Al Alcorn, creator of Pong, explains the NTSC color graphics trick - <AUTHOR> https://spectrum.ieee.org/tech-talk/tech-history/silicon-revolution/al-alcorn-creator-of-pong-explains-how-early-home-computers-owe-their-color-to-this-one-cheap-sleazy-trick <comment><USER2> "When the Apple II was being done, I helped them. I mean, I actually loaned them my oscilloscope, I had a 465 Tektronix scope, which I still have, and they designed the Apple II with it. I designed Pong with it."

Damn, that scope is a serious piece of history.

<comment><USER3> We really could stand to come back to those days of collaboration, freedom, and hands on practical development.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> _AA: In one repair shop, there was a real cheap, sleazy color bar generator [for testing televisions]. And instead of doing color properly by synthesizing the phases and stuff like that, it simply used a crystal that was 3.58 megahertz [the carrier frequency for the color signal] minus 15.750 kilohertz, which was the horizontal scan frequency. So it slipped one phase, 360 degrees, every scan line. You put that signal on the screen and you've got a color bar from left to right. It really was really the cheapest, sleaziest way of doing it!_

 _AA: Anyway, part of the way into the design, Nolan said, "Oh, by the way, it has to be colored." But I knew he was going to pull this stunt, so I'd already chosen the crystal [that drove the chip] to be 3.58 MHz, minus 15.750 kilohertz._

 _SC: So, in the home version of Pong, the graphics would simply change color from one side of the screen to the other?_

 _AA: Right, the whole goal for doing this was just to put on the box: "Color!"_

I'd never seen Pong in color, but having a simple color gradient across the screen works very well for the game. You can see the ball changing color as it crosses the screen, which is a bit weird, but nothing else looks out of place: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F73cgR63Jn4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F73cgR63Jn4)

<comment><USER5> If you look at the video signal on a waveform and zoom in on the front porch area of the signal, you can see the color burst. It looks like a group of 9 (i think) spikes. The first spike is supposed to go up, but it was possible to have the color burst "flipped" so that the first spike went down. (Maybe I have it backwards, been a looong time.) If that happened during a broadcast, the FCC would issue fines. There was a very expensive piece of video equipment that was meant for doing video effects during post production (3DO maybe?). If you had a flipped burst, you could pass your signal through it without using any of the effects, and it would get corrected. For a time, the post house I worked at said they made more money using it for that purpose than what it was designed to do. That was all before my time though. Supposedly, some poor engineer would have to watch all incoming video tapes with the waveform zoomed in to the color burst just to watch for these flips. If it occurred, they would reject the tape.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> This article contains a visual explanation of NTSC color artifacting, and how it can be used to get 1024 colors out of IBM's 1981 original PC CGA:

[https://int10h.org/blog/2015/04/cga-in-1024-colors-new- mode-...](https://int10h.org/blog/2015/04/cga-in-1024-colors-new-mode- illustrated/)

<comment><USER7> I remember this being used in games on the Atari computers, but only those that were ports of Apple games and Apple's crude graphics. By skipping horizontal pixels, they'd get composite NTSC to smear the area into a color.

But the Ataris had S-video outputs (in 1978!), which of course is not composite. The color resolution is too high to produce artifacts when using separated video, so those games were essentially black & white on a good monitor like the Commodore 1702 hooked up with separated Y & C signals.

The Ataris were great, forward-thinking computers.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Excerpts:

"Analog NTSC televisions generate color by looking at the phase of a signal relative to a reference frequency."

[...]

"And instead of doing color properly by synthesizing the phases and stuff like that, it simply used a crystal that was 3.58 megahertz [the carrier frequency for the color signal] minus 15.750 kilohertz, which was the horizontal scan frequency. So it slipped one phase, 360 degrees, every scan line. You put that signal on the screen and you've got a color bar from left to right."

</comment><comment><USER9> This is a really good story. It is important to remember that this is the spirit that built Silicon Valley.

</comment><comment><USER10> Not exactly related to the topic at hand, but that opening paragraph really caught my eye:

"I had my father sign me up for an RCA correspondence course on radio and television repair. So, by the time I got to Berkeley, I was a journeyman TV repairman and actually paid my way through college through television."

Sometimes it's had to believe just how much the cost of college has changed since the 60s/70s.

<comment><USER11> I started college in 1976. $300 per semester, 16 hours. Textbooks cost around $100 (all of them together).

But I earned $2.75/hr at the college computer lab as a lab monitor. So yeah.

<comment><USER12> So tuition and texts could be paid with 150 hours of on-campus labor. Let's call that 15% part-time. Someone on 20 hour/week 50% part-time would therefore have wages left over for things like food, clothing, and housing, and time left over for actually being a student.

Now, tuition and text can only be paid with 100% or less of a full-time wage job if you are an in-state student at a public university, or attend a community college. And then, no time or money left over for lectures, study, or basic survival.

In terms of student labor hours per semester, college tuition and textbooks have increased an average of 4%-5% per year from JoeAltmaier's 1976 numbers to 2020. Due to advances in efficiency, infrastructure, and technology, that metric should be _decreasing_ every year for most goods. Some see large downward jumps as machines are invented that allow one person to do jobs that formerly required more laborers.

What the hell have universities been doing? Do they not all have economics departments and business schools?

<comment><USER13> Costs have gone up mostly because of decreases in government funding toward college.

<comment><USER11> Oh yea. Our 'state college' gets only 5% of its operating funds from the state. I don't know why they don't just go private.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> NTSC, not NSTC.

<comment><USER5> Exactly. Never The Same Color

<comment><USER15> The US digital television standard is called "ATSC".

Officially, this stands for "Advanced Television Systems Committee".

Unofficially, the "A" stands for "always".

<comment><USER16> If you're an insomniac, I recommend David Brinkley's book "Defining Vision : How Broadcasters Lured the Government into Inciting a Revolution in Television"

It's an account of the incredibly messy process that got us the ATSC standard in the USA. A little dry but a little interesting.

[https://www.amazon.com/Defining-Vision-Broadcasters- Governme...](https://www.amazon.com/Defining-Vision-Broadcasters-Government- Revolution/dp/0156005972)

The upside is that the group took so long to define a standard that digital compression and broadcasting technologies matured enough so that HDTV in the US could be fully digital and not analog like the Japanese had pioneered and proposed as a world standard.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> > _In those days, in Silicon Valley, we didn't keep secrets._

That's how Silicon Valley was created from the 1950s through the 1980s, and still to a significant extent through the 1990s: knowledge was not treated as property, but rather as a commons. This is the foundation of the professions: judges and lawyers do not keep their reasoning secret, nor do priests, nor do professors, nor do medical doctors — to the extent that the knowledge they create belongs to anyone, it belongs to the profession, not to the individual professional or their client. When Silicon Valley started abandoning that principle in the 1990s and especially after 2000, the epicenter of innovation shifted to Shenzhen, where that principle was still practiced. And today with the covid pandemic we see the fallout: the US has been left far behind technologically and is completely unable to deploy the measures needed to stop the pandemic.

That isn't the only factor, of course, but it's a big one. The profession of engineering computing machinery has been subordinated to the quarterly goals of business, which can be more effectively promoted if information flow is controlled by management and money, not by engineers and sharing. But the innovation that remains vital in Silicon Valley today is underpinned by open- source software, which is based on the same kind of promiscuous openness that got Steve Wozniak debugging Atari machines for free on the late shift. Too bad free software can't tell if you've got a fever.</comment>


Improving HTTPS Performance with Early SSL Termination - <AUTHOR> http://blog.filepicker.io/post/29422604907/improved-https-performance-with-early-ssl-termination <comment><USER2> I'm doing something very similar to this, the setup I'm using is:

DNSMadeEasy has a global traffic redirector ( <http://www.dnsmadeeasy.com/services/global-traffic-director/> )

That then sends a request to the closest Linode data center.

Linode instances run nginx which redirect to Varnish, and the Varnish backend is connected via VPN to the main app servers (based in the London datacenter as the vast majority of my users are in London).

I use Varnish behind nginx to additionally place a fast cache close to the edge to prevent unnecessary traffic over the VPN.

Example: USA to London traffic passes over the VPN running within Linode, and the SSL connection for an East Coast user is just going to Newark. If the requested file was for a recently requested (by some other user) static file, then the file would come from Varnish and the request would not even leave the Newark data center.

<comment><USER3> Is this roll your own CDN significantly cheaper than another provider? Or is there some other advantage?

<comment><USER2> I was already on Linode and I'm only serving a few hundred GB of static files per day (with the Linodes I have this is well within my free quota).

In my instance (forums with current discussions) most static file requests are for image attachments in the very latest discussions, the hot topics. So Varnish fits this scenario really well. I didn't need a long-term storage of images in the CDN, I just needed to store the most recently requested items in the CDN.

Linodes are cheap, I was already using them in a distributed fashion to reduce SSL roundtrips, and introducing Varnish was a small configuration change.

I have tried a few other providers (most recently CloudFlare). But I was generally not happy with them, usually due to a lack of visibility.

