Flash is 10x more expensive than rotational disk. However, you'll make up the few thousand dollars you're spending simply by saving the cost of the meetings to discuss the schema optimizations you'll need to try to keep your database together."

Lots of great technical details presented in a commonsense style, well worth a read.

<comment><USER13> Sounds great in theory, but in practice you'll be having that conversation about your database schema anyway.

<comment><USER14> Nah, just throw it all into a NoSQL store and let the developers figure it out.

<comment><USER15> NoSQL, making devs into DBAs since 2010: "But hey, look, we never hired any DBAs, that's a win right ?"

<comment><USER16> Object databases and ORM were trying to do that from at least the 90's.

<comment><USER17> And look how well that's worked out.

<comment><USER16> My point exactly.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> "Switch Your Databases To Flash Storage. Now. Or You're Doing It Wrong."

Unless you know, you're storing a lot of stuff and are quite happy with your current level of performance and don't want to shell out a load on new hardware that will fail quicker.

<comment><USER19> Is anyone ever actually happy with database performance? I have never met a customer that wouldn't welcome better performance for so little outlay.

The failure rate of drives shouldn't be a huge concern, data is kept in redundant drives and replacing them is just a matter of routine maintenance. The data is typically worth considerably more than the drives it sits on, but several orders of magnitude.

<comment><USER20> _Is anyone ever actually happy with database performance?_

It depends on your access patterns and how large your active data set grows. Just because your entire DB is 5 TB doesn't mean anything. You could be running a forum where only the most recent 2 GB of posts are read by humans, most people are reading and not contributing, and the rest is trawled through by indexing bots.

I'm perfectly happy with all DB performance when the write load is reasonable, indexes are doing the right thing, and the working data fits into memory (which these days can be multi hundred GBs -- just pray to the gods of uptime you don't have to failover to a cold secondary server).

<comment><USER19> Good architecture eliminates the need for prayer.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Shameless plug alert. At Uptano[1], this is one of the neatest things we've seen with our very inexpensive SSD machines. It's amazing what you can do with 8GB RAM + 100 GB RAID1 SSD. It's probably the best price:performance DB you can run, and is sufficient for ~95% of projects.

1\. <https://uptano.com>

<comment><USER22> Hey, nice relooking of your site. I prefer this colour palette better.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> I would _love_ if cloud providers offered SSD options for their full range of boxes.

For example, to be able to get a Linode at only a fraction more of the cost (say, a 10% premium) with the disk being SSD (and obviously reduced capacity compared to HDD).

I have seen the current offerings but found them to either be too costly (AWS, only one of the the largest instances), or too onerous (ssdnodes.com whose base products aren't aligned with the costs elsewhere, and to move all of your hosts to be near your SSD powered database is a big task when I only seek a little task).

I was even considering co-locating as the most cost-effective way to get SSDs when providers still massively overprice them. It all feels a bit like the RAM scam a decade ago when they'd charge you near the cost of the RAM every 2 months. Again though... co-location fell into the onerous class of actions.

Right now, pragmatically I stay with HDD and Linode.

But Linode should look at my $500 per month account and be well aware that as soon as I see a competitor offer SSD nodes at a cost-competitive point that offsets the burden to move... I'll be gone.

<comment><USER24> Since NAND flash is being price fixed, and likely will be for several more years to come (we're just now starting to see LCD prices drop to reasonable levels after years and years of price fixing, I expect it'll take a similar amount of time for the NAND fixing to get busted and the market to respond), I don't think a 10% premium will be at all possible for a very long time. NAND storage SHOULD be significantly cheaper than rotational storage since it is cheaper to produce, requires fewer exotic materials, has a far wider market, etc. And eventually it will be. But for now, there is a huge premium on NAND storage. I am sure Amazon, EMC, and the others have done the math and simply don't think there is a significant market of people willing to pay for such a service, at least not at the steep rates they would have to charge to meet their growth projections.

<comment><USER25> Note he didn't say 10% premium for the same capacity. It's possible for cloud providers to replace $50 hard disks with $64 SSDs today.

<comment><USER26> Does a $64 SSD have enough charge to flush pending writes after a power failure? If not, then be prepared for widespread corruption.

See comment by pjungwir.

<comment><USER10> You're already on a cloud system, so you have to have a plan in place for your instance to up and disappear without warning. If your instance has an unplanned outage of any kind, you kill it and spawn a new one. You may as well use libeatmydata and reap the performance benefit.

<comment> j-kidd You are describing EC2. Most other providers do provide proper persistence.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Those caught in the middle on DB size needs and performance would be well off to take a look at Bcache. <http://bcache.evilpiepirate.org/> It's a block write-back cache and seems to perform really nicely. Here's some benchmarks. [http://www.accelcloud.com/2012/04/18/linux-flashcache-and- bc...](http://www.accelcloud.com/2012/04/18/linux-flashcache-and-bcache- performance-testing/)

</comment><comment><USER28> Does anyone else find the section "Don't use someone else's file system" a bit confusing? It starts off by convincingly saying O_DIRECT shouldn't be used and then goes on to say O_DIRECT works very well.

<comment><USER29> Linus Torvalds said O_DIRECT shouldn't be used because Linux's already implemented page cache and application developers should not bother to re- invent the wheel.

However page caching algorithms are pretty generic and database people think performance could be improved by using customized db caching routines instead of the generic OS one.

There are two ways to bypass OS page cache: 1) directly access the disk as a block device; or 2) use the O_DIRECT flag to disable page cache on a per- file/directory basis.

Direct access to disk as a block device would be ideal from the performance and flexibility point of view, but then you lose all the benefits and tools to manage databases as files. O_DIRECT flag seems to strike a sweet pot and that's what ended up being used most in the real world.

Then no body is really interested in improving the F_ADVISE interface, which is supposed to be a better than O_DIRECT from Linus's perspective. You know, the "worse is better" thing.

I'm not a db or kernel dev, but I've been watching this argument for a while, and so far that's my understanding. Very interesting.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> Clearly, there are different usage regimes where different solutions will make sense. Nonetheless, there's a really strong case to be made that SSDs have entered a sweet spot in terms of price/performance for databases, and this trend is only accelerating. Here's one discussion of the rationale: <http://www.foundationdb.com/#SSDs>.

</comment><comment><USER31> "Use large block writes and small block reads"

Yep. Write amplification is a big deal on SSDs and gets worse due to their internal garbage collection, if you give them a high-entropy write pattern. This is not a problem though, with TokuDB. See our "advantage 3" here: [http://www.tokutek.com/2012/09/three-ways-that-fractal- tree-...](http://www.tokutek.com/2012/09/three-ways-that-fractal-tree-indexes- improve-ssd-for-mysql/)

</comment><comment><USER32> Funny, and it's a no brainer really.. There was a thread about SSD's about 2 years back, regarding good ways to use them. My conclusion was pretty much the same when it came to DB's, yet nobody agreed with me back then and I received 3 downvotes. Odd!!

Good article!

</comment><comment><USER33> I don't disagree with the conclusions, but don't you have to short stroke those ssds pretty significantly in a high transaction environment to avoid write amplification?

It's too bad longevity worries are keeping them out of the no commitment market.

<comment><USER8> Not really. "short stroking" is called "overprovisioning" with SSDs, and you'll see different effects with different drives. The magic number with most consumer SSDs (the mentioned Intel and Samsung drives) do best with about 20% overprovisioning. The "enterprise class" drives don't require this - they bake in the overprovisioning. The new Intel s3700 works extraordinarily well with no overprovisioning.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> Anyone have any idea when Amazon will start providing SSD-backed RDS?

<comment><USER35> They already do, although it is quite new. The AWS provisioned IOPS layer ("pIOPS") is SSD-backed, and can be used for RDS:

<http://aws.amazon.com/rds/#PIOPS>

There isn't currently an easy way to migrate to pIOPS from traditional RDS, but the performance is fantastic and works as advertised.

