The reliability pillar of the AWS Well-Architected Framework [pdf] - <AUTHOR> https://d1.awsstatic.com/whitepapers/architecture/AWS-Reliability-Pillar.pdf <comment><USER2> The section about calculating the availability of hard and redundant dependencies ignores the fact that systems often fail in tandem. For e.g. you might have a primary and secondary database in different AZs, each with 99.9% availability. This gives read operations a hypothetical uptime of 6-9s. But hidden SPOFs like operator error, VM infra failing, load balancer or other networking outages can make the 0.01% failure time overlap, blowing away your 6-9s dependency guarantee.

<comment><USER3> Many run into this when they learn the hard way that "RAID is not a backup" as wiping out all your data on one set of disks also wiped it on the other. Ditto for naive replication with no rollback capability. It's a fancier version of the same thing.

"DROP TABLE customer"

" _Oh crap! Better failover to DR. Oh crap! It's dropped there too?!_ "

<comment><USER4> exponentially delayed replication down the replica chain...

<comment><USER5> Why increase the interval at all? Why not just equally, or at most linearly increasing, delayed replication?

<comment><USER6> With replication at 1 minute intervals and ten replicas, you can step back at most 10 minutes.

Same with replicas at 1, 2, 4, 8, etc minutes, ten replicas let you step back up to 17 hours.

Much more time to detect and correct a catastrophic error.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> This is total submarine marketing by AWS. Im sure some very smart people with good intentions at AWS produced this, but the fact is they're not an independent academic providing objectively "the best" practices, they're a company trying to sell you something. They probably in full belief in their own abilities believe the AWS way of doing things is best, but frankly, I know as much as you do, or at least if you want to win me over you need to comprehensively prove it, not just preach from the hill.

TL:DR stop telling me you're doing better architectures in the same of selling me something

<comment><USER8> I don't look at the well-architected framework as "the AWS way is the best way of doing things" but rather "this is the best way of doing things on AWS".

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> > "... For example, if a system makes use of two independent components, each > with an availability of 99.9%, the resulting system availability is >99.999% > ... "

This does not seem correct.

<comment><USER10> What they probably mean is that if each component can fail _independently_ with a probability of 0.001 (0.1%) then the probability of both of them failing is 0.001 * 0.001 = 0.000001 (0.0001%)

If the system depends on just one of the components working then 1 - 0.000001 = 0.999999 (99.9999%)

<comment><USER11> This is correct, however in reality completely independent components are very rare. Even things that seem independent and truly redundant e.g. jet engines of an airliner, are much more likely to fail after one of them fails. Therefore this line of reasoning must be applied with extreme care.

<comment><USER12> Indeed, contaminated fuel would do it.

<comment><USER13> I would not model the risk on fuel as part of the risk on jet engines.

<comment><USER14> Other correlated risks include weather, birds, thrust, age, time since last maintenance...

In fact, I'm having trouble coming up with any common cause of engine failure which _isn 't_ correlated.

<comment><USER12> Manufacturing defect either material or user error maybe?

<comment><USER15> Many manufacturing defects affect whole batches of units.

People serious about preserving data with redundant arrays, tend to be careful to avoid using multiple drives from the same batch.

I vaguely recall a cloud backup provider losing customer data because they failed to do this. Annoyingly I can't find it on google.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Interesting that security is 1 of 5 pillars and hardly gets a mention in this paper. Who wrote this and why?

<comment><USER17> [https://d1.awsstatic.com/whitepapers/architecture/AWS- Securi...](https://d1.awsstatic.com/whitepapers/architecture/AWS-Security- Pillar.pdf)

<comment><USER16> Thank you

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> (erased)

<comment><USER19> Yep. Amazon (GCP, Azure) are making bank off the idea that you can just pay opex to run in multiple regions and lay off your SREs, but if you really wanted high availability (and not just some service credits when things go wrong) you would spend the engineering effort to go multi-provider. At that point on-prem looks better, but at least with multi-provider you're no longer in the business of ordering hardware and power.

The idea that failures between different systems are uncorrelated doesn't even work at a hardware level (e.g. two different sticks of RAM), it's pure fantasy when you're talking about software stacks, especially when you have things like the blow-up-the-world button called "BGP." I'm deeply uncomfortable reading formulas for availability that add or subtract nines, if there's real money on the line, you can afford to do some better math.

Disclosure: Work at a cloud provider, opinions are my own.

<comment><USER20> Something that often goes ignored is that in high availability situations like that, humans are the biggest risk by a huge margin. Computers (almost always) don't accidentally wipe out the prod database thinking it was beta, that's usually a human that made a simple mistake.

Dumping money into IaaS while neglecting to recognize that high availability requires extreme quality of both engineering, as well as testing/qa is a super common mistake that's being made these days. This means slowing down, which most upper management doesn't want to do.

Things like executing DR plans regularly to test that they wofk are extremely costly to the business,and are one of those "IT" things that you hopefully never have to actually do in production. But without things like that, what's the point of 3xing the cost of your fleet and adding complexity (another great vector to cause failure) for "availability"?

I think the answer often comes down tok the fact that people are hard to hire. Computers are easy to provision.

<comment><USER21> Yes, humans are really important in these situations, thats why "Operational Excellence" is the first pillar of AWS Well-Architected - you can only get so far in terms of reliability and security if you don't consider people and process. [https://d1.awsstatic.com/whitepapers/architecture/AWS- Operat...](https://d1.awsstatic.com/whitepapers/architecture/AWS-Operational- Excellence-Pillar.pdf) (I work on the AWS Well-Architected team)</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Using Safari Reader to Send Multi-Page Articles to Instapaper - <AUTHOR> http://forkbombr.net/reader-multipage-instapaper/ <comment><USER2> Non-linkjacked version: <http://forkbombr.net/reader-multipage-instapaper/></comment>


Don't Touch My Code Examining the Effects of Ownership on Software Quality - <AUTHOR> https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/publication/dont-touch-my-code-examining-the-effects-of-ownership-on-software-quality/ <comment><USER2> The actual title has an exclamation point. By automatically removing it, Hacker News has turned the title into nonsense.</comment>


'This has never happened before.' Powerball jackpot swells to $700M - <AUTHOR> http://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-ln-powerball-jackpot-675-million-20160107-story.html <comment><USER2> If the odds are 1 in 292.2 million, doesn't this mean that the expected value is actually positive? If you had 292.2 million bucks, you could guarantee a win.