I proxy <http://> images within the user generated content over <https://> when the sites are accessed over <https://> . And occasionally I found that images would not load when I used a CDN provider for that. But never had enough data and transparency with the CDN to know why. Users notice this stuff though, so I'd have isolated users complaining of images not loading and no way to debug or reproduce it.

So I found that as my scenario made Varnish a good fit, and the bandwidth was within my allowance, and it was easy to do... well, I just did it.

I still experiment with CDNs every now and then, but largely I get more reliability and transparency from my own solution. I've also found this to be cost effective, though I would be OK with paying a premium if I found the reliability and transparency rivalled my home-rolled solution.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Maybe I don't understand the problem correctly, but why not just preflight an HTTPS request when your widget loads?

In the time it takes the user to pick their file(s) to upload, the initial SSL negotiation will most likely have finished. And if you upload multiple files serially, the browser should even reuse the current SSL context, so it wouldn't be ~300ms per file.

<comment><AUTHOR> We don't make any connections until the website calls us. At that point we load a personalized dialog for the user and we want that request to be as fast as possible.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> How do you manage the keepalive connection pool? Are you managing this in nginx (via HTTP 1.1 backend support?) or using a different service?

We ran a test of this approach using a similar stack in 2010. We had Ireland, Singapore, Sydney backhauling to Dallas, TX for a reasonably large population of users. Managing the backend pool was a bit of a challenge without custom code. nginx didn't yet support HTTP 1.1 backend connections. The two best options I could find at that time were Apache TrafficServer and perlbal. perlbal won and was pretty easy to set up with a stable warm connection pool.

Despite good performance gains we didn't put the system into production. The monitoring and maintenance burden was high and we lacked at that time a homogeneous network -- I tested Singapore and Australia using VPS providers as Amazon and SoftLayer (our vendors of choice) weren't there yet.

As a side-effect of using the VPS vendors we did and trying to keep costs in control, we had to ratchet the TTL for this service down uncomfortably low to allow for cross-region failover. In Australia the additional DNS hit nearly wiped out the gains in SSL negotiation.

With today's increased geographical coverage and rich set of services from Amazon, this is a much less daunting project if you can stomach the operational overhead.

Note that the lack of sanely-priced bandwidth and hosting providers in Australia is a huge problem. When Amazon lands EC2 there, it's going to really shake up that market.

<comment><AUTHOR> We are using nginx. Newer versions support HTTP 1.1 backends (There is also a patch for older versions of nginx)

<comment><USER5> How do you do get nginx to preconnect and maintain an appropriate-sized backend pool?

<comment><USER6> Most likely using "keepalive": <http://nginx.org/r/keepalive>

<comment><USER5> That would do it. Thanks.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> So, if my understanding is correct, are they are trading SSL handshake latency (which occurs once per connection), for the potential latency incurred by having traffic redirected from multiple servers around the world to a single set of application servers?

It seems like in the diagram, the West Coast Client, instead of making a direct connection to the APP servers on the right, is instead making a connection to the ELB on the left, which then forwards the traffic to the nginx server, which forwards it to another ELB, which forwards it to the App servers.

If the client connected directly to the ELB in front of the App Servers, they would incur the SSL handshake latency, but would avoid the four extra hops (two per send and two per receive) on the ELB and nginx.

Over the lifetime of the connection, is it possible that this latency could be longer than 200 ms?

<comment><AUTHOR> It is a possibility. However, I've measured 86ms between east and west EC2 instances, 96ms between my client on the west coast and an east EC2 instance, and 15ms between my client and a west EC2 instance. Thus the additional latency per connection is only about 5ms.

For the total latency to be longer than 200ms, about 20 requests would need to be made on the same connection, which will not happen given the number of requests we do at a time.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Isn't this a "poor man's version" of what cloudflare offers?

They even have an optimized version called railgun (<https://www.cloudflare.com/railgun>) that only ships the diff across country.

</comment><comment><USER9> Wow, this is actually really clever. Kudos to the engineer who thought of this.

</comment><comment><USER10> The "pool of warm keep-alive connections to the main web servers" is still sending the traffic over HTTPS, then?

Edit: I'm clear that latency is reduced and how that's accomplished. I just wanted to get clarification that the connections between the early SSL termination and the web servers was also encrypted, too.

<comment><USER11> Yes, but SSL connections are fine once they get going -- the nasty part is how many round-trips are needed to complete the handshake. Any latency between the client and the server is going to be multiplied several times over as they do the initial ritual of verifying public keys and establishing a session key.

The trick here is to cut down on the latency of establishing the session.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> I'm sorry, I don't understand. How is this different from geographically distributed reverse proxies?

<comment><USER13> These proxies are doing SSL between themselves and the app server and using a pool of warm keep-alive connections to avoid multiple high-latency calls. That's a little more than just a reverse proxy.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> You can get this from a CDN like AWS CloudFront as well. CloudFront will keep a pool of persistent connections to the origin, whether it's S3 or a custom origin. You can also do HTTP or HTTPS over the port of your choice on the backend, enabling "mullet routing". The minimum TTL is 0, allowing you to vary content for each request.

One issue with CloudFront is the POST PUT DELETE verbs aren't currently supported, which is a kink for modifying data. You could use Route 53s LBR feature to route requests to nearby EC2 instances, then proxy back to your origin.

</comment><comment><USER14> Would it be more effective to forward plain HTTP over a VPN instead? For example, you set up your servers in London, East Coast and West Coast and configure a VPN. People connect to their local servers via HTTPS and that server forwards it to London via HTTP; the request would be encrypted by the VPN. The advantage is that your proxy - Nginx is good for this - can bring up additional connections quicker.

<comment><USER15> I suppose that you usually want to protect the part from client->server rather than just receiving encrypted things from server side.

<comment><USER14> Sorry, I don't understand?

<comment><USER15> Oh I misunderstood you, I thought you were saying Client->HTTP->VPN->Server.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> So, the way I understand it, the connection between the load balanacer <-> web server is over the private network, right? And with VPC, your private network is isolated and can't be snooped by other Amazon customers?

Sounds cool, but this would only work on Amazon or datacenters w/ cross-data center private networks (SoftLayer has this, for example).

<comment><AUTHOR> No, the way it works is that there is a load balancer that terminates ssl and forwards it to nginx instances all in a private network. The nginx instances then have secure HTTPS connections over the public internet to the main load balancer that terminates ssl and forwards it over a private network the application servers. So this would be possible with any network since the cross country connections are encrypted.

<comment><USER17> That's a nice technique and the explanation is good while remaining concise. We do something similar at work (I work in finance) where our clients connect to a secure gateway using HTTPS but all communication with our other services are made using an unsecure protocol. If it lives in your house then it's likely to be harmless!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Standard CDNs will also accomplish this goal, and their bandwidth is normally cheaper than EC2 instances.

<comment><AUTHOR> Normal CDNs don't do this with dynamic content that changes on every user request. Each api request we serve is different and saving 200ms almost doubles the performance.

<comment><USER18> This is at least incorrect for Akamai and CDNetworks (examples of large CDNs; if you are talking about something silly like CloudFlare, then all bets are off). I run my entire website, most of the content of which is dynamic, through CDNetworks; they definitely maintain hot connections from their systems through to my server, and use it for uncached origin fetches. For more information on related performance improvements, see one of my earlier comments.

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2823268>

<comment><USER19> Sure, but Akamai is the "big iron" of CDNs - you can run your own custom code in a JVM at their edge locations. So I kinda think anyone in the market for Akamai isn't getting SSL termination advice on HN :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I think maintaining a pool of 'warm' https sessions between the nginx and the app server is not a very flexible approach. What happens when all of those are occupied? Wouldn't it be nicer to have an IPsec tunnel between the nginx and the app server and open http sessions on demand?

<comment><USER21> > What happens when all of those are occupied?

Backlog. That increases the latency till a new connection can be accepted. However, the number of pooled connections can be increased to a fairly large number at the expense of more memory consumption. This is something that isn't an issue with nginx by using it as a HTTPS proxy.

<comment><USER20> Was more a rhetorical question. ;)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> And... how is this different than SSLStrip? Except maybe that SSLStrip also prints out the HTTP form values as the data passes through.

</comment><comment><USER23> Wonder what the server certificate checking they are doing is. Its taking them 200ms seems a lot.

<comment><USER24> The 200ms is pretty well spelled out in the beginning of the post. It's not that cert checking is taking 200ms by itself, it's that sending any packet cross-country takes 80-100ms, round trip, and so if you have to go cross- country two extra trips...there's your 200ms.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Doesn't this mean the traffic is being sent un-encrypted across the ocean?

<comment><USER26> The impression I got from the article was that the warm keep-alive connections were encrypted - the SSL handshake takes place ahead of time and then tunnels multiple requests from multiple users - hence the lower latency.

Amazon's ELB (the EC2 load balancer) used to send HTTPS traffic to your back- end unencrypted, but I believe they have since fixed this.