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> Only that _append-only_ journal (transaction log).</comment>


Allsorts: font parser and shaping engine implemented in Rust - <AUTHOR> https://yeslogic.com/blog/allsorts-rust-font-shaping-engine.html <comment><USER2> This would certainly be beneficial for the XeTeX "oxidation" efforts[1] for fonts parsing and shaping[2]. There is also a number of existing alternatives: font-kit[3], Skribo[4], RustType[5], ttf-parser[6]. Some of them are just parsers, some - font shapers. Still all of them are relevant to the subject.

[1] [https://github.com/crlf0710/tectonic](https://github.com/crlf0710/tectonic)

[2] [https://github.com/crlf0710/tectonic/issues/117](https://github.com/crlf0710/tectonic/issues/117)

[3] [https://github.com/servo/font-kit](https://github.com/servo/font-kit)

[4] [https://github.com/linebender/skribo](https://github.com/linebender/skribo)

[5] [https://gitlab.redox-os.org/redox-os/rusttype/](https://gitlab.redox- os.org/redox-os/rusttype/)

[6] [https://github.com/RazrFalcon/ttf- parser](https://github.com/RazrFalcon/ttf-parser)

</comment><comment><USER3> Great to see more work in this space. Diversity of font parsing and shaping engines is important to make sure the ecosystem doesn't become reliant on bug- for-bug compatibility with the existing engines. (It's dangerously close already, due to the quirks of DirectWrite, GDI, and FreeType.)

<comment><USER4> Yeah! This was a big reason why we've invested in funding the work on [https://github.com/n8willis/opentype-shaping- documents/](https://github.com/n8willis/opentype-shaping-documents/) \- hopefully this makes the barrier to entry to building font shaping engines a little lower for newcomers, and gives us a place to document findings, separate from any single implementation.

<comment><USER5> Have any bugs been discovered and reported in the other implementations due to this work?

<comment><USER6> Not bugs per se, but a couple of improvements were fed back to HarfBuzz's Indic shaper.

The first was a minor optimisation to the final reordering of pre-base matras; the second was an adjustment to the output of the Indic table generator.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> So cool, I was going to ask what was the relationship with something like pathfinder [1], but you already addressed it in your github README.

Thanks for contributing in this space

[1] [https://github.com/servo/pathfinder/blob/master/README.md](https://github.com/servo/pathfinder/blob/master/README.md)

</comment><comment><USER8> Cool. Are you in contact with the Runebender devs at all?

[https://github.com/linebender/runebender](https://github.com/linebender/runebender)

<comment><USER9> Yes, they're in contact on [https://xi.zulipchat.com/](https://xi.zulipchat.com/).

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Obligatory article: Text Rendering Hates You [0][1]

[0] [https://gankra.github.io/blah/text-hates- you/](https://gankra.github.io/blah/text-hates-you/)

[1] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21105625](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21105625)

</comment><comment><USER11> I used Prince for everything I wrote in grad school. A truly beautiful PDF maker. It's cool that they're releasing part of it.

</comment><comment><USER12> How does this compare to harfbuzz?

<comment><USER13> HarfBuzz is more complete (supports more scripts) and higher performance (we assume, haven't benchmarked yet), but the large C++ codebase can be a little intimidating to dive into. We plan to extend Allsorts to reach feature parity with HarfBuzz, so it will be an interesting comparison of tackling a complex problem in Rust!

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> I'm curious about why they decided to develop Allsorts instead of just using Harfbuzz.

<comment><AUTHOR> pcwalton captures it pretty well in a comment above: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21580718](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21580718) that and wanting to have an implementation in a memory safe language that might prove useful to others.</comment></comment>


Adafruit Blocks University of Waterloo - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@MatinEsfahani/adafruit-blocks-university-of-waterloo-208749c50e82

<comment><USER2> I think the Adafruit response wasn't ideal, but it looks like the buyer foisting of some manufacturing spec problems on to Adafruit.

It sounds like the user was destructively testing some parameter of the product that wasn't on any spec sheet. Then asking Adafruit to bear the cost of sifting through the product to filter the higher performance parts. When you're looking maintain some specific some off-sheet performance characteristic you usually want to source from the manufacturer or a distributor that's close to the manufacturer, not a hobby/maker type shop like Adafruit. It will almost always cost you more at that point too because Adafruit type suppliers can give you lower cost because hobby/maker buyers don't need the same tight consistency that a more industrial / research application might need. They could be buying odd lots off a different manufacturer every time.

Edit: looking at Adafruits product page, they don't even have a spec sheet but a general description for ITO glass. The better way to handle this would have been to nicely ask Adafruit for the name of their supplier (or maybe former supplier) because you wanted to get something specific out of the glass.

<comment><USER3> In the emails, you can see that Adafruit checked with the supplier to make sure nothing had changed. They still got back to the customer after just 3 hours.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> You ordered a product, got the product, used the product, then asked for more while not being willing to pay? You don't see how that looks like fraud?

<comment><USER4> True, but it does still seem like cutting your nose off to spite your face

<comment><USER3> It looks like cutting your losses after losing $160.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> cannot? they must lose money so that you can experiment with their stock for free? entitlement much?</comment>


Ask HN: Have you taken 6 months to 1 year break to do self study? - <AUTHOR> There are so many nice lectures on AI, Machine learning etc., by Stanford, MIT etc., Have anyone took a break from work ,went home just to study these ? I am thinking about taking a break.How does it feel to be not earning that time ? <comment><USER2> Good question. I've done this a couple of times. Self-study can be incredibly useful. Being able to do it within the "distraction" of a full time job can also be extremely rewarding.

I have a very conservative financial point of view in that if I got fired tomorrow I would want to be fine for the next year without working.

This has in the past allowed me to work on my own stuff a couple of times without much worry (although in Australia, lack of health insurance isn't the issue it is in the US).

It's very easy to get distracted and not finish things (at least for me) without the external pressure of someone pushing you to finish. YMMV.

As far as "not earning" goes, these periods of self-improvement are pretty much directly responsible for me getting the great job I have now (at Google) so I'd say it was a worthwhile investment.

Pick something you want to learn. Don't be directionless and say "self- improvement" is your goal. As long as you can reasonably afford to do it.

<comment><USER3> In the US if you quit your job you can buy the same health insurance plan you had, for up to 18 months ("COBRA"). It's not going to be the cheapest thing in the world, but if you're talking about taking a year off, you're probably not on the verge of going broke. (It looks like it'd be far less than what I pay for rent, for example.)

Another option could be to take a part-time job. A fair number of stores seem to offer health insurance for any employee working 20 hours a week. Of course, that may or may not be compatible with one's idea of a "break".

<comment><USER4> When I quit my job last year to join a start-up the cost to continue my COBRA benefits would have been $700/month (and I'm a healthy guy in my 20s). Fortunately, I'm in MA with its private health insurance market, and I was able to find a plan for $200/month. I still had to go without health insurance at all for a month, though, to make myself become inelegible for COBRA and therefore eligible for the other plan.

"Not the cheapest thing in the world" is quite an understatement.

<comment><USER3> From what I'd found (also for a young single person), it would have been more like $500/month, but even at $700, that's still cheaper than rent at any apartment I've seen since I was a college student.

And remember the context: this is someone who wants to take a year off with _no work at all_ , and so is voluntarily giving up tens of thousands of dollars, in exchange for his own time. Yes, there are almost certainly cheaper health insurance options, depending on how much effort you want to put into the research, but COBRA is the upper bound, and takes practically no time to sign up for, which, again, was the whole point of the exercise.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I quit my job and worked only on open source projects for almost two years. This is the article I wrote about my decision at the time:

[http://njclarke.com/posts/why-i-quit-my-job-to-work-on- open-...](http://njclarke.com/posts/why-i-quit-my-job-to-work-on-open- source.html)

I never wrote a follow up to it, I guess in part because I'm still not sure exactly what I got out of it. I certainly improved a lot as a programmer - I'd say I worked harder on programming than at any time in my life, and doing almost all of my work in public held me to a higher standard than what I was used to. I spoke at several conferences and managed to get over my fear of public speaking, which was another goal of mine.