<comment><USER3> You could guarantee a win with 175 million or so.

You couldn't however guarantee that you'd win more than you spent -- because others could win as well, diluting the pot.</comment></comment>


Show HN: Analyzing Your Goodreads Habits with Streamlit - <AUTHOR> http://www.tylerjrichards.com/books_reco.html <comment><USER2> Very interested analysis. Keep up the great work!</comment>


Why Didn't America Become Part of the Modern World? - <AUTHOR> https://eand.co/why-didnt-america-become-part-of-the-modern-world-dac6d65e9015 <comment><USER2> Poorly researched article, no citations and the numbers that are provided are grossly misleading. Ex:

>40 million Americans live in poverty, while 50 million Mexicans do

The Mexican poverty rate is $157/month and less in rural areas whereas US is over $1000/month.

Even with that, the US poverty rate is 12.7% below the national poverty line whereas Mexico's is 42%.

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

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poverty_in_the_United_States#R...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poverty_in_the_United_States#Recent_poverty_rate_and_guidelines)

Mexico also isn't anywhere near the bottom compared to other countries. Only 2% of Mexican citizens live below the international poverty line.

</comment><comment><USER3> This piece is very melodramatic, ignores huge pieces of US history, and the US's place in world history. No citations or references. Starts off relying on cherry picked headlines to set a biased tone that doesn't reflect reality for most US citizens.

</comment><comment><USER4> This is one of the dumbest things I've read in a while. America practically created the modern world, in ways good (transportation, electronics, medicine) and bad (modern warfare). But sure, the fact that you dont like the president negates all of that. Still the wealthiest country in human history, and it's not close. Please just look, for one second, at how the poorest Americans compare to the rest of the world. Its a positive story. Always more to be done, but take a step back once in a while and appreciate how amazing the world we live in is.

<comment><USER5> "Practically created the modern world" is a vast exaggeration and sad you actually believe that.. European countries especially Britain and France developed many of the things that enabled modernisation of the world.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Americans are weird. America is always exceptional. Exceptionally good, or exceptionally terrible. We have homeless people in Australia too, you know.

<comment><USER7> The blog's author is British.

<comment><USER8> I'm not sure we've been that exceptionally good for awhile now. if ever. It's a story we grow up with, and tend to repeat, But i think the author has a reasonable assertion, and describes america pretty accurately. I look back at all the vitriole we would cast at peoples of foreign countries, and laugh at how beneath us they are. I suppose most countries feel that way about others, it's the age old iron-age in-group/out-group that we need to somehow grow out of. Frankly we, as americans, are now looking up at other peoples.

<comment><USER8> I see this response got down voted, but no one has given evidence to it mistakes. Compare America to most of the other 'modern' countries. Look at the metrics: Poverty, Health care, Social values, Life expectancy, Jailing practices, Murder rates... on and on.... where are we exceptionally good?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> This essay certainly corresponds with the sentiment in this article:

[https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2016/08/trump-white- blu...](https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2016/08/trump-white-blue-collar- supporters/)

"You are patiently standing in the middle of a long line stretching toward the horizon, where the American Dream awaits. But as you wait, you see people cutting in line ahead of you. Many of these line-cutters are black—beneficiaries of affirmative action or welfare. Some are career-driven women pushing into jobs they never had before. Then you see immigrants, Mexicans, Somalis, the Syrian refugees yet to come. As you wait in this unmoving line, you're being asked to feel sorry for them all. You have a good heart. But who is deciding who you should feel compassion for? Then you see President Barack Hussein Obama waving the line-cutters forward. He's on their side. In fact, isn't he a line-cutter too? How did this fatherless black guy pay for Harvard? As you wait your turn, Obama is using the money in your pocket to help the line-cutters. He and his liberal backers have removed the shame from taking. The government has become an instrument for redistributing your money to the undeserving. It's not your government anymore; it's theirs."

I think this sentiment explains why so many poor whites are against programs that would ultimately help them. To them, minorities are the competition in a zero sum game.

<comment><USER8> The line is so long and non moving not because of these supposed line cutters, but because the people at the front of the line managing it are so slow and stingy processing the people in the line.

<comment><USER9> That could be part of it. If you are convinced by the Picketty idea where the rich have captured a greater part of the economy and rig the game in their favor (I am personally convinced by this) then you can see why things don't seem to be getting better for most Americans. But why do those same American's not focus their rage against the 1%? I think racism plays a role. And certainly, some members of the 1% stoke these flames.

<comment><USER8> >> But why do those same American's not focus their rage against the 1%

The %1 aren't stupid after all. They have done what they could to pit one group of poor people against another group of poor people. They have convinced a large group of poor white people that poor brown people are the cause of their problems, as if the most disadvantaged people in the country could possibly have any power over anyone. The power players in Washington have been doing this quasi-covertly for a long time, it's only in this latest term of presidency where the actions are explicit, obvious, overt and relentless.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Funny thing is that USA thinks it's rich because they are doing something well, but the reality is that they are just cutting coupons off of the fact that they didn't have their industry completely wrecked by WWII.

They'll get easily surpassed in raw income by India, China and few developing countries in one generation.

Or faster. When world decides to ditch the dollar as reserve currency it's house of cards.