<comment><USER27> Not sure what you mean by your ELB/HTTPS comment. ELB can be used as an HTTPS terminator. It will then proxy traffic to your backend as HTTP. It can also be used as a straight TCP proxy, but in that case it's just shoving along the HTTPS request to an HTTPS terminator that you maintain.

<comment><USER26> >> Not sure what you mean by your ELB/HTTPS comment. ELB can be used as an HTTPS terminator. It will then proxy traffic to your backend as HTTP.

That's what I mean. In that mode it's sending traffic that should be HTTPS over HTTP.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Wait. "The actual HTTP request would then be sent to the intermediate instance which then forwards it on" are you forwarding this on in plain text ? Is the traffic at least traversing a VPN between the two locations ?

<comment><USER11> As the article says, the intermediate traffic happens over long-lived HTTPS connections.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> This post shows off how engineers aren't the best at showing off their work. I think if the author abstracted this post and didn't dive so far into the technical aspects of the problem, it could appeal to a much wider audience.

For example, the discussion of nginx could be abstracted into a discussion of graph theory, where a handshake has to occur with a secure cluster of nodes.

This is all just IMHO. Great post though!</comment>


Facebook Secondary Stock Just Surged To $34 - That's An $85 Billion Valuation - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2011/03/21/facebook-85-billion-valuation/

<comment><USER2> I just. Don't. Care. Any. More.</comment>


So Pythonn standard library can read Windows Installer files - <AUTHOR> http://docs.python.org/library/msilib.html

<comment><USER2> ... on Windows.</comment>


Microsoft's Windows 10 Is Slowly Killing My Old Lenovo Laptop - <AUTHOR> http://www.eejournal.com/article/killing-me-softly-with-its-upgrades/ <comment><USER2> I'm definitely not saying something that believe 100%, but...

This happened under Windows XP, too. My work desktop was new in 2002. I got it in 2003. By 2009, it was struggling to run a complement of PuTTY terminals, Outlook and Internet Explorer, along with whatever corporate "compliance" software that company demanded. By 2010, it was hopeless.

In moments of weakness, I have a sneaking feeling the Microsoft puts deliberate performance-wasters in, so that older hardware and/or OS versions just barely work, in order to nudge people to upgrade. Of course, Microsoft doesn't do this, as it would be objectively unethical, open them to civil suits and maybe even be illegal. As a citizen and a taxpayer, I know that market forces would prevent such dirty tricks, as it would cause customers to flow away from Windows and on to its many competitors in the free market.

</comment><comment><USER3> Backup, wipe the disk, and revert to your old Windows 7 recovery disks.

I have steadfastly resisted any 'upgrade' of the Windows 7 in my trusty 8-year-old Lenovo T410S.

Mind you, 98% of the time I am running Mint Linux flawlessly.</comment>


GDB 7.6 Released - <AUTHOR> http://sourceware.org/ml/gdb-announce/2013/msg00000.html

<comment><USER2> The mention of 'target record' reminds me that I should try to use the record/replay feature next time I debug something.

<comment><USER3> It is pretty neat, but I have yet to actually use it to fix a bug. The bugs that I cannot just spot tend to be bugs that occurred long ago in the program execution, something that record doesn't handle well (well, it could but it takes a lot of space to store all that info).

It seems that the only thing that reverse debugging helps me to do, i.e. find errors from not long ago, are something that is actually pretty easy to do. Maybe I am using it wrong.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Just yesterday I used GDB for the first time in years because I fancied an alternative to Println debugging for Go. Works pretty well.

</comment><comment><USER5> Isn't anybody shocked by the fact that the main release site is an FTP server?

> Release 7.6 of GDB, the GNU Debugger, is now available via anonymous FTP.

> ...

> You can download GDB from the GNU FTP server in the directory:

            ftp://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/gdb

<comment><USER6> FTP is perfectly sufficient. Why should they use FTPS instead?

The cryto signature for the file is here ftp://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/gdb/gdb-7.6.tar.gz.sig</comment></comment>


PLE: Reinforcement Learning Environment in Python - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/ntasfi/PyGame-Learning-Environment <comment><AUTHOR> Author here.

Thought I'd share a library I've been using with my personal work and projects. Its an interface around PyGame which makes it painless to start doing RL based work. Deciding to share it now as I'd like to get feedback from others on how to adjust the library and make it useful. Plus I was afraid of developing "just-one-more-thing" syndrome causing further delays.

If you want to start using it right away General Deep Q RL[1] currently supports PLE out of the box.

[1][https://github.com/VinF/General_Deep_Q_RL](https://github.com/VinF/General_Deep_Q_RL)</comment>


A PDF that contains its own TeX source - <AUTHOR> https://code.google.com/p/corkami/source/detail?r=1907

<comment><USER2> Link to the actual PDF: [https://corkami.googlecode.com/svn- history/r1907/trunk/src/p...](https://corkami.googlecode.com/svn- history/r1907/trunk/src/pdf/quine.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER3> So this is kind of like a quine ? (i.e. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quine_%28computing%29](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quine_%28computing%29) ) i.e. since PDFs are based on Postscript, they are effectively a program that produces certain visual effects in a PDF viewer. The source code in PDF is generated from TeX code which also has itself in the output of the program.

</comment><comment><USER4> (I'm the author) it's a polyglot PDF/TeX, and you can generate the PDF by directly running PDFLaTeX on it (so you distribute the source with the viewable result)

the 2 tricks: \- include the source unmodified in the PDF itself \- modify the PDF so that it's parsed by PDFLaTeX itself.

</comment><comment><USER5> [http://ideology.com.au/polyglot/](http://ideology.com.au/polyglot/)

<comment><USER6> While ridiculously awesome, that isn't really the same thing. It would be more similar to consider programs that print themselves, such as [1]. Though, even that isn't quite the same. Since I doubt you could point a compiler back at the .pdf. (Edit: Well, looks like I was wrong on that point...)

[1] [http://stackoverflow.com/questions/7690862/program-that- prin...](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/7690862/program-that-prints- itself-how-does-it-work)

<comment><USER7> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quine_%28computing%29](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quine_%28computing%29)</comment></comment></comment>


Uber reveals plans for flying taxi to bypass road traffic congestion - <AUTHOR> https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2020/jan/07/uber-reveals-plans-for-flying-taxi-to-bypass-road-traffic-congestion <comment><USER2> When will the bullshitting stop?

<comment><AUTHOR> When <del>pigs</del> Uber drivers fly</comment></comment>


Caffeine dosing strategies to optimize alertness during sleep loss - <AUTHOR> https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/jsr.12711 <comment><USER2> To everyone thinking about using caffine or other drugs to combat sleep: all of the latest sleep reseach would suggest that 'optimizing alertness during sleep loss' is a fool's errand if what you want is productivity. The real goal must be to ensure you get enough sleep, not that you medicate yourself with caffine to stop your body from getting sleep signals.

Think about it this way: If prolonged sleep were not absolutely essential to your survival and health, sleep would be the biggest mistake evolution has ever made. an animal spending 1/3 of its life unaware of it's surroundings is an incredibly steep evolutionary price to pay. It should be obvious that if we evolved to do that, there would be gigantic benefits to it, considering htat there is not a single known animal with a nervous system that does not sleep (including insects!). If caffine was actually helpful at reducing your need to sleep, an animal would have evolved by now to endogenously produce caffine.

There is a substantial body of sleep literature now showing huge benefits to physical / mental performance, willpower and creativity from sleep. Don't fight it, use it.

_____________________________________________

Edit:

One statistic thats particularily compelling to me: Every year during daylight savings when everyone loses an hour of sleep, the rate of heart attacks rises by 25%. On the day of the year where everyone gains an hour of sleep, heart attacks fall by 21%. Thats the effect of gaining / losing a single hour of sleep.

<comment><USER3> This is a sound advice. I spent 10 years of my life trying to squeeze as much time awake time as I can using tons of coffee and that almost ruined my life and got me nowhere. I have managed to get some success in life once I gave up on that idea and was productive when I was feeling productive without forcing it. If I can't do anything during the day? Fine. If I feel sleepy? I go to sleep. It was important though, to wake up at the same time in the morning. I was unable to kick off the coffee addiction, but reduced it just one cup in the morning. I find coffee more difficult to quit than cigarettes.

<comment><USER4> I quit tobacco about 4 years ago after using for 7 years. I agree that quitting caffeine is more difficult, but I think part of that is social. I can enjoy sharing a cup of coffee with my SO just about anywhere without any dirty looks.

<comment><USER5> Oh yes, coffee is one of the less harmful pleasures of life! I would never consider quitting it, that doesn't mean I'd neglect sleep though.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Club mate is the drink of choice in the start up community in Berlin. I've made the mistake of drinking that in the evening a couple of times and regretted that at 4am by being wide awake and unproductive the next day. If you are not familiar, mate tea which this is based on contains a form of caffeine that is particularly potent. It's like drinking multiple espresso shots. Don't drink this if you have blood pressure issues.

In general, I've learned to moderate my caffeine intake and restrict myself to mornings only. The more you consume, the more you need of it to work at all, and the more likely you are to have side effects like feeling tired, having poor sleep rythm, headaches, etc.