Most importantly, I also got to be a lot more present in my 1-year old son's life for that time, which I will _never_ regret.

It did however take a big toll on my family financially, and I can't help coming away with the feeling that there are ways I may have accomplished those same goals without having gone to the extreme of sacrificing almost all income. I'm almost 40 now and given the historic ageism in our profession I worry a little about the kinds of jobs that will remain open to me over the next 20 years.

Anyway I think that if you're at the point in your life where you have enough money to satisfy the kind of lifestyle you want to live, but don't have the responsibility of a spouse and children, then absolutely go for it.

</comment><comment><USER6> I've taken several 6 month - 1 year breaks, but probably not for what you have in mind when you wrote this question.

Still, I think it was very much worth it.

Initially, I would spend my entire years off travelling, pausing from time to time at a spot with good rock climbing. Eventually, I started adding a bit of freelance development work into the mix, and spent a few years turning that into a consulting business that meant I didn't ever need to come home.

Nowadays, when I'm on the road, you'll often find me working on my own products, which incidentally are a much nicer form of income than consulting. A lot of the things I do during these periods might in fact fit your description of self study, since there's a lot of non-programming knowledge that you need to take a SaaS business from "pile of code" to "product that pays your rent".

Overall though, I'd consider all my years of travel to be about learning. Self study, studying the world. As I said above, I'd highly recommend finding a way to do it.

</comment><comment><USER7> I've built up a solid fund over the past 4 months for this kind of self-study. The plan is to quit my job around May 1st, and use the resulting free time to spend 20 hours more a week on edification and 20 hours more on personal projects.

I'm explicitly committing for six months, with the option to continue it six more without even giving a thought to job-hunting.

The downside is that, at the end of it, I'll be down a bit more than 12 months of savings than I would be otherwise. So compared to the "stick with my job" plan, in my particular case I'd have 75% what I otherwise would. That's assuming I don't change my consumption habits from current.

In terms of intellectual growth, I've stagnated at my current position. So the skills built by taking this route are pure benefit. There's no trade off. The alternative of getting a job where I'm both challenging myself and getting paid (likely more than I am now) is more appealing, but getting a much more solid grasp of the fundamentals seems to trump that (I've never taken any CS classes).

I figure that the investment should pay itself off financially within 5 years, as a pessimistic estimate.

As far as the actual feeling... that's an open question for me, too. The big issues I see are making sure that I follow through with my intentions. No wasting any time on HN/Reddit. I shouldn't be doing that now, even.

</comment><comment><USER8> Did it 12 years ago after a tiny windfall from stock options...

During that time I launched one of the first distributed computing projects and almost finished porting a console game to Java. At that point, I made the decision that getting paid is good and went back to work.

More recently, I took a month off after working briefly at Google nearly sapped my will to live. But in this case, I already had the next and better gig lined up.

But I made the call that the first hour of every day from then on would be devoted to reading tech books. In just a few months I went from crusty niche engineer to working knowledge of Javascript, Python, Django, GWT, and HTML 5 and I'm already applying all of it. Ironically, I think if I had gone into google with this in my head, I would have had far more opportunities made available to me instead of the wretched allocation that was my only choice.

(Now if any googlers are about to chime in about the smoke blown up one's patootie at orientation that it takes ~6 months to come up to speed there, I was told point blank by my manager that rule only applies to NCGs and that I was already falling short by not having come up to full speed in 2 to 3 weeks)

</comment><comment><USER9> In late 2003 I was laid off from my job as a hardware/firmware design engineer. I spent the next two years away from work. During this time I spent nearly a year on self-study, got married, and then went travelling with my wife in Europe and south-east Asia. We worked on and off while travelling to be able to afford to continue our adventures.

If you are a self-motivated learner I would highly recommend a study break. The stuff I learnt during my break helped me secure my current job. I spent most of my time learning about web development, both client-side and server- side technologies. I now teach these technologies at a local college. I also do contract web work on the side.

As others have mentioned, be sure to pick some solid learning outcomes. Map out your study goals. Give yourself timeframes and be sure to reward yourself when you meet these milestones.

I'd recommend either blogging about your experiences or putting together a portfolio of work. This will come in handy when future employers ask about the gap in your resume. Working on one or two open-source projects might also be worth while.

Learning to live frugally and within your means is also key.

<comment><USER10> > Learning to live frugally and within your means is also key.

Spot on! That is one of the most important things in my mind. I live very frugally but I live very well!

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I took much of last year off to focus on learning the technologies needed to build the product for my startup -- graph databases was the big one, and during the time I built Bulbs (<https://github.com/espeed/bulbs>), a Python framework for graph databases like Neo4j Server.

Eliminating all distractions has been key -- no side jobs, no girlfriends, no going out -- a period of complete focus.

Working out and exercising has been critical though for keeping my energy level up and maintaining mental clarity.

</comment><comment><USER12> After I dropped out of a theoretical physics Ph.D. program a long time ago, I decided to try to become a computer programmer. I had not taken a single computer science course in college. I was lucky that my parents allowed me to live at home for a year while I spent my entire time teaching myself programming. A friend told me to learn Scheme, so I went through all of SICP using my sister's Mac (I did not own a computer at the time). Then I started to learn C and Unix, hacked a bit with that, learned C++, and applied for jobs after doing some open source work so that I could have something to show. I got hired as a software engineer a year after I started my self-study.

</comment><comment><USER13> i took 3 months off at the end of 2010 because my partner was on sabattical in the states and i wanted to travel with her (and can't work their due to visa issues). it was great not working (or more exactly, being able to choose what i did), but i don't think i learnt much more than i would have in, say, 6-9 months of doing stuff on an evening and at weekends. the biggest win was that it brought us closer together (another bonus, more particular to my case, was that living in the usa gave me access to new egg, amazon and adlibris, so i read a pile and built a new machine - mini-itx based - that came back as hand luggage) .

financially i didn't have any worries - i had a pile of savings, a job to return to, and my partner earns enough for us to survive on anyway. one thing i would suggest is talking to your employer about it - while they may be unhappy to have you take time off, it is also likely in their interest to take you back afterwards (assuming you're a decent programmer, which i would guess is the case if you care about learning) (although a year ago the economy was heading down, so it made more sense to give me a break then).

</comment><comment><USER14> > How does it feel to be not earning that time ?

You are earning during this study time, you are earning through a long term investment in yourself.

</comment><comment><USER15> It would probably helpful to have a very clear goal with what you want to accomplish. And some way to force yourself to actually sit down and put in the hours. For me, it would be too tempting to have coffee dates all the time, or refresh hacker news every minute.

</comment><comment><USER16> Every morning (or almost every morning) I get up at 5am for self study. Then finish up and go to work from 8-5. I find myself less motivated to work during the night after work. I've still been able to put in a few hours every other day. There has been 3 times where I snuck in some study during my lunch hour but I find that harder to 'get into'.

I have no kids so that might be different from your situation.

You can perform self study while still working full time hours, you just need to be motivated and find the time out of your day. You need to focus on the long term goal, which shouldn't simply be 'Finish AI lectures' but something potentially life altering, 'Finish AI lectures to better my chance at a job for Y/to create Z'.

</comment><comment><USER17> I think it worth every penny lost. But, I would suggest to do enough groundwork on what you would like to achieve in that period.

No financial earning periods can be quite challenging but if you have a job, like I had, that does not allow any time to explore yourself, I think it is worth taking time off if you are really serious and confident about doing something different. Also, bear in mind that your efforts could (will) take substantially longer to bear fruit. So, it is really important to set your expectations appropriately before taking the step forward.