<comment><USER11> > They'll get easily surpassed in raw income by India, China and few > developing countries in one generation.

Ain't gonna happen. Do the math of GDP per capita please.

<comment><USER10> Hard to predict things over few decades into the future.

Also predictions are accurate only if nothing unpredictable happens. I don't think anyone made 30 year accurate prediction of British economy in 1920.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Thinkpieces lately have had a trend of reaching harder and harder to link the news de jour to a higher, abstract concepts. They try to give an impression that their words can carve America out of the "modern world" with surgical precision, by contrasting the socialist utopia of... the entirety of Europe.

The result feels hystrionic to me. Claiming that America has no social contract, that there is a proto-fascist movement arising, all this and more, feels like it is just designed to raise the excitement for people in the correct echo chamber. By calling on increasingly abstract concepts the author can reign in an appeal to authority and emotion that has more appeal than actual facts and statistics.

The author, and his inward-looking media peers, are all drinking eachother's Kool-Aid a bit too much. It's like some sort of outrage porn that keeps getting remixed over and over again, and becoming some sort of fractal version of itself.

</comment><comment><USER13> Though poverty does cause ruin, the cause of poverty is often a lack of education and I'm not talking academic, I'm talking about the education your parents give you. Europe has been through a lot more bad experiences and doesn't want to do that again whilst America is yet to learn.

</comment><comment><USER11> > Now think of America. People dying for a lack of insulin.

I stopped treating this article seriously here. I can confirm you this happens everyday in a third world country and the international English-speaking media don't give a damn about it.

Quickly skimming through the article I can see the author was filled with rage and drowned in a sense of entitlement. True, human existence is suffering, but it is not just the US. You can never eliminate poverty completely.

I'll tell a Soviet joke. \- What is the best way to eliminate poverty in a communist country? \- Eliminate the people who are in poverty.

That is where the author's blind spot is. The author fails to see the foundations that lead to the rapid expansion of wealth in the past three hundred years: limited government, individual liberty, free market, and _capitalism_. Before the industrial revolution, everywhere on the planet people live in "poverty" if judged by today's standard. You can rant all day long about your rage against poverty. But you are not providing any _better_ solution than the _existing_ solutions the system has.</comment>


Only 13% of Wikipedia Contributors Are Women, Study Says - <AUTHOR> http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2009/08/31/only-13-of-wikipedia-contributors-are-women-study-says/

<comment><USER2> Funny how they didn't think to include a contribution ratio, just a contributors ratio.

That would be just as interesting, if not more interesting.</comment>


Raspberry Pi Press Announce Code the Classics - <AUTHOR> https://www.raspberrypi.org/blog/pre-order-code-the-classics-today/ <comment><AUTHOR> As someone currently embroiled in a project to motivate people to explore classic videogame development techniques- this is super interesting.

I'm not sure how I feel about Pygame/Pygame Zero, though. It feels a little detached from classic C techniques and doesn't present the technical challenges of original hardware. On the up side, it's far more accessible to beginners.

I really enjoyed working through, for example, this Wolfenstein 3D-style raycasting tutorial- [https://lodev.org/cgtutor/raycasting.html](https://lodev.org/cgtutor/raycasting.html)</comment>


Clinton Gets $13m from Health Industry, "Single-Payer Will Never, Ever Come" - <AUTHOR> http://www.ibtimes.com/political-capital/hillary-clinton-gets-13-million-health-industry-now-says-single-payer-will-never <comment><USER2> I recently quit my job to start my own indie game studio. I came dangerously close to being unable to file the paperwork to prove that I was experiencing a "qualifying life event" that would allow me to sign up for ACA insurance outside of the normal once-per-year window. It's not that I was lazy -- I started looking at options over a week before I left my job, and between the various websites being down every night, and insurance representatives not knowing what they're talking about, and having to figure out coverage for my partner also, the whole process was way trickier than it should have been.

A former coworker of mine recently went through the same process when he quit, and ended up without insurance for a short period.

A lapse in insurance coverage means exposure to basically unlimited costs. That's not a position anyone should have to take, whether due to financial hardship or missing a paperwork deadline. And until we get single-payer, there are going to people who fall through the cracks who have to face the possibility of losing their life savings if they get hit by a bus.

<comment><USER3> I encourage you to support candidates that vigorously support single payer (I do).

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> So the US spends a ridiculous percentage of it's GDP (15-20%) on health care. Many treatments for serious diseases are far too expensive for a family living on a median income to afford, so health insurance is a requirement in order to avoid bankruptcy in the face of a serious health problem.

My question is, are we getting something for this money? Does healthcare research and innovation in the United States justify what it's costing us, or does the whole system need a reboot?

<comment><USER5> It's the latter. Privatization of sectors that are responsible for meeting human rights such as right to life (enforced by the police - as of now a public entity), liberty (right to vote - in some cases needs to be afforded by paying for IDs), education (we had a strong public education system until late 1980s), health care (private insurance companies are run as profit-making corporations, treating patients as cash-cows that are disposed of when valueless), and others is not sound policy for a democratic nation. We fell victim to the siren songs of lobbyists and paid media analysts, and have supported massive privatization and agglomeration efforts by corporates over the past 30+ years. This is hurting us.

<comment><USER4> I was more asking whether or not the quality and advancement of the healthcare in the United States justifies what it costs. Are we getting what we pay for?

Another way to phrase it: if we trade market forces for universal access, will the rate of healthcare innovation slow down?

<comment><USER5> no, because policies governing access to health care should not share a lot of commonalities with R&D efforts in medical science and technology. The former should be public, while the latter should be commercially driven as much as possible. In our country, the former is predominantly privatized, while the latter is public funded. As a result, we have shown relatively slow progress in R&D while doling out sub-standard health care.

p.s. I really like this statement - "You start to understand how an economy works when you realize Karl Marx and Adam Smith were hitting on the same idea". It is accurate in that both men seeked a more efficient economic system - a far cry from what we have today. What we should have is a combination of both ideas - merging public guarantee of basic rights with the concept of private property.