When used in moderation it's a great tool for getting yourself productive after a lazy weekend on a monday morning. However, if you feel tired all the time, stop drinking coffee and get a few nights of good sleep in.

<comment><USER7> > _" a form of caffeine that is particularly potent"_

I've heard this over and over, but as far as I can tell, caffeine = caffeine = caffeine. I'm not a chemist, but I can't find any mention of any different forms -- it's C8H10N4O2. [1]

Is there any scientific evidence that alertness is related to anything but the quantity of caffeine, regardless of whether it's delivered as black tea, mate tea, coffee, pills, etc.? Assuming that the caffeine makes it into the bloodstream at the same rate?

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

<comment><USER8> Caffeine == Caffeine

But if a Coke is ~3mg caffeine 100ml and coffee is ~40mg per 100ml, drinking 13.3 "units" of cokes will not be equivalent to 1 "unit" of coffee.

1\. Timing of the intake will affect the efficacy (x mg of caffeine over 2 hours vs. 20 minutes is very different to the body)

2\. Controlling for time-dependent intake (the spherical human consumed both quantities instantly), concentration of the substance affects the rate / efficiency of absorption by the body (I cannot predict for which way it will go, this stuff is complex) so the net absorbed caffeine will be different between the two substances

3\. Delivery mechanisms are different: Coke is very sugary, black coffee is not and is a colloidal suspension. The local chemical environment for the caffeine within these two substances will be different. Sugar is known to affect osmosis, meanwhile who knows wtf the gunk in coffee is doing at the chemical level.

So to sum up "caffeine = caffeine = caffeine" is probably a useful rule of thumb and will get pretty far, but at the physiological/biochemical level, that is as useful as armchair pseudoscience is.

To use a possibly relatable issue: most people find consuming shots of vodka more efficacious than consuming the equivalent amount of beer by alcohol. 3 shots will probably get you more wasted than necking 3 beers

<comment><USER9> > To use a possibly relatable issue: most people find consuming shots of vodka > more efficacious than consuming the equivalent amount of beer by alcohol. 3 > shots will probably get you more wasted than necking 3 beers

But it won't, after drinking 3 beers after each other your BAC will go to the same level, just takes a little more time to get there.

Subjectively, you start feeling drunk much more quickly because the change is faster with Vodka, but your capabilities are as much impaired.

<comment><USER10> This is not true and is the nature of the discussion. Alcohol and caffeine are processed differently depending on what they are consumed with, like how the digestive cofactors in apples make it have a lower glycemic index than it's fructose content should produce. To stay with alcohol, this is easily testable. Drink five shots of vodka and see how drunk it gets you. Separately, drink five shots of vodka with honey added and you will get significantly drunker. Your liver prioritizes sugars first, so the alcohol is rapidly absorbed and takes effect instead of being processed out. You do not reach the same BAC in each case, just like drinking 5 shots in five days won't either.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Caffeine is also linked to panic attacks, anxiety and sleep loss (and loss of quality of sleep), I would recommend staying off caffeine all together, having tried both, I by far more like working in the calmness of not having caffeine circulating in my body.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caffeine- induced_anxiety_disor...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caffeine- induced_anxiety_disorder)

<comment><USER12> Counter-point: I once quit coffee altogether, weening myself off with tea at first. After about 3 months of total caffeine "sobriety" I hated it. I found I enjoyed myself more and was more productive with some caffeine rather than none. It did help me cut back (I went from ~8 cups a day to ~2-4).

I think the level I'm at now -- still ~2-4 cups -- is perfect. I find I'm productive and still sleep well.

Note: 2-4 cups still sounds like a lot, but I mean 1 cup = 250ml not 1 mug.

<comment><USER13> 8 cups?! You should drink that much water - but coffee..

2-4 still seems like a lot - this is coming from someone who doesn't drink at all anymore, but before 1, maybe 2. Now I only drink if I know I need the alertness. More effective for me considering the caffeine tolerance is gone and even a little has full effect.

Why did you hate it?

<comment><USER12> It's pretty easy to hit 4 cups. Large cups of coffee are 20 fl oz which are ~570ml. So 2 larges in one day, which I have from time to time, will get you there.

I can't really explain why I hated it with complete accuracy -- I think I just felt overall less energetic. And I felt this way when I was definitely over the effects of caffeine withdrawal.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> How about, you know, sleeping? Working in a startup isn't being parachuted behind the enemy lines where your life depends on staying alert. Go home, you'll work better tomorrow.

<comment><USER15> I have mild ADD and tons of issues with migraines. Caffeine helps on both fronts.

Do what's best for you, personally, and not what some internet stranger thinks is the correct way to function.

<comment><USER2> I know nothing about your medical issues, but to bring up a counter-point, it's possible that your 'mild ADD' and migraines are the symptoms of insufficient sleep quantity of quality. Medicating with caffeine could be counterproductive if that's the case.

<comment><USER15> Fair point, but I get 8 hours of solid sleep a night and can drink caffeine up until I go to bed and it won't keep me awake.

I've also done sleep studies and endless 'preventative' medicines for migraines but nothing has worked so far.

Caffeine is definitely not a cure-all, and I don't want to argue that it's good to use, but it's also not fair to blanket statement and say that everyone should avoid it at all costs :)

<comment><USER16> [https://www.psychologytoday.com/intl/blog/sleep- newzzz/20131...](https://www.psychologytoday.com/intl/blog/sleep- newzzz/201312/new-details-caffeine-s-sleep-disrupting-effects)

Caffeine disrupts the quality of sleep even if you are not aware and feel like you are sleeping fine. I'm not saying this is the cause of any issues you have, but just want that to be considered.

Attention and focus have strong correlations with sleep quality. I say this as a fellow "ADD-er", and only point this out because, being in the health field, I see so many people who completely neglect proper sleep hygiene and then wonder why they feel like crap all the time. This makes me suspect that most of the population has no clue how important proper sleep is to quality of life.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Anecdotally, water and sugar directly affect my alertness while using caffeine. If I don't have enough water I get headaches and can't think straight. If my blood sugar is low due to not eating enough, or eating too much sugar and "crashing" then I might as well be asleep, even though I can't from the caffeine.

I may have missed it, but I don't see where they account for the diet of their test subjects.

<comment><USER18> another anecdotal story: I generally skip breakfast and lunch and do most of my eating after work. I find that the longer I fast the more I can focus, provided that I stay hydrated. I do use caffeine (almost exclusively black coffee) for alertness and appetite suppression.

<comment><USER19> IANAD (not a doctor) but just as a note of caution, I remember reading that eating one large meal a day rather than several smaller ones can have adverse consequences due to stress on the oesophageal sphincter. This study appears to come to that conclusion: [https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4223119/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4223119/)

(I'm not judging, I've been known to skip the odd meal here and there myself.)

<comment><USER18> Interesting study. I do suffer GERD symptoms, but fasting hasn't seemed to have an effect on the severity of symptoms, though

I do notice particular things CAN give me GERD more _often_ , particularly if I eat something high in sugar on an empty stomach, especially if I've had a lot of coffee that day. I need to have "real food" in my stomach before I can do candy, donuts, etc.

This is the primary reason I started skipping breakfast. I know, I know...donuts aren't an ideal breakfast, but they're hard to resist when someone brings them in the office and you don't remind yourself that you're going to suffer from heartburn all morning if you indulge.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I drink a lot of tea. About 1 liter a day as a baseline, but if I do some ultrahike or something I can easily drink 3 liters a day. Sometimes for some reason it's really hard to drink my tea (e.g. I'm in a hotel that doesn't have drinkable tea), so I tried to substitute with other caffeine products. Unfortunately I couldn't find out any reliable data on the caffeine content of the tea that I drink. All the information I could find is the worthless X-5X mg caffeine/cup, usually without even defining what a cup is!

Does anyone know a better resource?

Anyway, subjectively speaking I find that all the online estimates are too low, at least for the type of tea that I drink and in the concentration I prefer.

Also, subjectively it seems that tea has a more complex psychoactive effect that either pure caffeine or coffee. If I drink enough caffeine, I can avoid the symptoms associated with caffeine withdrawal, but I don't get nowhere near as strong as an effect as I get from from tea, even if I drink a lot of caffeine. It appears tea has other stuff in it apart from caffeine.

Now when I travel I take my own tea, cup, and immersion heater with me.

As I said, I really like tea, but only good tea that properly prepared is good. What passes for tea these days, sometimes even in tea shops (!) is usually poison. An easy litmus test is this: do they use a thermometer when making green or white ea? If not, that means they use boiling water which will destroy the tea. I think most people never had good tea in their life. I strongly dislike coffee, but I somehow suspect I only drank bad coffee that was not prepared correctly, and that I would enjoy good coffee.

<comment><USER21> High- and medium grade green tea (especially the Japanese varieties) have significant amounts of L-theanine, which has its own effects and synergies with caffeine. For me, the same amount of caffeine will have me anxious and give me tunnel-vision if I get it from coffee while more euphoric and peppy if from green tea.

<comment><USER22> What should we be feeling with L-theanine?