As far as I can see, all successful stories are basically breaks that involved a lot of hard-work, luck and which finally materialized!

Just my 2p.

</comment><comment><USER18> Not earning for 6 months, a year or more isn't a big deal. Just plan for it financially ahead of time and leave a nice buffer so you are comfortable.

If your going to come out with a new skill set or even just a better outlook on life it's worth it IMO.

</comment><comment><USER10> In the UK we have The Open University (which is open for international study too).

You can get a real degree in your spare time without a massive spend, working or not.

I'm doing a mathematics degree at the moment, whilst employed. No holiday/vacation required!

<comment><USER19> In the UK, if you work for a company with 250 or more employees, you are also entitled to request time off work to train (including degree study): [http://www.direct.gov.uk/en/Employment/Employees/Timeoffandh...](http://www.direct.gov.uk/en/Employment/Employees/Timeoffandholidays/DG_183635)

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> How do future employers look at this time of unemployment?

<comment><USER21> Is that still a thing? It's not like you'll be applying to law firms. I've found making yourself less available only makes your demand higher.

<comment><USER22> It is absolutely still a thing. Since the current top comment (from cletus) mentions working at Google I'll relate a story from when I interviewed there. From what I understand, I made it pretty far in the process (to the "executive committee review") and that's when they asked me to explain a gap in my resume. They pressed me for a detailed breakdown of what I did during the gap and the reasons behind it, and said that they take it seriously. This was after 8 technical interviews and after I'd passed their hiring committee. I didn't get the job, although I suspect that this was not the reason. I'm sure experience varies here, and this would likely be less of an issue at a startup or other small company where a record of getting shit done is more important, but it's worth noting.

I would recommend that if you take time off for whatever reason, prepare for questions like these and be ready to provide a succinct and compelling explanation at the drop of a hat, because being blindsided isn't fun.

<comment><USER23> > It is absolutely still a thing.

A bit of a pity.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> _Just posted this on Google Plus. Thought I should re-post it here too._

I often think about doing exactly this. There is so much I want to learn:

\- many awesome free online courses ( <http://www.crypto-class.org> , <http://www.ai-class.com> , <http://www.ml-class.org> , <http://www.modelthinker-class.org> , ... )

\- dozens of non-fiction books sitting on my shelf I have yet to read (on computer science, programming, design, UX, software project management, system administration, computer security, business, time management...)

\- thousands of articles and blog posts, bookmarked in my "to-read-later" folder

I've sometimes been asked if I'd want to go back to school to do a master that would complement my engineering diploma (e.g. MBA). But I think I could learn so much more by simply taking a year off and doing self-directed learning, using all these resources... Of course, I've set aside some learning time outside of work, but it feels like I'll never catch up.

Reminds me of this great article: [http://www.npr.org/blogs/monkeysee/2011/04/21/135508305/the-...](http://www.npr.org/blogs/monkeysee/2011/04/21/135508305/the- sad-beautiful-fact-that-were-all-going-to-miss-almost-everything)

<comment><USER25> I think self directed learning is far better than going back to school. You can pic and choose and curate the exact learning experiences you want.

Don't mean to self promote, but you are welcome to be part of the free peer learning community on <http://diycomputerscience.com/> You might actually like the 'Elements of Computing Systems' course a lot.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> Nice to see others who rather take some time to study instead of only working.

I studied business and landed a job as a Project Manager. Meeting developers, I felt the urge to learn to code and become a programmer. While doing Project Management work at day time, I used my evenings to practice and learn coding. I loved working with developers because I could learn from them.

But there is only so much you can do working full time, taking care of your other stuff in life and find as much time to learn and practice coding. I thing it's easier if you can focus full time on something instead of the learning being too much spread out.

So I talked to my boss and asked to work 4 days a week and have three days for learning and coding (with less salary of course). I did this for five months and my skills really improved.

After five months, it was clear for me I was ready to earn money from developing. So I stepped down as a Project Manager, had to give in some more salary and started as a programmer (junior).

It was one of the best decisions in my life.

For me, it's not relevant for the moment to stop working and study, because I learn so much working as a dev. But I can imagine myself stop working for a couple of months if I reach a plateau and want to focus and learn in a specific field.

It is a lot of fun to be able to focus on something and improve fast. So if you can afford it and you want it, I think you should do it. It's not only a lot of fun, but you probably be worth more on the job market.

</comment><comment><USER27> Totally worth it. Write open source code, it just might turn out to be the foundation of a career.

<comment><USER28> Just to reiterate what others have said: work on something concrete. Opensource projects, your own side project, a subject-specific blog, etc.

A year of study is worth significantly less if the results are only in your head.

Also - working on something real can give you measurable milestones to work toward completing. (The fact is, the longer time you set aside, the more time you are in danger of wasting.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> Honestly, I've found that getting a job in a field that I'm interested in is a much faster way to learn. You have the advantage of working with people already in the field, an existing codebase and set of data to tap into, and clear projects with deadlines and impact to the bottom line.

Example: Machine Learning. I learned much more in a few weeks at a job at a Machine Learning company than I ever did trying working through _Elements of Statistical Learning_ on my own.

<comment><AUTHOR> How do you get into Machine Learning company in the first place? You need certain basics to get into one.

<comment><USER29> If you can prove that you're smart and capable of contributing to the bottom line, it's very possible to get hired with the assumption that you'll quickly pick up anything you need to know.

Eg, at a previous job I'd saved the company $3MM/year using a technology I'd never really worked with before. With that kind of track record this company was happy to hire me even if I didn't have direct ML experience.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> I have worked independently for over a decade., so I often factor in time for study in my regular work schedule, but at times I have also taken longer breaks.

One I too about a year off on a startup idea I had. It did not work out, but I learned some important lessons.

I have also taken 3 months off to be part of a startup accelerator as a fellow. I did not have any product, but just spend my time working on a few experiments / prototypes and generally helping other teams wherever I could.

The ideas experimented did become my startup, which I have been working on since the past year or so. It is actually related to peer based learning (<http://diycomputerscience.com/>), so I am hoping that learning will be an integral part of working for me.

</comment><comment><USER30> I don't think you'd need to quit or take off for a year, many people have full time jobs and go to school at the same time. You should be able to take these classes at your leisure while maintaining a paycheck. Or you can just quit and focus fully on this for a year.

</comment><comment><USER31> I did something like this to study math after a startup exit (so money wasn't an issue), around 2005, well before the recent spate of free online courses. I did a combination of self-study (reading books), informally sitting in on classes in the local university, and some small study groups I organized. That was all well and good, but it eventually became clear I'd make much faster progress in a more formal setting, so I went back to school. Formal deadlines are a powerful motivator. Also, reading math is hard and conversations with experts can often speed along understanding. Five years later, I'm in my 3rd year of grad school in a pure math program.

</comment><comment><USER32> I just graduated from university and have been relishing in the sudden freetime. I can easily spend 8-10 hours per day just consuming and practicing new technology, or just reading unrelated literature that I had little time for. I've been more active in my sideprojects than ever before in my life.

Unfortunately, I didn't have the wherewithal that unversity might not be for me until I was 51% done with my degree. Sometimes I fantasize about taking the past four years of debt and expenses, going back in time, and using all that money to live in Bangkok for a fraction of the rent and work on my own craft/projects for a few years.

</comment><comment><USER33> I consider self-study to be a key part of entrepreneurship. In particular, extended self-study has worked very well for me whenever I've wanted to change careers, geographies or industries. Indeed a major professional change justifies this effort.

However, given the current pace of technology, it might be a better idea to develop a discipline for continuous learning and try to fit your educational/updating needs into a conventional agenda.

As far as "not earning" goes, granted, it sucks, but consider the option of doing this while freelancing, writing a book or starting a new company... there are many, many ways to skin a cat.

</comment><comment><USER34> Took the Stanford Database class online (while working) at the end of last year. It was one of the best technical education experiences I have ever had. That said...