<comment><USER4> _The former should be public, while the latter should be commercially driven as much as possible._

I think there's a recipe for consensus building here. Granted that you'll never be able to pay for universal health care by eliminating public research grants, but there's got to be some lobby money coming from medical R&D for policies like this.

As for Marx and Smith, the statement is not just about efficiency, but also oppression. Forceful intervention into an economy is oppressive and inefficient. Impoverished workers operating in unsafe conditions are both oppressed and unproductive. These are obviously blanket statements that require nuance for specific situations, but that's basically what I was getting at.

I'd personally like to see an environment where initial risk is taken on by the capitalist, and as a venture matures, ownership gradually passes to labor. When you think about it, it's not too far off from what we have now with the Seed -> VC -> IPO cycle.

<comment><USER5> Hmm that is also an interesting and truthful way of looking at that statement. I echo your sentiment for businesses to be more employee centered. We have to buck the trend for making profit margin the absolute bottom line.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This is a terrible article. It takes something HRC said decades ago, contrasts it to something she said recently (out of context of course) and presents it as a concrete cause and effect scenario. The ACA took a monumental amount of effort and wasn't even particularly groundbreaking in terms of legislation in its final form. Single-payer really is a pipe dream right now.

</comment><comment><USER7> Just discovered that my wife and I can't get insurance until the next open enrollment period (November?), because we missed the previous one.

Supposedly this policy was enacted to prevent people from getting insurance only when they get sick. Who comes up with this stuff?

If there was ever a bloated carcass of an industry awaiting disruption... unfortunately its so institutionalized that any new system would require rogue doctors / hospitals.

</comment><comment><USER8> To be fair, single payer healthcare systems are a mess... A relic of 1940s Era economic thought. No one serious about designing national health systems even considers them anymore. The waiting lists, under and over staffing, wage setting and budget impossibilities make it impossible. Canada has been convening one health council after another for 20 years to try and fix their system, and every one says they have to go mixed. But politics of identity make that hard. I guess it must be the same for Bernie... Hard to reject your roots.

The most successful universal coverage systems are mixed models, like France and Germany. Make the private system compete with a public system (and vice versa). The details of how that works depend on what part of the outcome you want to target: best costs, best patient outcomes, etc...

</comment><comment><USER9> Half of America still thinks the word 'socialism' is a curse word. There are enough ignorants, malcontents, and profiteers to hold back meaningful progress far beyond any of our lifespans.

Not to be a wet blanket or anything, but people expecting big, commonsense improvements to the US social system are doomed to be disappointed.

Additionally, the sheer size of the health insurance industry is a speed limit on how quickly such a transition could happen, both because of their ability to retard or corrupt political progress, as well as the scale of economic disruption such a change would entail.</comment>


Ask HN: What OS should I use to to revive an 8yr old PC (1GB RAM) - <AUTHOR>

I want to just be able to connect it to my TV and watch Youtube and Hulu.<p>Already tried (and didn't like): Ubuntu 11.10 (open to other version) Chromium <comment><USER2> I have fedora 16 running on a similiar laptop (dell inspiron 8600). On a laptop like that, i think the graphics card is what will make the most noticable difference. Hopefully you have an intel or ati card with supported drivers. Nvidia let their drivers for that era go "legacy" and nouveau (the open nvidia driver) might be lacking even basic hardware acceleration.

Sadly, Windows XP might actually be your best bet if have an nvidia card and you want to do things with flash and expect it to be somewhat performant.

</comment><comment><USER3> I like running Linux Mint LXDE edition on my Atom/ION machine with a 1G of memory. It's based on Ubuntu (I think the latest version is based on 11.04), but uses LXDE, which is the lightest "full" UI that I could find. I put Chrome on it and it works fairly well - not exactly snappy, but sufficient for Web browsing.

The plus side is that all the software that's in Ubuntu is still available (from the repositories), which might not be the case with some other minimalistic distros.

</comment><comment><USER4> TinyCore if you want minimal and hard work (<http://distro.ibiblio.org/tinycorelinux/welcome.html>) {Damn Small Linux is dead. TinyCore is sort of the result.}

Puppy if you want, well, I dunno, but it has a loyal userbase ([http://puppylinux.org/main/Overview%20and%20Getting%20Starte...](http://puppylinux.org/main/Overview%20and%20Getting%20Started.htm))

or there are a gajillion "minimal" versions of Ubuntu. CrunchBang is one, but there are many more.

<comment><AUTHOR> thanks!

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Some lighter weight Linux, I'd say. See : [http://tuxradar.com/content/whats- best-lightweight-linux-dis...](http://tuxradar.com/content/whats-best- lightweight-linux-distro)

</comment><comment><USER6> To be honest a minimal version of windows 7 will run better than xp on a system that old. I mean, if you just want to setup something with the least amount of hassle.

Get a good video card though.

</comment><comment><USER7> I have windows xp running on a 7 year old PC that was low end at the time. Hulu and Youtube do pretty well on it but netflix chokes. If I were going to set it up again I'd probably go with Ubuntu.

<comment><AUTHOR> I actually had the exact same scenario! Then I tried installing Ubuntu w/ Wubi and it corrupted my Windows partition. So I wiped it clean and wanted to do something else. Ended up going with Xubuntu. No netflix :(

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I used Debian testing with openbox/tint2 on my Toshiba NB505 for a while. It has a 1.66GHz Atom with 1GB of RAM. It ran pretty snappy.

</comment><comment><USER9> You could try Ubuntu 10.04LTS, depending on your taste (habits) I think Windows XP will do just fine on your 1GB PC.

</comment><comment><USER10> An older Ubuntu could be more pleasurable, like 10.10, then you can use the classic gnome UI.