I never found it affected me.

<comment><USER23> With good green tea that has lots of it (shaded tea, but doesn't need to be gyokuro, Sencha Momiji is my favorite, cold brewed over night, then strained in a french press), I usually feel a slow but steady rise in wakefulness and around the time where I would start to get jittery (say, like when drinking a few too many cokes), it transitions over to an incredible calm mixed with a feeling of... wideness. Like your FOV is actually expanded by a few degrees, on many levels. Close your eyes and it feels like being at peace in a kind of Zen state. But... with a little buzz, very much an eager, productive peace where things line up and you can approach them.

It's probably different for different people, but I can highly recommend trying to "get some good stuff" to see whether it can do the same for you. I wouldn't want to miss it.

<comment><USER21> This!

Another curious thing I have noted: While living in Japan I was binging on houjicha[0] (which has significantly less caffeine due to the roasting process) on late evenings so I would still be able to sleep. After several strong pots (we are talking litres of 1:1 water/leaf ration) I would often get into a different mind-space that is pretty close to what you are talking about. I tried to research if other catechins (like l-theanine) also disappear in the roasting process or if they could be the explanation, but weren't able to find anything to back this up.

0: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H%C5%8Djicha](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H%C5%8Djicha)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Personal anecdata, I was drinking several cups of coffee to get myself through 7 hours' driving with a full work day spliced within. I used to feel absolutely dreadful. Why am I so tired despite drinking all this coffee? I used to think. I then started limiting myself to one small coffee a day. Bingo, all symptoms gone. The coffee was making me feel far worse than I would otherwise have done as it wore off, I believe.

<comment><USER25> It's alertness effects go away after repeated use and subsequent tolerance building. The best way to use it is in moderation: decaf or no caffeine some days, caffeine other days when it is needed. Drinking it daily is common and often done out of liking/habit/addiction or some combination of those. However, the best positive effects will be seen with moderation.

<comment><USER26> "It's alertness effects go away after repeated use and subsequent tolerance building"

Link to evidence? I don't remember seeing anywhere in the literature that caffeine stops being effective when used daily and long-term, nor does it match my own experience.

Thanks!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Interesting detail: look at where they authors are working. This is military research. And I'm not surprised. The problem of having to keep soldiers alert during long phases of sleep deprivation has been around since the early days of modern warfare.

<comment><USER22> Yes, this didnt seem like it was useful for daily use.

48 hours without sleep isnt realistic for most cases, and I dont think these results have anything to say about daily caffeine.

Also, I think the best advice is to learn your body. I cycle caffeine every few months. 2 cups all at once before I need 5 hours of productivity.

<comment><USER28> Yea, I think the 48 hr sleep deprivation is not applicable to most people. The task also is a kind of "vigilance" task. I don't know if it applies to any kind of productive thinking. They also studied chronic sleep deprivation, maybe that would be helpful for people.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> In case anyone found that study difficult to read, the optimal strategy was, over the course of 3 days, one 600mg dose after 12pm on days 2 and 3 of a 3 day string of sleep loss.

<comment><USER30> Thank you. I was thrown off because I couldn't believe I was looking at post-12pm. Those are pretty extreme circumstances.

In my own case I've been tracking caffeine use and some helpful strategies are:

\- 30mg after a brief afternoon nap

\- 50mg to 60mg after a long afternoon nap that resulted in grogginess

\- 100mg after a terrible night's sleep and before a long meeting

\- Extreme care if I have an exhaustion headache due to lack of sleep and overproduction; caffeine often triggers migraine here

<comment><USER31> 12 pm is noon not midnight, in case that's what threw you off.

<comment><USER30> Of course it would. :-) Thanks! 600mg still seems crazy strong but I guess everybody's different.

<comment><USER31> Yeah, I feel like I'd have a heart attack well before that myself.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> Genetics play an important factor. CYP1A2, one of the enzymes that metabolizes caffeine, varies by as much as 40x between individuals.

In those with a high level of the enzyme, caffeine is metabolized quickly, so they can drink coffee in the afternoon and still fall asleep. They are less likely to get anxiety from caffeine, and do not suffer from a higher risk of heart attacks with coffee consumption.

In contrast, a small amount of CYPA12 prevents caffeine from being metabolized and prolongs its effects.

[0] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CYP1A2](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CYP1A2)

<comment><USER33> My dad (in Italy) drinks his last espresso after dinner, at ~9pm, every night, and soundly falls asleep by 10:30am.

Perhaps he has a high level of CYP1A2? I am wondering if there's a cheap but effective method of measuring it.

<comment><USER34> I realise you said 'perhaps' but I have to comment on how much I dislike this kind of backwards reasoning. I used to compete in bodybuilding, and I heard arguments like this all the time. "I'm not making progress, I must have low testosterone", "I must not be metabolizing protein", etc. The number of possibilities is huge, you really can't say with any certainty what the cause is.

Most likely he just has a tolerance to caffeine from drinking it. It sounds like he drinks it all day.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> Trick: Boost your adrenaline by doing exercise before drinking down the caffeine.

I learned that caffeine makes adrenaline last longer by blocking it receptors in college. [https://science.howstuffworks.com/caffeine4.htm](https://science.howstuffworks.com/caffeine4.htm)

My trick is no adrenaline no caffeine effect. I would do 10 push ups or run around my car a few times and then drink down the caffeine and that changed everything.

<comment><USER36> Isn't the half-life of adrenaline like 90 seconds? Wouldn't you be a nervous wreck if it lasted much longer?

<comment><USER37> I think the parent comment is talking about the _effects_ of adrenaline not the adrenaline dump itself.

As someone who, prior to being medicated, used to get a lot of panic attacks, I can safely say that the effects of too much adrenaline being dumped all at once is pretty inhibiting.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> _> Caffeine, if safely administrated, is an effective countermeasure to mitigate impairment of alertness caused by sleep loss. This has been demonstrated in multiple laboratory and field studies for different sleep–wake schedules. However, to maximize its effectiveness, caffeine should be consumed at the right time and amount. Here, we developed an optimization algorithm to determine when and how much caffeine to consume so as to safely maximize alertness of a group of individuals for any situation_

I couldn't find the algorithm though...

<comment><USER39> They built their own tabu search algorithm (section 2.3)

<comment><USER40> How large is the search space?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> there's an app, caffeine zone, that helps you find out the right time. I don't know if it based (or been updated based ) on this study. [http://frankritter.com/caffeinezone/](http://frankritter.com/caffeinezone/)

</comment><comment><USER42> Is there a way we can use this algorithm for personal use?

<comment><USER22> Do you stay up for 48 hours straight?

Probably not.

I think the best advice is to learn your own body. Sure there are similarities between everyone, but good caffeine habits are more important than the dosage.

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> What are the inputs of the algorithm?

I couldn't find it after reading the abstract and quickly scanning the first page.

</comment><comment><USER43> [https://2b-alert-web.bhsai.org/](https://2b-alert-web.bhsai.org/) \- Implementation of previous research on this by the same people, who currently work on adding this improved model to the implementation.

</comment><comment><USER44> I drink about a gallon of caffeinated drinks a day, sometimes more. Am I the only one?

I don't have problems sleeping, headaches, or with fatigue. I look forward to the jitters; it actually cheers me up to know that soon I'll be so intense.

<comment><USER45> ~ 25% Caucasians are fast metabolisers of caffeine so can expect to not notice much of a change with standard doses. Doesn't mean it isn't doing it's thing on a biochemical level (both reuptake of intracellular adenosine and driving tolerance)

<comment><USER44> I was born and raised half my life in Mexico, so I probably don't have that trait.

I wonder if perhaps there's something related though.

<comment><USER45> 23 and me will tell you for $100

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> Surely there's a better drug than coffee for staying awake for a long time.

<comment><USER27> The Germans used metamphetamine during World War 2. They gave it nicknames Panzerschokolade ("tank chocolate"), Stuka-Tabletten ("Stuka tablets"), Herman-Göring-Pillen, or Flieger-Marzipan ("pilot's marzipan"). It was freely available under the brand name "Pervitin" until 1941. From then on, you needed a prescription in order to purchase it.

<comment><USER47> The Japanese also had similar drugs in free circulation during ww2 if I remember correctly.

<comment><USER48> Not only that, the Japanese actually invented (synthesized) Meth in 1919. source: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Methamphetamine](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Methamphetamine)

It's still one of the most popular (if not the most popular) illegal drugs in Japan. source: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legal_status_of_methamphetamin...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legal_status_of_methamphetamine)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER49> My goal has been to increase protein intake and reduce my caffeine. My body and brain works better when fueled with protein. With caffeine I have to "refuel" every 30 - 60 minutes and snack on stuff but with a big protein meal I find myself not thinking of food or drink for 3 hours of hard focus.

</comment><comment><USER50> Off topic, but...

Anyone knows what PDF renderer Wiley is using? The performance is fantastic.

Is this PDF.js?

Edit: Found it [https://www.readcube.com/](https://www.readcube.com/)

Edit 2: Apparently ReadCube uses PDF.js

</comment><comment><USER51> It should be noted that all they've done here is create a computer simulation with no controlled in vitro measurements of performance.