Self study does not include credentials and evidence of specific work that traditional education does. If your future work is largely freelancing, this is probably irrelevant. If you are targeting work in the corporate world HR still looks for gaps in employment.

</comment><comment><USER35> Forget a few months, I took a few years.

Of course survival is neccesary during that time. You could do any of the following:

1) Move home 2) Consult with a higher rate and work very part time (5-10 hours a week tops) 3) Move somewhere cheap with your savings 4) Consider going back to school or see if there's a program you can use for learning / training that will help.

I took a combination of #1 and #2, worked great.

</comment><comment><USER36> In my opinion 1 year break is far too long. I find that 2 weeks of intensive self education every now and then is perfectly enough to stay up to date with the industry.

Example: Last week I played with backbone.js & Co., this week I'm playing with the cutting edge stuff from HTML5. And next week I'll probably get another job for which I'll be able to use my new knowledge.

<comment><USER37> Learning the basics of new frameworks/libraries can be done in two weeks. Learning an entirely new field of study or research can be justified in terms of many months.

<comment><USER36> I disagree - unless you are talking about becoming an expert. But I prefer to become an expert in the course of using things in the real world.

This applies to the theoretical knowledge as well - you can easily learn new data structures or algorithms in two weeks. Then you can master them when you have a problem that requires you to use them.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> I'm going to have a break doing exactly this while trying to make something out of my ideas starting in July, and I'm aiming for six months before I'll see if I need a job or have something working on my own.

So if anyone in Frankfurt wants to hang out or have some tips on available coworker offices feel free to send me an email.

</comment><comment><USER39> Such a break would be more effective with structure. Everybody can benefit from a coach. Even those who are the best in the world (Tiger Woods, Michael Jordan) use coaching. Humans have a natural lazy instinct and a coach can make your efforts more effective than if you were left to your own devices.

</comment><comment><USER40> I am engaged in a one-year course of self-study. My focus is on quantitative, numerical subjects. So far I have not narrowed it any further. I was raised in an atmosphere of "well-rounded generalism." I would welcome any suggestions on how to overcome a congenital inability to specialize.

</comment><comment><USER41> Not that long but I did take 3 months vacations, or 2 weeks to learn something.

It feels absolutely great to be able to just learn for the sake of learning (but that learning can be: build a product etc too).

Now you have to secure your finances: know your burn rate, define a date in advance to start looking for work etc.

</comment><comment><USER42> I have - I left a a very stable job and pursued self-study for 9 months. I still pursue it, but not in a rigorous fashion as I had for those 9 months; once my startup levels out a bit more and I can hire more people to do my job, I will probably start going after more self-study.

</comment><comment><USER43> Yes. I dropped out of high school during my sophomore year, I spent the next 18 months of so teaching myself to program, economics, and a bunch of other stuff. It wasn't taking a break from work, but I figure it's relevant.

</comment><comment><USER44> I'm currently doing self education beside my full time job. Did not take time off for self study, but I'd like to if I get chance.

</comment><comment><USER45> I tried to, given the opportunity. I thought it time to level up yet again.

</comment><comment><USER46> A bit of hard earned experience: Check for health problems. If you hate what you're doing, you might just be sick.

That said, it is really good to think about what you _really_ want to do every few years.

</comment><comment><USER47> You mean periods of time where you earn little to no money, and learn new skills constantly? That's a startup.

</comment><comment><USER48> You can self-study your entire life, whenever you make the time for it. I do.</comment>


Private equity looting public health in a pandemic - <AUTHOR> https://pluralistic.net/2020/04/04/a-mind-forever-voyaging/#prop-bets <comment><USER2> Related to profiting off pandemics, or rather by causing them: pack animals by the thousand to breed viruses and put them near other species closely packed to promote virus mutations -- aka factory farming.

Presto, save money and promote viral mutations that can jump to humans. And they'll keep doing so as long as it's legal. In other words, expect bigger pandemics or legislate.

Here's a video on what few are working on but if we don't stop, we'll see more pandemics: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7_ppXSABYLY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7_ppXSABYLY).

My short podcast episode on it: [https://shows.acast.com/leadership-and-the- environment/episo...](https://shows.acast.com/leadership-and-the- environment/episodes/318-why-pandemics-will-keep-increasing-and-how-we-can- revers)

<comment><USER3> I find his statement that there were no pandemics before domestication of animals and therefore domesticated animals must be the source of pandemics quite bold and it seems to me that it is more backed by wishful thinking or political agenda than by actual science.

Anyways, it seems that this time the source was bats, and I am not aware of any domesticated bats.

<comment><USER2> The video also covered encroaching on wildlife territory causing epidemics and pandemics such as ebola. He seems to have recorded it during a bird flu pandemic so focused on that type.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I think it tells a lot about the values of a society that let's something like that happen. And I don't mean this in a judgemental way. It's similar to corruption. It works as long as enough members of society either profit or don't care enough.

</comment><comment><USER5> One sentiment I see on hacker news a lot is that "government is inefficient (and that's never going to change).". But I read about PE and I think: public servants cannot fight these sharks.

Are there an examples of private equity losing these types of takeovers? Are there examples of public agencies fighting back and winning?

PE doesn't take over public agencies. But they extract public money in a clever way and that seems at the root of problems with big government too and it feels like it is seldom mentioned.

</comment><comment><USER6> I work for a hedge fund where all of the founding partners are billionaires. One of them said "Private equity is the best business in the world to be in." Translation: If you are rich, it's the easiest way to get even richer. PE seems like another example where the rich get to play the game "Heads I win, tails you lose".

</comment><comment><USER7> > I remember being at Defcon one year and going into a Vegas casino and asking > a craps croupier to explain how the game worked, and as he rattled off the > different odds on the different paylines, I was like, Ohhhhh, I get this. > This is a scam.

The pass/don't pass odds are the best of any game in a casino, where the house basically doesn't have an edge. It's most fun to play in a group though. Almost a positive expected value if you take advantage of the free drinks and entertainment, and stay away from the other bets on the table.

<comment><USER8> The initial pass line bet pays even money and is where most of the house edge derives from. Unless you have a very low minimum bet and very high odds, you are unlikely to break even with free drinks. If you can find one of these casinos, though, it's a great way to learn the game.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> If you, like me, hate cheating and being cheated, you should really read the mentioned book "How to Cheat at Everything". Another book that I recommend is "The Big Con" by David W. Maurer. And if you are one of the few people who have never seen "The Sting" you should watch it now. It is one of the best movies ever and you may learn one or two things about cheating.

Edit: I just found that the book has become really expensive. It used to be 19 US$.

<comment><USER9> Thank you for the movie and the book references. I'm always looking for things like that, to teach myself how to see and look beyond appearances.

</comment></comment><comment> t-vi Any profit made not by genuinely improving efficiency/productivity is made through causing someone else a loss of the same amount.

Now, very few parts of the finance industry genuinely improve efficiency - classic market making (classic stock market, taking savings and giving out loans to real people) does, but that is just a tiny drop of water in the ocean of dodgy modern finance.

The same applies to tech, too, see Uber and AirBnB.

</comment><comment><USER10> Look at what PE is doing in the Pet care/vet market. Capture the market, raise costs and extract value.</comment>


IRS criticized for releasing app using open source and Objective C - <AUTHOR> http://www.treasury.gov/tigta/auditreports/2011reports/201120076fr.html

<comment><USER2> tl;dr The IRS built an app for the iPhone. They built it using tools and libraries that hadn't internally been approved by the IRS. The team in charge of the app could have requested a waiver to use non-approved software, but decided not to because of time constraints. This was detected during a security audit. The audit was performed because this was the first time the IRS developed an iPhone app and they wanted to make sure it had been built securely.

The project wasn't criticized for using open source software or Objective C. They were criticized for using non-approved software and for not getting a waiver to use the non-approved software.