</comment><comment><USER11> I use Ubuntu NBR on machines like this and it seems to work ok.

<comment><AUTHOR> hows ubuntu nbr vs jolicloud does anyone know?

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> ZenWalk has always been my choice for older hardware.

</comment><comment><USER13> Arch linux with a lightweight WM or framebuffer.

</comment><comment><USER14> lubuntu</comment>


On Journeys - <AUTHOR> http://lcamtuf.blogspot.com/2015/03/on-journeys.html

<comment><USER2> Just FYI: The owner of this blog is Michał Zalewski, author of afl-fuzz[1]. Lately, his posts have alternated between addressing technical topics and social topics.

I'm very happy to hear he has accomplished his goal of becoming an American.

1\. [http://lcamtuf.coredump.cx/afl/](http://lcamtuf.coredump.cx/afl/)

<comment><USER3> I first heard of Michał when he won a 1996 contest for a computer-themed sci- fi short story with an oneiric tale about an astoundingly complex self- modifying virus. He would have been 15 back then. I was 12, and I thought to myself "wow, I will never be as smart as this guy."

Fast forward 19 years, and the impression still stands.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I could not disagree more with Michał.

When I first read his blog post I added an item to my todo list to write a lengthy reply. I never did, and now I think it is time to do so — but it will be in Polish, as it is mostly Polish people who might be interested.

I think Michał has an extreme view of both the United States (which is not the paradise he paints it to be) and Poland (which isn't nearly as bad as he describes). As someone who has lived both in Poland and the US, I came to opposite conclusions: I would much rather live in Poland. I could live anywhere (I don't have the visa problem like he did), but my choice is to live in Poland.

I am puzzled by his extremely negative experiences. People all around me get paid good money for doing extremely interesting work. The money isn't necessarily the same as in the Silicon Valley, but it goes a long way here: living in Poland (even in the largest cities) still isn't as expensive as in Western Europe. All in all, as a young person entering adult life, you will be _much_ better off here than in the US, assuming you are a highly-skilled professional (which he is the extreme definition of!).

I also find it disconcerting that he begins with a historical note, describing Poland's struggle for independence, and then follows with a description of how he basically said "I don't care" and moved out. It is worth considering what happens to countries where most people make a similar decision.

But most importantly, I don't understand Michał's negative viewpoint. My experiences have been very different: my standard of living here in Poland is really good. I don't want to describe what I dislike about the US, especially since Michał does not seem to even consider criticism ("no matter how smug the critics are"), so I'll just say that it can look very, very different from a different person's point of view.

<comment><USER5> The economy in Poland is almost exactly 3x weaker/smaller than the US. Sure, it means that soda is only $0.66 a can, that you can buy a feast for ~$7, and that clothes are extremely inexpensive; imported goods, however, carry the American price. You're not buying an iPhone on your salary. (Hardly anyone does.)

If you travel to Poland with a pile of money, the living is far from difficult. It's quite a great place to go on vacation. (Especially if you already know the language like myself.) But taxes there are high and many people find themselves in poverty.

I agree that it's worth betting on Poland's future. CD Projekt RED is leading the pack in bringing new tech industry to Poland, for instance. I can only see a brighter future.

At the same time, I don't want to live there. Not yet.

<comment><USER4> I don't understand your point of view. The size of the economy has little to do with your everyday spending.

As for taxes and iPhones, I pay 19% income tax, and when I buy an iPhone I deduct a) 23% VAT, b) 19%, because that is a business expense. So, I don't see how one could say "taxes there are high".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I wonder if he ever considered moving to the UK, lots of cutting edge research and you get free public health care and very little gun crime. Also its in the EU (for now) so moving from Poland would have been easy.

<comment><USER7> The breadth of opportunities vastly the outweighs the minuscule risk of being carjacked, despite what Europeans may choose to believe.

<comment><USER8> I think most Europeans do know that, even if only at some subconscious level. The rest is just propaganda, which is strong these days in every country.

But to be fair, the risk is not minuscule - for example the murder rate is 4-5 times higher in the US than it is in Europe. The only two times in my life I was close to being beaten up was during my few months visit to California.

<comment><USER9> 4-5x extremely minuscule is still minuscule.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Why that 'rare' Chinese tea you're drinking isn't rare at all. - <AUTHOR> http://www.minrivertea.com/blog/the-rare-tea-myth/

<comment><USER2> As if by chance Chris appears on Hacker News. I ordered some tea from him a few weeks ago and will definitely order again. Yes, I know Chris, but no, I wasn't asked to post this - it's great to see a buddy doing a great job.

<comment><AUTHOR> hehe - how else am I going to learn coding tricks etc. out here in China?

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> A masterclass in web marketing. I placed an order purely on the strength of this page.

<comment><AUTHOR> That's quite a comment, thanks! There's a marketing element to it, of course, but seriously, one of my main reasons for starting the tea business was because I was fed up of seeing over-priced teas being marketed incorrectly that I knew anyone could buy easily and cheaply if they were in China.</comment></comment>


Symbolic execution with SymCC: Don't interpret, compile - <AUTHOR> http://www.s3.eurecom.fr/tools/symbolic_execution/symcc.html <comment><USER2> Wow, talk about Baader Meinhof. I've spent the last few days hacking out a FOSS Mathematica impl + jupyter kernel, and I'm trying to keep as much of the semantics and stdlib as possible defined inside the interpreted runtime, so I can have a small Haskell core and avoid the verbosity of defining builtins in the interpreter.

However... it's slow as hell, and I was wondering if I could implement some kind of bytecode compiler to cache results. It looks like this does exactly that, by tagging cells as symbolic or constant, and replacing them on the fly. Hmmm.

</comment><comment><USER3> If i understand, this is a one time performance improvement, which reduces the overhead of symbolic execution by emitting final assembly instructions into the final binary.