This does not necessarily predict real-world effects.

</comment><comment><USER52> I've learned, after too many years - no caffeine after 10am

</comment><comment><USER53> Anecdotal I know but since trying to eliminate refined sugar from my diet I can manage the occasional night or two without sleep pretty well, no caffeine required.

</comment><comment><USER54> caffeine + l-theanine + picamillon. get you going steady. awake or asleep. Sleeping though is in no way replaceable. 8-9 hrs 10-6. Even fact this is mentioned here, is a bit insulting. There should be a study of how many bugs that you produce when awake but sleep deprived with/without caffeine vs well rested( no caffeine after 1pm, no food after 6pm)

<comment><USER22> >picamillon

Not legal in the US... :(

</comment></comment><comment><USER55> A bit off topic, but if you like good coffee, /r/coffee is a great online community.

<comment><USER56> And if you only like drugs, /r/nootropics is a great place to discuss seriously.

</comment></comment><comment><USER57> Is there the TLDR version of this paper?

<comment><USER58> The summary on the first page?

<comment><USER59> I think he/she is asking for a more actionable summary. E.g. consume 10mg of caffeine every 4 hours from 6am till 2pm etc.

<comment><USER60> After 10 minute read here's what I get out of it:

The study is a meta study that doesn't actually test individuals but uses data from other studies that do test individuals to assess average group performance under sleep deprivation (either total or chronic restriction) using an algorithm that tries to use the other studies as inputs and predict their results to draw out patterns by finding dosing strategies that optimize performance.

The advice seems to be: reduce total caffeine amount because otherwise recovery to normal is worse, take more caffeine on days with less sleep, and less on days with more sleep, delay the dose to closer to sleep period ( otherwise your performance tanks as your approach sleep period, i.e., you only stay high for so long ), and if you can don't dose on the first and last days of your sleep restriction period, just go "natural".

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER61> Honestly guys, my opinion in this day and age is that pretty much any substance you put into your body (including water and air) can be toxic.

Some are more vital than others. We have a pretty clear need for lots of air, and a fair amount of water.

But it isn't as reasonable to think that our evolution intended or makes accomodations for caffeine intake.

Ingest at your own risk, whatever the dose. My wallet and my brain tell me to just go without it in my life.

<comment><USER62> I agree with "But it isn't as reasonable to think that our evolution intended or makes accomodations for caffeine intake." However, caffeine has been tested over generations and doesn't really have any major consequences as far as I can tell. I do think that a lifestyle where caffeine makes you more effective is probably not optimally healthy, but since when does anyone care about that.

<comment><USER61> I agree that all health decisions are a trade off between risks and benefits.

But, in sufficient dosages, caffeine can cause heart attacks, paranoia, spasms and so on. It is a neurotoxic substance.

Of course, you need to massively overdose for these things to happen. Water can be deadly if you overdose it as well. But perhaps we are missing minor damage that's occurring even with proper dosages</comment></comment></comment>


Putting Time in Perspective – Wait but Why – Tim Urban - <AUTHOR> https://waitbutwhy.com/2013/08/putting-time-in-perspective.html <comment><AUTHOR> This is a rather old post by Tim Urban at his Wait But Why website.

I find myself regularly going to this article to enjoy being reminded of what had come before us ( to the extent that we know from records of various forms).</comment>


We're Probably Not Mostly Microbes - <AUTHOR> http://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2016/01/youre-probably-not-mostly-microbes/423228/?utm_source=SFFB&single_page=true <comment><USER2> Non-scientists would be surprised how often this happens in science. Take a really hard question and some scientist will do their best to come up with an estimate. That part is fine.

The problem is when other scientists do literature searches, find the "answer" then base their entire work off of it. Every scientist after that does the same thing and suddenly a wild-ass-guess becomes fact.

A great example is in epidemeology. I work in biotech and many of our forecasts are based on epi data. I remember one time when someone questioned a numbered, so our epi team did some work. The number was the only estimate available, but it turned out to come from a paper from the 1700's that looked at the prevalence of this disease in orphan children in some small Frech town. We would have been better off just guessing.

This happens a _lot_.

<comment><USER3> Many, maybe most, of the wilder claims in science (by scientists) are made to bring attention and funding to a field. Science journalists are often happy to join in because surprising results sells more papers and ads.

As fundamental discoveries are made, future work tends to be more peripheral, even if important. For example, microbiomes clearly influence the host organism, but the discoveries in this field are not on par with understanding the structure/function of DNA. Germ-free mice are recognizably mice, DNA-free mice are not.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> >It's also debatable if cell totals is a useful metric. After all, Milo's calculations show that 90 percent of human cells are red blood cells, which don't contain DNA and aren't capable of dividing. They're rather poor excuses for cells—remove them from the equation and the 10:1 ratio reinstates itself.

So all that and it says the ratio might be perfectly correct when you only count proper cells. Great.

I want to hear where the 724 trillion number came from.

</comment><comment><USER5> >Which gives a ratio that can best be expressed as ¯\\_(ツ)_/¯.

A bit unrelated but I found it amusing the author used an emoticon in a magazine article (a reputable magazine, at that). Even more interesting, if you search for "I don't know emoticon" the first result on Google is an article from The Atlantic on the subject: [http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2014/05/the- be...](http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2014/05/the-best-way-to- type-__/371351/)

And while facts like the cell to microbe ratio may be useless for most in terms of practicality (as someone else mentioned), for me they are not only interesting but instill the same sense of wonder as knowing that there are ~100 billion stars in the Milky Way. Definitely makes you think about the scale of numbers, if nothing else.

</comment><comment><USER6> I don't understand the interest of such discussions about cell count in human body (scientifically or even philosophically). It seems a meaningless metric to me.

<comment><USER7> I think there are pretty important implications of cell counts.

It is probably more apparent if we look at the brain - it has been pretty important to evolutionary biology to study not only the whole number of brain cells but also the proportion that are neurons and the proportions that are other, supporting cells. Similarly, it matters how many cells there are in a particular region of the brain when we ask the question - how did this region evolve to be of this size?

If this piques your curiosity I'd recommend Suzana Herculano-Houzel's work - either her popular TED talk ( [https://www.ted.com/talks/suzana_herculano_houzel_what_is_so...](https://www.ted.com/talks/suzana_herculano_houzel_what_is_so_special_about_the_human_brain) ) or this kind of paper if you want to take a deep dive ( [http://journal.frontiersin.org/article/10.3389/fnana.2014.00...](http://journal.frontiersin.org/article/10.3389/fnana.2014.00077/abstract) ) << should be open access.

Getting accurate measurements of the numbers of cells gives us a good idea of the number of divisions required to produce them, and could also be used in normalizing cancer risk across organisms.

Measurements of _types_ of cells in a tissue give us an idea of the magnitude of the signaling / secretion events from these cells.</comment></comment>


Ask HN:What does your bash_profile look like? - <AUTHOR>

I just accidentally deleted my bash_profile file which contained most of the custom colors, shortcuts etc. I would love to see what other people's bash_profile looks like so maybe I could try a new color scheme and some new shortcuts. <comment><USER2> My actual~/.bash_profile file is very minimal, it just sources each file in ~/.bash/ in turn.

You can see the organized contents of that directory here:

<https://github.com/skx/dotfiles/tree/master/.bash/>

<comment><USER3> Thanks, your "x" function looks useful. May I ask about the organization? Why the NN- prefix for filenames? Some type of standard I'm not aware of?

<comment><USER4> When the contents of .bash are sourced it will be done in filename order. Some files might rely on others being sourced first. So using the numeric prefix allows controlling the order while still having meaningful names.</comment></comment></comment>


Programming with Nothing (2011) - <AUTHOR> http://codon.com/programming-with-nothing

<comment><USER2> I love articles like this! They're a very fun exercise in what you /really/ need to have a programming language. Here's another one: [http://stevelosh.com/blog/2013/03/list-out-of- lambda/](http://stevelosh.com/blog/2013/03/list-out-of-lambda/)

It's in JavaScript for those who prefer JS over Ruby (although for the purposes of the exercise the language choice doesn't matter much).

</comment><comment><USER3> I feel like I must have progressed as a programmer somewhat. Even though I doubt I could write an article like this from scratch, I can now at least follow it, and there are no more "wtf did he do there?" leaps of logic.

Post this again in a decade, and we'll see how I fare then...

<comment><USER4> There is nothing new in this article. They basically just did the untyped lambda calculus in Ruby; Landin already had everything worked out in the 60s! To write a similar article, just find a cool idea from the past, and then port the idea to some current technology so that readers can better empathize with it.

<comment><USER5> Yup, there is almost nothing new under the sun. Everything I use in my day to day job was discovered in the 70s. Heck, half this stuff is even worse than what was discovered in the 70s. SmallTalk was a complete OS/programming environment with checkpoints, pausing, and live migration. What do we have now that comes close?