</comment><comment><USER3> Bravo.. If you read between the lines they basically ignored outdated/inappropriate processes/bueracracy to provide a service to the end user. And by not adhering to those rules they indeed saved taxpayer dollars. Glad they pushed through and delivered... All they gotta do now is circle back and get the waivers. The epitome of a broken/meaningless process. Quite typical, unfortunately, in our gov....

<comment><USER4> Seems liked it worked in this instance.

Of course there are lots of examples where rules or regulations weren't followed and bad things happened: BP oil spill, Enron and many other accounting fiascos, endless number of stories on HN about software being developed with basic security flaws, numerous stories regarding lost laptops with unencrypted private information and so on.

Each time this happens you can't count to ten before the Google bot indexes another GB of punditry arguing for more regulations.

If it were easy to know when bureaucratic controls or official regulations were appropriate and when they were superfluous the world would be a simpler place.

I'm not sure what general princple applies here other than KISS. Reducing complexity is probably a good rule of thumb for any endeavor. Complex rules and meta-rules create their own second, third, or n-th order problems.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> The unwritten implications of this are that open-source code must be subject to more scrutiny before use, and that the regulations regarding software development are too dated to be strictly followed.

The first implication is probably the more disturbing, since proprietary code is just as likely to have security flaws, and the only advantage it has is a clear way to shift the blame off the government. While the audit only complained about the use of unapproved open-source libraries, the IRS promises to be better about getting _all_ libraries reviewed and approved in the future.

The second implication, regarding OMB Circular A-130, last revised in 2000, is probably quite true. The IRS's responses repeatedly express a desire to adhere to the _intent_ of that document, but they seem to feel that following it strictly would interfere with the use of modern technologies and development methods (here, agile).

</comment><comment><USER6> Looks like a fairly light slap on the wrists to me. People malign the IRS but they do a lot more innovation than most agencies.

<comment><USER7> Innovative at taking your money.

I kid, I kid</comment></comment>


WiFi QR Codes - <AUTHOR> https://wifiqrc.com <comment><USER2> This is just an ad. What's premium about a QR code? You can easily generate these for free.</comment>


Nest launches $39 temperature sensor - <AUTHOR> https://www.theverge.com/circuitbreaker/2018/3/15/17123822/nest-temperature-sensor-video-doorbell-smart-lock-price-features <comment><USER2> It really feels like a rather pointless product given the current state of HVAC manufacturing. Until HVAC manufacturers make zone control more of a priority paired with having technicians that are capable of installing it properly.

Between all the environmental and construction related variables it would seem that it would take a 3rd party to develop something that could integrate with the various residential systems you can have installed with a reasonable warranty attached. Without having a bunch of automated dampers, properly insulated homes/duct work it seems a bit premature to try and market this as a product that makes sense for the average human.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Can someone explain to me what these actually do? Doesn't there need to be a way to actually manipulate the airflow into each room (air vent flap motor etc)?

<comment><USER3> That was, partially, explained part way through the article:

These sensors make the whole system more accurate and keep things comfortable. That might come at the cost of overheating another area of your home that you're not in, though. Unless you've got smart vents, heating systems are nowhere near precise enough to set different climates for each room.

<comment><AUTHOR> So basically for heating this is a "min temp" sensor per room. For cooling I assume "max temp".

<comment><USER3> That's what I read as implied by the quote from the article.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Can the Immune System Fight Covid-19 Without a Temperature Increase? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> From my understanding of "Reducing fever, good or bad" (Dr. John Campbell, [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gJqSdmNNwW4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gJqSdmNNwW4)) the human body needs fever to fight the viral infection.

<comment><AUTHOR> My confusion leads from thinking that there are two ways to fight it. One is white blood cells murdering the virus - the "ideal way". Two is the body panicking and over-heating to kill anything that can't handle the temperature (preferably mainly the virus). I am not sure if #2 works through virus-killing cells, in conjunction with them, or purely in an unrelated fashion killing everything that it can, kind of like chemo.</comment></comment>


HQ Trivia App Puts On-Demand Generation on a Strict Schedule - <AUTHOR> https://www.wsj.com/articles/hq-trivia-app-puts-on-demand-generation-on-a-strict-schedule-1513870073 <comment><USER2> I play this game semi-often and as the popularity has risen, the performance of the game has gone down hill.

Interestingly enough almost all the issues occur when starting the game - after the first question the game runs (somewhat) smoothly, even though there may be 400k+ viewers.

I wonder what technical hurdles their hitting that causes the app to lag at the start (an issue the commonly delays the game by 30-60 minutes).

<comment><USER3> My theory is that they lag when logging people in and sending the questions over. Seems like streaming video is a solved problem, but they're struggling to scale their custom logic governing the trivia.

<comment><USER4> They've only had a few weeks to scale up from a few thousand to a few hundred thousand concurrent websocket connections. It's weird that it works great sometimes, and other times it doesn't.

I'd love to read their engineering blog!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I hope it inspires competitors, because it's a fun concept -- gathering together with a bunch of people at a certain time to play a game together. But the HQ Trivia game itself is... terrible.

I'm aware they're beholden to certain design constraints. Such as making something that's immediately understandable and fun to a wide range of people. But. They have not risen to the challenge, in my opinion.

I expect there will be numerous competitors in this space. And some will have much better game design chops. And one of those will do very well.

(And then the whole apps-like-TV-game-shows-everyone-plays-together market will totally collapse after four hundred start-ups launch and obliterate the novelty.)

<comment><USER6> Can you be more specific in what how they're not rising to the challenge?

I think the live stream quality and synchronization is incredible. All my friends gather at lunch and the video and sound play together exactly.

<comment><USER5> The game design. I meant user experience design constraints.

For example:

\- Most people will lose after fewer than half the questions have been asked and have little reason to stick around.

\- The chance of having a meaningful "win" is so low as to be nearly pointless. I won a round that, like, 100-ish people out of 50,000 won. That's too low. Games can also have multiple flavors of winning.

\- Money is not a useful incentiviser. In fact, it can ruin the experience. Again, I won a round (along with about 100-ish people). Won about $15. Which after all of the hooting about $5k or $10k in prizes felt pathetic. (Also I can't withdraw until I get $20, which felt sort of insulting or borderline scammy and tainted the experience.) Good games create their value without extrinsic prizes -- or, at least, the extrinsic prizes have to be valuable enough to add significant drama to the game.

\- Straight multiple-choice trivia is the unflavored ice cream of game design.

I could probably come up with a few more things, but it's late and I've got this third glass of half egg nog/half whiskey blend that I need to finish before bed. (Not a Christmas thing, just my year-round nighttime ritual.)

<comment><USER7> I largely disagree with you.

It'd be nice if you could still win 'points' or have some other reason to stick around. But I still do feel fulfilled even dropping out early. I think it makes getting further feel even more special, because you're simply in the game longer than normal.

Money is a great incentivizer to get people excited / interested. It's already fun but the _potential_ of actual cash makes it feel more exciting. It's also a better word-of-mouth hook.

The simplicity of multiple choice makes it easier to play with multiple people and still select an answer. It gives framing (you know one is correct), but 3 choices is still enough drama after it starts to get hard.

I'm not saying there's no possible improvement, but I feel like they've really hit the nail on the head with this one, and their growth curve seems to agree.

<comment><USER8> > and their growth curve seems to agree

It's natural but probably wrong to assume that a product's success means it's getting nearly everything right. I agree with the original point: they've hit upon a really exciting concept in getting everyone around the world together at certain times to play a game, but the specific game is not very good.

I think you could even plug in traditional TV game show formats (something more like Jeopardy, for example) and do quite well. That would keep much more of the initial audience around for the whole game, and watching the inevitable forthcoming ads that will be required for the company to make any money from this growth.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> How many people got threatened to be fired for this article?

</comment><comment><USER10> I played for about two weeks starting early November then got bored and don't play anymore. I wonder if this will be the case with most other players over time as well. Twice daily seems too much. Reminds me of when Who Wants To Be A Millionaire went from once a week to every night in the early 2000s. In that case viewership tanked and never recovered.