Great

But i dont see any algorithmic improvement on the exponential explosion of states?

Is this "outsourced" to a fuzzer that has to generate coverage test cases ?

</comment><comment><USER4> I think the paper provides maybe the best introduction and overview of the approach: [http://www.s3.eurecom.fr/docs/usenixsec20_symcc.pdf](http://www.s3.eurecom.fr/docs/usenixsec20_symcc.pdf)

To me, it was also not clear initially why symbolic execution is useful anyway. But this is for testing. The paper introduction explains it. "Symbolic execution was conceived more than 40 years ago to aid in software testing." The goal is to cover all possible execution paths in all possible conditions, which is hard or impossible with traditional testing.

The new approach here (SymCC) improves a lot on the runtime of the symbolic execution over previous approaches.

<comment><USER5> You can do a lot with Symbolic Execution. Bug-reproduction for example. Say your customer remarks on a weird state if the system. You put a 'stop condition' as 'the system is in the state the customer described' and ask 'how'? You get a list of input & their values. Aaaaah that's how :-). Also if you record/print intermediate values you can use them as complexity reduction for your search.

Also, for minimal log/trace placement it's actually fun to use.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> What are some use cases for symbolic execution? Is it only for fuzzing?

<comment><USER7> It's actually the exact opposite of fuzzing; with symbolic execution you aim to prove, symbolically, that all possible code paths have some desired behavior (e.g. not crashing,). With fuzzing you just try code paths (guided) randomly and see if any of them crash.</comment></comment>


Will HTML5 overtake native mobile apps? - <AUTHOR> http://pixelstech.net/article/index.php?id=1336650706

<comment><USER2> I hope not. No matter what people say, you _can_ tell the difference between native and non-native apps. They use more memory, use more CPU (and therefore drain the battery) and generally feel like second-class citizens.</comment>


Mentor list in Google documents - <AUTHOR>

A couple of weeks back someone posted a link to a Google document where established entrepreneurs were entering their details and offering their help.<p>Does someone remember the link to the document? <comment><AUTHOR> Found it:

[http://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?key=0AmPJqmiFQCPEdGdQS3VO...](http://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?key=0AmPJqmiFQCPEdGdQS3VOSWRXV09QVXBqMlpuRjhONEE&hl=en#gid=0)</comment>


Twitter didn't act after bomb suspect made threats on its platform - <AUTHOR> https://www.cnn.com/2018/10/26/tech/cesar-sayoc-twitter-response/index.html <comment><USER2> Other than removing the tweet, which they didn't do, what could they have done?

The strain it would out on Twitter and law enforcement investigating every single tweet that contains violence would be too much.

<comment><USER3> This.

Twitter is a communications service, not the police.

<comment><USER4> You're right, but it's easy to see how they've blurred the line by taking action to ban some high profile individuals from their platform.

<comment><USER5> What line has been blurred? As a private platform, Twitter has always had the right to ban anyone from their platform for any reason. Doing so isn't acting as an agent of the state or using the state's monopoly on force, even when they're compelled to do so by the law.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I don't understand the media.

I think it's easy to make Twitter the bad guy, censor and you get called out for it, allow free speech and they become responsible for people's actions.

The polarity increase between "us" and "them" and especially the political animosity between parties is the catalyst for this kind of radicalism. It no longer feels like American first, politics second.

Are we able to detect sarcasm using artificial intelligence yet? Because until that's possible, the credibility of a threat is going to be the job of law enforcement and not Twitter.

<comment><USER7> Death threats from the MAGA bombing suspect, isn't sarcasm.</comment></comment>


Shut up and calculate (2007) - <AUTHOR> http://arxiv.org/abs/0709.4024 <comment><USER2> This is known as the instrumentalist approach to quantum mechanics, where we deliberately avoid thinking about the philosophical interpretations of things like the wavefunction, and only focus on the results of experiments. The thinking being, the observables don't change regardless of whether you pick MWI or pilot wave or the Copenhagen interpretation, so what does it matter? (The actual phrase "shut up and calculate" is older than this paper; I think David Mermin coined it.)

This approach rubs some people the wrong way, either because it's seen as a failure of imagination on the part of physicists to look at the bigger questions, or because it drifts close to the discredited logical positivism of the mid-20th century. Those are valid complaints, but I think it can also be seen as humility on the part of physicists, and an understanding that this is outside their field of expertise. "Science" is a fundamentally empirical exercise; if you're doing thinking without empiricism, it might still be valuable thinking, but it isn't science. "Shut up and calculate" is shorthand for, "Because these questions are not empirical, our tools and methods we have as scientists are not capable of addressing them." It's acknowledging that their powers are limited.

(I do think it would be nice if more physicists thought about it anyway, because in their abscence the void has been filled with woo by a bunch of New Age cranks, but that's not a moral obligation on their part)

<comment><USER3> It's worth noting that Tegmark is advocating a particular approach to the entirety of physics, not simply quantum mechanics. Taken to an extreme, a further criticism of instrumentalism (due to Alan Sokal) is that the concept of "dinosaur" becomes nothing more than a fanciful way for paleontologists to come up with predictions about which fossils they will discover next.

I'm not sure I agree with you that "instrumentalism" is an adequate description of the position of Tegmark outlines. Instead of neglecting to assign an ontological status to anything, Tegmark appears to be assigning an ontological status to the mathematical structures themselves.

<comment><USER4> _[...] Tegmark appears to be assigning an ontological status to the mathematical structures themselves._

Which appears to me similar to rejecting the idea of an universe that just somehow came into existence or existed forever and introducing a god as the source of the universe but still leaving you behind with the same questions as before but now attached to the god instead of the universe.