<comment><USER6> Granted that what we have now often seems like a pile of kludges. Probably because our modern systems evolved "organically" over a span of decades, and technical issues have been solved with compromises rather than careful planning

...However, I'm pretty sure if you booted up a SmallTalk machine from the 70s, you'd find there were A LOT of bugs and unfinished corners. The UI was really not polished or user friendly. The impression I got is that they barely had it working, that it was more of a tech demo than any kind of finished product. I don't think you'd want to trade any of your modern software for something from then. I mean, yes, they thought of clever things back in the 70s, but don't go imagining they had some nice, clean, perfect implementation of those ideas.

<comment><USER5> Sure, cutting edge stuff is always going to be rough around the edges but I see no such boldness around me any more. All I see is another version of AngularJS popping up every other week. How many MVC frameworks does a JavaScript developer need?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> The video is wonderful - one of my longtime favourite talks.</comment>


Big News for ZFS on Linux - <AUTHOR> http://dtrace.org/blogs/ahl/2016/03/07/big-news-for-zfs-on-linux/ <comment><USER2> I know it seem silly to care about licensing in this case, since it's about GPL incompatibility between two free licenses. However, the problem here is the precedent that it sets. If ZFS distributed this way, in binary form linked to Linux, does not infringe Linux's copyleft, then this could open the doors for other kinds of proprietary blobs to grow on top of Linux. That is SFC's analysis,

        Indeed, Conservancy believes this situation is one
        battle in a larger proxy war by those who seek to
        limit the scope of strong copyleft generally.

[https://sfconservancy.org/blog/2016/feb/25/zfs-and- linux/](https://sfconservancy.org/blog/2016/feb/25/zfs-and-linux/)

I also fear about what Oracle could do, as they are copyright holders of parts of Linux (btrfs) and might decide to make things difficult for Canonical. Oracle has misused copyleft aggressively in the past, trying to strong-arm people into buying GPL exceptions for MySQL when they didn't need one, although in this case, they probably do have a good case for why a GPL exception would be necessary.

<comment><USER3> So, correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't the license incompatibility related to shipping binaries of zfs? If a user chooses to compile locally from zfs sources, then the license issues don't apply, correct? So this is not an issue for, say, Gentoo, Funtoo, LFS, etc, and only an issue for Canonical because they are not interested in a mechanism that allows users to build packages from source, am I correct? I'm thinking something something along the lines of "Here is a tarball containing the sources and a container instance you can spin up. It leaves a .deb behind." What part of this am I missing?

<comment><USER4> Two points to this:

First, it's not without precedent. qmail's license prohibited binary redistribution (as well as modified source code distribution), and Debian's solution was packages that, as part of the install, patched, built, and installed qmail from sources on the target machine.

Secondly, this is already an option. The ZFS on Linux project [0] provides packages which do exactly this, by:

1\. Distributing kernel sources and building them against the currently install(ed) kernel(s) via dkms. This is actually a common mechanism for module distribution, and is also used by Virtualbox, or anyone else distributing kernel extensions, closed-source or not, which aren't included in the mainline kernel.

2\. Providing the userspace binaries to interact with the custom-built ZFS kernel modules built on behalf of the user in #1.

The difference here is Ubuntu distributing binary versions of the modules _in the base install_ , which is important for things like installing on ZFS root, or accessing ZFS filesystems during install.

<comment><USER3> > modules in the base install, which is important for things like installing > on ZFS root

Ah yes, the bootstrapping problem.

<comment><USER5> An init script or the installer script could compile the module. Awkward but not hard.

We can bootstrap much more difficult things. For example booting from kernel source: [http://www.bellard.org/tcc/tccboot.html](http://www.bellard.org/tcc/tccboot.html)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Last I joined in on the discussion I got quite convinced by the argument "if Nvidia can use a propietary license for their Linux graphics driver, then Canonical can use the CDDL for their ZFS driver". Substitute for any other propietary modules that people like to load in their Linux kernels.

Can anyone point me out why this argument is wrong? Googling around for this I was actually suprised that propietary kernel modules _are_ in fact a debated topic (obviously to little success of the opponents), but doesn't the practical existence of propietary kernel modules at least show that no-one has had a problem with this for a long time, legally speaking?

<comment><USER7> The problem is not the use per se, the problem is delivering them to the user as one blob of software together. This is not a problem with proprietary graphics drivers, since you can just download them after setting up you system. However, if you want to boot from a ZFS disk, you need the ZFS driver and the only way to obtain it at that point is effectively from the installation medium.

<comment><USER6> OK, fair enough. So distributions that ship the Nvidia drivers in their distro install image (AFAICT OpenELEC does this, not Canonical though) should be in trouble then? And Canonical would find a way around this by autodownloading the ZFS driver when the user select the "ZFS" option in the installer?

<comment><USER7> IANAL but as far as I can tell there is no legal precedent here and so the questions you raise can only be answered by a lawsuit. Sure there is 'technically' a difference between packaging the ZFS driver with Ubuntu and audodownloading it, but it all depends on how a court sees it, because as long as there is no precedent you can't get off on a technicality like this.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> This was in the news before. What's the big new thing about this article? It reads like a writeup of the news of yesterday. Also, ZFS is not coming to Linux as such, it's coming to Ubuntu specifically and the article does not clear up the detail why this is now possible for Ubuntu but was not possible for the rest of the Linux community.

<comment><USER9> Am I really reading this correctly, that the plan seems to be "ignore the possible license incompatibility and hope Oracle doesn't sue?"

Because of all ways to fill in the "Hope _____ doesn't sue" plan, "Oracle" must be in the top 5 worst companies to fill in the blank with in the tech industry.

<comment><USER10> No, the plan was, "have the lawyers evaluate the possible license incompatibility, decide that the really isn't one, and release the module." The SFLC is essentially running a FUD campaign here by trying to paint Canonical as being reckless.

<comment><USER11> SFLC seem to think CDDL/GPL are ok:

[https://softwarefreedom.org/resources/2016/linux-kernel- cddl...](https://softwarefreedom.org/resources/2016/linux-kernel-cddl.html)

Perhaps you are confusing them with SFC:

[https://sfconservancy.org/blog/2016/feb/25/zfs-and- linux/](https://sfconservancy.org/blog/2016/feb/25/zfs-and-linux/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I suspect "Just ignore the licences and focus on the technology" is not going to fly with enterprise customers.

<comment><USER13> Yep. It's all fun and games until the lawsuits start :-).

I don't understand people like this. If they were advocating using pirate copies of Microsoft Windows or other proprietary software, would they be saying "ignore Microsoft legal department and focus on how _cool_ it is that I get a free copy of Windows ?

Stupid, stupid, stupid.

<comment><USER14> I think it's safe to say there's a world of difference between license violations for a piece of software that's closed source, proprietary and sold for profit and a license incompatibility on two open source projects caused by a single clause in licenses that are otherwise compatible.

You may have the chops and cred to call someone stupid that wrote dtrace but I'd certainly hesitate before doing so myself.

<comment><USER13> People can be very smart technically, yet legally very naive. This is a very naive legal position, which I certainly feel justified in calling "stupid, stupid, stupid".

<comment><USER14> Certainly if I was a lawyer I'd probably feel comfortable using an insult like "stupid" to describe a legal position but I'm not. You might be, I don't know. But it's still unnecessarily negative.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Google cache: [http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:scs1wYb...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:scs1wYblGe0J:dtrace.org/blogs/ahl/2016/03/07/big- news-for-zfs-on-linux/+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=ca)

</comment><comment> git-pull > Oracle holds a copyright on most of OpenZFS since it was forked from the > original ZFS code base. It would be within their rights to decide to > relicense ZFS under the GPL.

Why imply it should convert to GPL? It could become GPL compatible by making the license more permissive.

[https://blogs.oracle.com/chandan/entry/copyrights_licenses_a...](https://blogs.oracle.com/chandan/entry/copyrights_licenses_and_cddl_illustrated)

"A common misconception is about CDDL and GPL incompatibility. (Incompatibility in the sense: to combine two source files, one under GPL and another under CDDL, to create a common executable.) GPL is incompatible with most licenses like Mozilla Public License, Apache, and CDDL. GPL wants you erase those licenses and use GPL in that place, where as these licenses do not permit erasing them. Hence the incompatibility deadlock."

<comment><USER16> irrelevant politics, but if you aim to be included in the kernel at some point, you must go for GPL or live with "kernel tainted" messages.

which i think is great.

<comment><USER17> Which is the core of the argument. ZFS is simply not aimed at being included in the kernel at some point. Linux user's just wish it were so.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> What's the situation on btrfs? It was supposed to make ZFS not that big deal anymore on Linux.

<comment><USER19> There are lot of missing parts. Everything beyond using it for single disks or with RAID1 is still experimental. It's slow for a lot of use cases like VMs or OLTP ( [http://blog.pgaddict.com/posts/friends-dont-let-friends- use-...](http://blog.pgaddict.com/posts/friends-dont-let-friends-use-btrfs- for-oltp)) and using nodatacow does not count!

RAID1 is implemented to use the oddness of the pid to decide which disk to read from... RAID5/6 have huge performance problems in certain use-cases. Write hole is apparently still a thing.