</comment><comment><USER11> If you're hitting the paywall, you can get to the article by using the link from the author's twitter.

[https://twitter.com/johnjurg/status/943894139657179142](https://twitter.com/johnjurg/status/943894139657179142)

<comment><USER12> That didn't work for me. This did, though: [http://archive.is/Xb2k8](http://archive.is/Xb2k8)

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Coming to you live from the greatest city on earth, the city that never sleeps, Annandale Virginia.

</comment><comment><USER14> Can't get past the paywall. Can we ban wsj?

<comment><USER15> Buy a subscription and the support the journalists who write these articles.

<comment><USER14> Sure, once I can get a subscription that covers what is actually linked here and not just one article.

Anyway I thought hn had a no paywall rule.</comment></comment></comment>


How security flaws work: The buffer overflow - <AUTHOR> https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2015/08/how-security-flaws-work-the-buffer-overflow/ <comment><USER2> Despite the later references to ROP, this basically captures the mid-1990s state of the art in memory corruption bugs.

</comment><comment><USER3> "Blame C"

"As an example of C's utter hostility toward safe development..."

Am I misreading or does this author fail to see any distinction between a. programming language and b. functions in a "standard" library, e.g. gets(), authored by particular C programmers?

The most "secure" programs I have ever seen are written in C. The reason they are so "secure" is not because of the language chosen, but because of the _competence_ of the person who wrote them. He writes his own basic functions and uses very few from the "standard" C library. (Not necessarily "reimplement". He may implement basic functions that have _no equivalent_ in the C "standard" libraries.)

Secure is not in quotes to be "sarcastic". It is because there is always the chance someone will expose a serious flaw in these programs. It is a subjective assessment of security. However it has been roughly 20 years and no one has done so yet.

<comment><USER4> Is "secure" in quotes because you're being sarcastic? I would expect the venn diagram of people who reimplement standard library functions and people who write really secure C to have pretty much no overlap.

<comment><USER5> As legend has it, DJB rerolled most of libc for qmail.</comment></comment></comment>


What Flannery O'Connor taught me about chronic illness - <AUTHOR> https://electricliterature.com/what-flannery-oconnor-taught-me-about-chronic-illness-5dd75130df15 <comment><USER2> Here's another Flannery bit from yesterday: [https://quoteinvestigator.com/2018/01/18/stifle/](https://quoteinvestigator.com/2018/01/18/stifle/). Frivolous, but amusing. She was a great letter writer.

</comment><comment><USER3> _her publisher, Harcourt, Brace, had requested a picture for the back of the book jacket. "They were all bad," O'Connor wrote to the poet and translator Robert Fitzgerald and his wife, Sally. "The one I sent looked as if I had just bitten my grandmother and that this was one of my few pleasures, but the rest were worse."_

It is a good read. I can identify with a lot of it.

</comment><comment><USER4> Steven Sparrow's essays[1] made Ms O'Connor's short stories more accessible to me

[1] [http://flanneryoconnor.com/on.html](http://flanneryoconnor.com/on.html)

</comment><comment><USER5> It's possible that the author suffered from what might be called "vegetable deficiency" disease.

See for example this MD who cured her Lupus with better nutrition: [https://www.forksoverknives.com/stroke-doctor-reversed- lupus...](https://www.forksoverknives.com/stroke-doctor-reversed-lupus-plant- based-diet/)

Or this other MD who cured her MS with better nutrition: [https://terrywahls.com/](https://terrywahls.com/)

See also for general background: [http://media.wholefoodsmarket.com/news/the- whole-foods-diet](http://media.wholefoodsmarket.com/news/the-whole-foods-diet)

Vitamin D deficiency is also common. But obviously there might be other deficiencies (or in a very rare case some genetic disorder).

Or there can be an undiagnosed chronic infections. Here is an MD who cured himself of chronic Lyme with better nutrition plus herbs plus antibiotics: [http://www.lymebook.com/lyme-disease-solution](http://www.lymebook.com/lyme- disease-solution)

Bottom line: mainstream medicine has only become good so far at treating the first two of these three major health situations:

* accidental trauma (based on learning from US battlefield experience in surgery)

* acute infectious disease (mostly by quarantine, sanitation, and increasingly-less-effective antibiotics -- until maybe phage therapy becomes common someday)

* chronic disease like autoimmune disorders, cardiovascular disease, or cancer (usually caused by the Standard American Diet, but maybe also interacting with some other factors including exposure to toxins etc.)

All that said, part of healing is mental or spiritual -- so reading good stories can indeed help with that in a variety of ways.

</comment><comment><USER6> good country people

</comment><comment><USER7> Skimmed the piece. Was there any real imsight about dealing with chronic illness?</comment>


.NET Core Roadmap - <AUTHOR> https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/dotnet/2016/07/15/net-core-roadmap/ <comment><USER2> Full .NET core support for F# is very nice feature,should have there on day 1. But project.json to csproj conversion is going to hold many open source projects to start porting to .net core in the near future.Even after RTM ,you cannot rely on many features or your existing learnings with such changes. I guess I have to wait for another year to see full adoption for people to migrate existing libraries or frameworks.Even networking and data support coming in Q1/Q2 2017. Anyways big kudos for being open and transparent</comment>


Ask HN: Add Chat To Your App - <AUTHOR>

Hi - What are the services available to add chat to mobile apps? <comment><USER2> Check out <http://www.getsocialize.com/>, you can get a chat within 5 min. Really great.

</comment><comment><USER3> If you are talking about mobile app, Parse has an excellent example for that to integrate in applications.</comment>


6 Surprising Predictions Are More Scarier for Cyber Security in 2017 - <AUTHOR> http://www.scrolib.com/2016/12/6-surprising-predictions-scarier-cyber-security-2017/ <comment><USER2> Posting guidelines are to rewrite clickbait headlines instead of using the original.</comment>


Ships, Bananas, Logistics, Math and a Big Dose of Engineering - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/cybergibbons/status/1213572501395120134 <comment><USER2> > Those reefer positions all need power. We used to factor around 4kW for a > reefer... so that would be around 4MW total. Easy! Problem is, bananas are > not average. Most frozen cargo is taken onboard frozen. It doesn't take much > power to keep it frozen at -21degC

> Bananas are different though - they are often packed warm, and brought > directly to the ship. They are also kept at +14degC. This means the > refrigeration needs to work harder.

> We are now looking at as much as 20kW to cool that container when it comes > onboard, and 8kW to maintain the temperature. We've jumped to 8MW at least!

I don't buy that. Sure, cooling to 14C will require some extra energy for a limited amount of time, but why would 4 kW be enough to keep a -21C container at that temperature while it takes 8 kW to keep a container at 14 C. Doesn't make any sense. Of course that doesn't mean the conclusion that regular container ships cannot go 100% bananas is wrong. At least @cybergibbons seems know what they are talking about. I just think there is a gap in the argumentation or that I just misunderstood.

EDIT: @cybergibbons address this objection [1]. What I understand is that frozen cargo is stored at -21C but then _allowed to warm up_ wheres bananas are cooled and then held at a constant temperature in the ship.