And I personally don't really buy into the idea of mathematical structures existing independent of humans or the universe or whatnot anyway. Humans bring mathematical structures into existence, they postulate the axioms and explore the consequences. That pieces of the universe are isomorphic to this or that mathematical structure and therefore show similar properties and behaviors is either accidentally or because a mathematical structure was explicitly designed to mimic certain aspects of the universe, at least as far as I am concerned.

<comment><USER5> The only way to get out of this mess is self organization. Without a self governing process that causes atom crystallization you will always end up with some problem of beginning and end. Then the hole big bang theory is also counter factual: [http://www.cosmology.info/newsletter/2014.05.pdf](http://www.cosmology.info/newsletter/2014.05.pdf)

The BSM-SG model gives a very logical explanation how galaxies come to be and the high order matter we can measure (proton/neutrons/electrons/positrons).

It does not give you an answer tho, where the 2 types of fundamental particles come from, but their pure existence in mass quantities is enough for a galaxy to be born, or in our case, many many galaxies.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> I agree that most physicists believe that an external reality exists.

I agree that physical theories aim to describe how it works.

But I disagree that it follows that our physical reality has a mathematical structure. My objections are:

\- There is no compelling reason to think that "purely abstract" mathematics any less anthropocentric than human language;

\- Even if mathematics transcends humanity, there is no compelling reason to think that there is a single overarching mathematical structure of the universe, despite being able to predict the outcomes of our interactions to greater and greater accuracy as our physical theories develop.

It may be that Tegmark addresses these points in his "full strength" version, but given the way he glosses over these hidden assumptions in this paper, I'm not inclined to dig in and find out.

<comment><USER6> Tegmark believes (pardon me if I have this wrong) that all conceivable realities exist that can be described by equations, not only this reality. The reality we have access to is the one in whose equations we are ourselves locked up, so to speak.

I'm basically with Tegmark. For one thing, what has physics ever come up with but equations, and improved equations to replace those, and so on? Everything so far has been math.

So, going forward, either everything in physics will always be rooted in math, or else some "non-math stuff" has to be discovered. (The very idea of "non math stuff" being at the root of reality seems absurd.) What kind of thing would that be? I think if we discover the ultimate equations then that's all there will be: those equations, and mysterious constants embedded in them that _just are_. The only explanation for those constants will be the anthropic principle: if those constants were different, we wouldn't be here to contemplate why they are, and in some other universe there are beings completely different from us also wondering why their constants and equations are they way they are.)

<comment><USER7> > For one thing, what has physics ever come up with but equations, and > improved equations to replace those, and so on?

Observations of nature and rational explanation of those in terms of old but also new concepts. Equations are just one of technical artifacts to help us think in a precise way. If we had computers sooner, there might have been physics without differential equations.

<comment><USER6> What observations are made in physics experiments which don't end up expressed as a cluster of floating-point numbers?

<comment><USER3> I think the previous comment was getting at concepts like "the laws of physics are the same in all inertial reference frames". It doesn't directly refer to any mathematics, although of course it can only be tested via the quantitative predictions that follow from it.

<comment><USER6> I understand the statement "the laws of physics are the same in all inertial reference frames" as referring to correspondences and invariances among some math under a coordinate transformation.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Regardless of what you call the universe, we already know 1. Everything we know about it comes from sensory input, and 2. That sensory input's production can be modeled mathematically. But it's hard for me to make sense of what author really means by the claim "the universe _is_ math". He claims after pulling away notation math is "A set of abstract entities with relations between them". Great! But then again... any idea I can conceive of can be said to be abstract entities with relations between them. That's an awfully vague definition. Then it's as if he fills in the void with baggage from his subjective understanding of mathematical structures (object movement is like 4 dimensional spaghetti). It's an interesting read but it seems like he just wants his idea of the universe to be more literal than it is.

<comment><USER9> I disagree with 1 and 2, in the sense that i believe that sensory input has no fundamental ontological role, and is merely how we biological humans bootstrap our knowledge of macroscopic objects.

The real dilemma of quantum theory is how to reconcile this macroscopic world with the world described by quantum theory. Personally I don't think many worlds approaches make sense because they don't have an adequate description of probability.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> How does this square with Gödel's Incompleteness Theorem ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gödel%27s_incompleteness_theor...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gödel%27s_incompleteness_theorems))?

</comment><comment><USER11> In your gut you know he's a nut...

[http://arxiv.org/find/physics/1/au:+Tegmark_M/0/1/0/all/0/1](http://arxiv.org/find/physics/1/au:+Tegmark_M/0/1/0/all/0/1)

<comment><USER4> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Max_Tegmark](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Max_Tegmark)

<comment><USER12> I think that there are respected scientists who know all the facts in that article and still consider him a nut. (I say I _think_ because most respected scientists are too polite, or politic, to say so directly, but it's the impression that I've got in reading discussions of him.)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I'm into the BSM-SG model and this approach, is the same as we have now and it failed. Using mathematical logic in quantum mechanics was one of the larger mistakes we did...

reality is exactly the opposite, everything has a form, mass, movement,...

</comment><comment> j-dr I find it ironic that the title of this article is 'Shut up and Calculate', seeing as he proposes no way to calculate the things that he proposes would qualify his theory as falsifiable.</comment>


Tool: The right way to email a Git repository – Brian Graham - <AUTHOR> https://statagroup.com/articles/git-bundle <comment><USER2> Wow, TIL.

git continues to surprise with a lot of these lesser-known subcommands and flags.</comment>


Eric Schmidt will testify to Congress in September - <AUTHOR> http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702303365804576434242590555286.html?mod=WSJ_business_whatsNews

<comment><USER2> Seems like a very poor choice for Eric to appear in front of Congress. Can only result in bad PR for Google and hightened scrunity of Google.

My favority Schmidt gaffe thus far was his comment on user privacy "If you have something to hide, maybe you shouldn't be doing it"</comment>


House bill wants to crack down on prepaid 'burner' phones - <AUTHOR> http://www.zdnet.com/article/california-lawmaker-wants-to-crack-down-on-pre-paid-burner-phones/ <comment><AUTHOR> Surely this will prevent determined people from ever getting phones without giving out personally identifiable information! And customers who buy these phones to call home certainly already have SSNs or drivers' licenses.</comment>


Oracle Sues Google For Patent And Copyright Infringement - <AUTHOR> http://www.businessinsider.com/oracle-sues-google-for-patent-and-copyright-infringement-2010-8

<comment><USER2> Patents cited in the complaint(<http://www.scribd.com/doc/35810897/Oracle- Google-Complaint>):

<http://www.google.com/patents/about?id=dyQGAAAAEBAJ>, [http://www.google.com/patents/about?id=G1YGAAAAEBAJ&dq=6...](http://www.google.com/patents/about?id=G1YGAAAAEBAJ&dq=6192476) \- Does Dalvik even use the Java security model?

<http://www.google.com/patents/about?id=5GMZAAAAEBAJ> \- related to the dex file format

<http://www.google.com/patents/about?id=U-4UAAAAEBAJ>

<http://www.google.com/patents/about?id=mEwEAAAAEBAJ>

</comment><comment><USER3> I think this type of behavior was what everyone feared would happen, but I never really believed they would stoop this low.

This may mean that JCP is dead, harmony is doomed and it must be pretty scary for companies heavily invested in Java.

<comment><USER4> This would be like Microsoft suing the Mono team for its C# and CLI implementations, which it has irrevocably promised not to do:

<http://www.microsoft.com/interop/cp/default.mspx>

I was worried when Oracle acquired Sun, but I never thought I'd see them clamp down on Java to the extent that .NET is a significantly more open platform. But there it is.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> and people thought Java was a safer platform than .NET/Mono !

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> This is really awful. Only proves that money drives oracle and not ethics and community. Wonder what's in store for mysql.

<comment><USER4> It's worse than that, it proves that _short-term_ money drives Oracle. What kind of effect do they think this behavior will have on long-term Java vs. .NET/CLR platform adoption?

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> I think we can probably expect this from Oracle. I think next on the chopping block would be GWT and then companies who use J2EE.

</comment><comment><USER6> Could the timing they chose have anything to do with the whole deal between Google and Verizon?</comment>


Dyson gears up for electric car testing - <AUTHOR> https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-45345778 <comment> King-Aaron I'm very interested to see what Dyson comes up with here, but I'm surprised they've considered undertaking the entire vehicle design and manufacturing process, and not just developing powertrains for other companies to use.

<comment><USER2> I think this is one sign of the changing times for the automotive industry. Dyson has a lot of technologies required to manufacture an electric car in- house. Batteries and their control, electric motors, and of course they manufacture their products too. So getting into car manufacturing doesn't seem to be a huge stretch.

<comment><USER3> Yep, EVs have turned automobiles into consumer electronics.

Hopefully that doesn't mean they will be made to be unservicable by third parties, disposable, and replaced regularly.

<comment><USER4> Is that really that far off from the current state of a cars? We had a 69 gmc truck growing up and I could point o the parts in the engine and understand how everything worked. Later ok we got a 97 gmc truck and damn it's way more complex. I know it can still be worked on by anyone and is definitely serviceable but what is a 2017 model like I'm sure even more complex with onboard computers etc...

<comment><USER3> You can still walk right up to the parts department counter and order OEM replacement parts for anything on the vehicle, just like the dealer can.

The computerized bits are well isolated control modules and are generally treated as black boxes which either work or are replaced as a unit. But that doesn't encompass the entire vehicle, the vast majority of the vehicle is still very servicable, all the mechanical bits haven't really changed that much from the 60s.

I've rebuilt engines on cars and motorcycles, modern and old, many computerized with EFI, you generally don't worry about the inner workings of the computers unless you're modifying things.

In my experience the more modern stuff is actually simpler having fewer vacuum lines and archaic rube goldberg machines for control systems.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> It's crazy that they got money from the government towards this when their profits are so insanely high. James Dyson is very tight-fisted (I used to work there; that is part of the reason I left).

</comment><comment><USER6> I'm all for alternatives so that I can choose away from Tesla and away from some heavy-handed oil-producing countries in what/who I support.

No idea if Dyson is going to make a good electric car or not but I sure hope they do -- another big player in the space also means more innovation so I'm up for that, and Dyson prides themselves in unique engineering so maybe they'll make a thing that will actually help other manufacturers regardless of whether their car is a success or not.

</comment><comment><USER7> I'm genuinely curious as to what they're working on: my guess is it'll have spherical wheels, a climate control system with cyclone technology and expensive air filters you're supposed to wash every 500 miles, be silvery plastic with orange highlights, dock with a dedicated wall charger, feature a drivechain with Dyson Digital Motor(TM) technology, and cost a lot of money.

<comment> King-Aaron _And it will suck_

<comment><USER8> That would be a first for Dyson.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Is it just me or has Dyson's brand really benefitted from The Terminator association?

</comment><comment><USER10> I don't understand the Dyson hype. Their products seem over-engineered, over- priced, and under-performing...

On top of which Dyson himself is strongly pro-Brexit [1] which is shaping up to be a disaster for the UK. Really don't hold out much hope for this.

[1] [https://www.telegraph.co.uk/men/thinking-man/sir-james- dyson...](https://www.telegraph.co.uk/men/thinking-man/sir-james-dyson-so-if- we-leave-the-eu-no-one-will-trade-with-us/)

<comment><USER11> Likewise.

Brexiteers hold him up as a paragon of British engineering and entrepreneurship. But he took an already-solved problem and "re-imagined" it with twice the cost and power requirement.

I'll stick with my Vax, thx.

<comment><USER12> What I'm getting from you two is that you're desperate to insert Brexit into any conversation.</comment></comment></comment>