[1] [https://twitter.com/cybergibbons/status/1213593041740664832](https://twitter.com/cybergibbons/status/1213593041740664832)

<comment><USER3> It takes a lot of energy for matter to change states from frozen. This would be a large buffer:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latent_heat](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latent_heat)</comment></comment>


Hyperinflation forces Zimbabwe to print $200 million notes - <AUTHOR> http://www.cnn.com/2008/WORLD/africa/12/06/zimbabwe.currency/index.html?eref=rss_world <comment><USER2> come on mate who did not see that one coming. I am waiting for the days of the Billion dollar notes. Mugabe should consider himself lucky that the current financial crisis meant less attention on Zimbabwe!</comment>


Fifteen Months Later - <AUTHOR> http://uncrunched.com/2014/06/24/fifteen-months-later/ <comment><USER2> Why isn't a false rape accusation punished with real jail time? I can't imagine the terror that's associated with an accusation that's so hard to fight.</comment>


DC Leaks: Little Known Site Dumps Data on George Soros - <AUTHOR> https://www.riskbasedsecurity.com/2016/08/dc-leaks-little-known-site-dumps-data-on-george-soros/ <comment><USER2> Soros, a thief who managed to essentially steal the majority of state owned assets of the former USSR outside Russia, and who has tried to introduce a "world tax" on every country under the guise of "helping the poor nations and nations effected by global warming"</comment>


Unix as IDE: Files - <AUTHOR> http://blog.sanctum.geek.nz/unix-as-ide-files/ <comment><AUTHOR> The introductory post in this series is quite interesting too: <http://blog.sanctum.geek.nz/unix-as-ide-introduction/>

Presumably there will be some more posts in the "Unix as an IDE" series (<http://blog.sanctum.geek.nz/series/unix-as-ide/>)</comment>


The chicken that lived for 18 months without a head - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-34198390 <comment><USER2> This would definitely be classed as animal abuse today.

To quote the article:

> Reports indicate that Mike's beak, face, eyes and an ear were removed with > the hatchet blow. But Smulders estimates that up to 80% of his brain by mass > - and almost everything that controls the chicken's body, including heart > rate, breathing, hunger and digestion - remained untouched.

So in effect the chicken was still alive and potentially suffering the whole 18 months. Lovely.

<comment><USER3> I don't really understand; the images in the article show a chicken with its entire head and neck removed, which doesn't jibe with that description. Am I just mistaken about chicken anatomy, or is there something missing?

<comment><USER4> That is the chicken[1] in the photo. According to the article, a lot of a chicken's brain is in the very back of the head / beginning of the neck. I believe in the photo, that's still got the entire neck there.

Comparison photo of a full chicken[2].

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mike_the_Headless_Chicken](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mike_the_Headless_Chicken) [2] [http://img3.wikia.nocookie.net/__cb20130606165306/animalcros...](http://img3.wikia.nocookie.net/__cb20130606165306/animalcrossing/images/4/41/Chicken.jpg)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I know in general there's no room for pity when it comes to animals for food. But just felt sad reading this, especially the attempts to replicate Mike's case. It frustrates me that while we make a strong legal case against cruelty towards animals, we don't give a thought about those animals that are turned to food for humans. Of course, you could argue why harm vegetables/plants for food, but I guess animals suffer much more because of higher consciousness.

<comment><USER6> Actually we give a lot of thoughts. There are both care and butchering standards - sadly the later, as usual for religious people and law, is opt in. There are exceptions for kosher and halal.

In Europe the animal well being is also codified into laws and regulation.

And a lot of small farms do care about their chickens and livestock.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I read about this years ago on [http://www.damninteresting.com/superflous- brain/](http://www.damninteresting.com/superflous-brain/) which is one of the most accurate domain names on the Internet.

I wonder what'd happen with a similar experiment on Hans the Counting Horse?

<comment><USER8> Yup. And here's 7 more damn awesome articles:

1\. [http://www.damninteresting.com/the-birth-control-of- yesterye...](http://www.damninteresting.com/the-birth-control-of-yesteryear/)

2\. [http://www.damninteresting.com/the- clockmaker/](http://www.damninteresting.com/the-clockmaker/)

3\. [http://www.damninteresting.com/the- derelict/](http://www.damninteresting.com/the-derelict/)

4\. [http://www.damninteresting.com/the-ethyl-poisoned- earth/](http://www.damninteresting.com/the-ethyl-poisoned-earth/)

5\. [http://www.damninteresting.com/the-zero-armed- bandit/](http://www.damninteresting.com/the-zero-armed-bandit/)

6\. [http://www.damninteresting.com/spies-on-the-roof-of-the- worl...](http://www.damninteresting.com/spies-on-the-roof-of-the-world/)

7\. [http://www.damninteresting.com/undark-and-the-radium- girls/](http://www.damninteresting.com/undark-and-the-radium-girls/)

Full archive: [http://www.damninteresting.com/archives/](http://www.damninteresting.com/archives/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I skimmed around Google...what's the next longest record for a chicken? The OP mentions rumors of scientists trying to repeat the phenomenon though none apparently successful...unless Mike had a extraordinarily unique anatomy...wouldn't this kind of thing been seen before, among all the billions of chickens killed since then? (Obviously, many billions more are killed every year, but probably not with an ax). Doing it as a science experiment seems cruel...but not nearly as seemingly cruel as many other kinds of animal experiments.

</comment><comment><USER10> If it is possible to be alive without a brain, then if you think about it that explains Donald Trump.

</comment><comment><USER11> I skimmed through the article, but I couldn't find anything about how the chicken was fed.

<comment><USER12> It mentions "Mike was fed with liquid food and water that the Olsens dropped directly into his oesophagus."</comment></comment>


Did RobinHood crash because of a leap year bug? - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/IanFrisch/status/1234606509197230082 <comment><USER2> Seems kind of likely. [https://imgur.com/a/2JvNdsy](https://imgur.com/a/2JvNdsy)

<comment><USER3> Static image from the Twitter thread that says the same thing quicker [https://twitter.com/Davis0036/status/1234605727223832576](https://twitter.com/Davis0036/status/1234605727223832576)

<comment><USER2> Yep. The whole thing is hilarious. What a shitshow.

</comment></comment></comment><comment> 1-6 One code hangup probably costed this company everything. I'd hate to be the CTO right now.

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm surprised that nobody in the company said "Hey, this is a leap year, can our system handle Feb 29th?"

<comment><USER4> Literally no one has ever said this, ever

<comment><USER5> That's untrue. I know a lot of people who have said that exact phrase....on February 28th.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I wouldn't jump to conclusions right away, this might be a bug in their web app rather than all clients.

</comment><comment><USER7> can anyone explain this? why are those 503s related to leap?

<comment><AUTHOR> The date in the request url is "2020-03-03"

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Yup checkout tweet in update.

[https://www.interestingsoup.com/robinhood-app- down/](https://www.interestingsoup.com/robinhood-app-down/)</comment>


Are mass shootings caused by firearm access or economic inequality? - <AUTHOR> https://thedeductible.com/2019/08/15/are-mass-shootings-caused-by-firearm-access-or-economic-inequality/ <comment><USER2> False dichotomy. What about social disintegration?</comment>


Is it rude? - <AUTHOR> I really find some of the SHOW HN threads interesting, in that case asking for the implementation insight of a particular feature or the architecture of product will be considered rude
or is it any unprofessional act ? <comment><USER2> Not at all. Anyway some features are "secret sauce" "it looks good but the implementation is a mess", so the poster may politely decline to answer.</comment>


The Abercrombie and Fitch Brown Pants Fiasco, "Splogs," and you - <AUTHOR> http://www.hanselman.com/blog/TechnicalAnalysisTheAbercrombieAndFitchBrownPantsFiascoSplogsAndYou.aspx <comment><USER2> These sites wouldn't be a problem except that Google inadvertently promotes them in search results---otherwise, they would be the tree falling in an empty forest and no one would bother creating them. Google promotes them because their algorithms are no better at reading content than the spam sites are at writing content (worse, actually, because at least the spammers can leverage existing human-produced content whereas Google has a harder time leveraging existing human comprehension). Spam in Google's results will continue to get worse until Google's search engine can actually reason on a par with humans, at which point we'll have reached the goal of strong AI.

<comment><USER3> Google does have a "Give Us Feedback" link. Admittedly, it's hidden at the bottom of the page.

It'd be really good to hear anything from Google about that link. Does reporting sites make any difference at all? Obviously Googlers cannot go into much detail, but it would be nice to know that it's not a futile gesture.</comment></comment>