Quota seems to be still broken or difficult to handle, the tooling is not exactly nice or intuitive (this may change in the future).

Hardware failure handling is nonexistent - it can't detect a broken drive.

Lot's of other gotchas. Just read the mailing list. I've been fighting against btrfs for a while and I'm happy when I'm not having to deal with it. Works probably fine for desktop usage but don't bother stressing it - at the moment it will break horrible.

<comment><USER20> Lots of gotchas yes, but it's about as rare to see data loss on Btrfs as it is on say linux-raid@ list for mdadm or LVM and those are much more mature. More often is the case of some suboptimal behavior and the recommendation to get the data off the volume and onto a newly created one. Very inconvenient for some users to be sure, but also not data loss. About the worst I've seen lately that wasn't hardware related needed data scraped using btrfs restore (the tool the extracts data from an unmountable filesystem).

<comment><USER21> This hasn't been my experience. When an md array has lost a disk, I have added a new one and the array has transparently resynched in the background. No interruption in service or loss of data. When a Btrfs array has lost a disk, Btrfs oopsed the kernel, and stopped working. When I rebooted with the hardware problem resolved, it toasted both the outdated mirror and the up-to- date disk, causing irretrievable dataloss. Any attempt to boot the system led to Btrfs causing an immediate kernel panic. I had to put the disks into a system without Btrfs kernel support and use dd to zero out the Btrfs partitions before I could use them again.

That was admittedly a few years back, but it's still a long way from production use in many respects, while ZFS has been in production use for years and is well documented, has good tools, and is very robust. After several years of Btrfs problems, I gave up on it and moved to ZFS, initially on Linux and then on FreeBSD due to it being better integrated.

<comment><USER22> Just incidentally, 'wipefs -a' should clear out the partitions in a much speedier manner.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> My favorite quote from the piece: "And it is the height of delusion to think that Oracle would grow ears to hear, a heart to care, and a brain to decide." And this is coming from a former Oracle employee.

</comment><comment><USER24> > Canonical had their lawyers review the licenses and deemed their use of > Linux and OpenZFS to be in compliance.

So Canonical, a tiny desktop-focused Linux company, have discovered something that Red Hat's well paid lawyers have missed?

<comment><USER25> Do you have a legal statement from Redhat's lawyers? So far, all I heard about their opinions has been hearsay from third parties.

<comment><USER24> The proof is in the pudding: no major company has ever shipped zfs on Linux in the last decade, nor will they in the next decade.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> What about Proxmox?

They are a commercial slightly modified Debian distro who have been shipping ZFS with their ISOs and ready to use out of the box, even from the installer wizard for zfs on root installs for around a year now.

Nobody has said anything about them doing this or sued them or tried to stop them.

They are distributing the ZFS on linux binary kernel module pre-instated as Canonical is about to do with Ubuntu.

<comment><USER27> Who?

Edit: Oracle seems to have very little reason to do anything for precedent. Canonical is both competition and a largish business, that would be done for the money, suing proxmox would look like being a bully.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> "Ignore pedants who would deride your pragmatic use of technology as heretical or immoral."

That sounds like bad advice.

</comment><comment><USER29> Why ZFS on Linux when FreeBSD ships with ZFS by default, without any legal quagmires? Also, we need a real open-source, non-GPL competitor to Linux if there's any hope of not being taken hostage by overzealous GPL enforcement by SFC and other GPL right-wingers.

</comment><comment><USER30> "Lawyerly cosplay" ROFLMAO

</comment><comment><USER31> And here I was hoping (somewhat) that big news by now would be Oracle relicensing OpenZSF under GPL :))

</comment><comment><USER32> And there is an appreciable performance difference between using ZFS and BtrFS ?

<comment><USER33> Massive under certain use cases, and major reliability and feature differences too. A lot of BtrFS is still "in progress" like the copy-on-write stuff and fault detection.

<comment><USER32> Actually I'm using BtrFS on a few Ubuntu server 14.04 virtual machines. It's very nice when I need to add extra hard disk space, and I only need to add or expand de the virtual hard disk, and indicate to the filesystem to append the extra new space. Also, transparent compression comes very useful, on special when our applications are very dependent on I/O performance and need to store a lot of write single time/read a lot of times data.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> I hope this fixes the "read only filesystem" issue.

</comment><comment><USER35> on by default != default filesystem right?

</comment><comment><USER36> zsf?

</comment><comment><USER36> Real useful

</comment><comment><USER37> Hug of Death on the site as of 1250 CST

</comment><comment><USER38> Now, how 'bout them Apples err Macs?

<comment><USER39> [https://openzfsonosx.org/](https://openzfsonosx.org/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> Can I have big news on ZFS (or BTRFS) for Windows now? I've heard how awesome this filesystem is, but I still can't use it.

<comment><USER41> Seems unlikely that either will ever come to windows guess you should check out ReFS or install Linux

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/ReFS#/search](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/ReFS#/search)

<comment><USER25> The O3X project lead has joked about porting ZFS to Windows after he finished the Mac OS X port. That is the only discussion of porting it to Windows thus far, although there was one guy who tried reimplementing it as a userspace filesystem on Windows, but that did not get far.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> ZFS on Linux. No, thank you. I'll continue to use ZFS natively under FreeBSD, which is arguably a far better OS for what ZFS users would be wanting anyway. Been using *BSD since the late 90s. Never a real issue short of HW failure. I cannot say the same for the painful times I was forced to use Linux.

ZFS is indeed a lifesaver, but we in the BSD camps have know this for many moons.

<comment><USER43> This is a relatively useless contribution to the discussion. Given that there are obviously reasons why Linux has been successful while BSDs have seen less popular usage, it must be the case that Linux or its ecosystem offers features not found elsewhere.

Adding ZFS to Ubuntu is a benefit to everybody, and a smug, holier-than-thou attitude really does nothing to further the conversation about the technology.

<comment><USER13> Nope. Adding a _legally licensed_ copy of ZFS to Ubuntu is a benefit to everybody. Oracle haven't seen fit to do that, and they're the only ones who can.

Sticking a hack-licensing-job into Ubuntu is damaging to the Linux ecosystem, certainly not a benefit.

<comment><USER44> _they 're the only ones who can._

This is true, in the same way that it's true that the US could vote in a constitutional amendment to allow a dictatorship.

First, Oracle only has the copyright to the original ZFS code as it existed in 2010 when they stopped working on OpenSolaris.

Second, the AUTHORS[0] file from the 'zfs on linux' project that was imported into ubuntu lists 73 authors not including the Oracle developers, which appear to be both individuals (gmail accounts, etc) and multiple individual businesses (nexenta, ovh, etc). So Oracle cannot naively relicense those 6+ years of contributions, since they have no copyright over that new code. Thus changing the license of the original ZFS code would have no effect because all of the years of contributions since then would still be licensed as CDDL.

Third, Oracle does have exactly one 'option'. The details of the CDDL license specifically state that is 'auto upgrades' if a new version comes out, and an older version is not specifically mentioned. So theoretically, they could release a CDDL license version 1.3 that has radically updated text in order to be GPL compatible. However, since that effects all CDDL licensed code, they would end up relicensing every bit of CDDL code (related to Oracle or not) in the entire world. Is that something that Oracle should reasonable be expected to do? I think this is as likely, and as reasonable, as GPL v4 coming out with the text of the MIT license, thus affecting any GPL code in the world that says 'or any later version'. In other words, it's just not reasonable to use this 'one weird trick'.

So there is no remotely reasonable way in which Oracle can have an effect on this issue.

[0] - [http://kernel.ubuntu.com/git/ubuntu/ubuntu- xenial.git/diff/z...](http://kernel.ubuntu.com/git/ubuntu/ubuntu- xenial.git/diff/zfs/AUTHORS?id=b65ce14d3445e8fe69b5d59aaaf2699319714179)

<comment><USER45> > So theoretically, they could release a CDDL license version 1.3 that has > radically updated text in order to be GPL compatible. However, since that > effects all CDDL licensed code, they would end up relicensing every bit of > CDDL code (related to Oracle or not) in the entire world.

Though of course since laws are made by lawyers and not nerds, the new license may well be invalid and nothing would change at all except for lots of confusion.

Which makes you even more right.

<comment><USER44> Note that regardless of lawyers vs nerds, the CDDL is quite clear about what happens if a new version of the CDDL is released.

      4.1. New Versions.

      Sun Microsystems, Inc. is the initial license steward and may publish revised and/or new versions of this License from time to time. Each version will be given a distinguishing version number. Except as provided in Section 4.3, no one other than the license steward has the right to modify this License."

Note that v1.1 of the CDDL replaces Sun Microsystems, Inc. with Oracle. Otherwise, this gives them the right to publish a revised and/or _new_ version of the license.

      4.2. Effect of New Versions.

      You may always continue to use, distribute or otherwise make the Covered Software available under the terms of the version of the License under which You originally received the Covered Software. If the Initial Developer includes a notice in the Original Software prohibiting it from being distributed or otherwise made available under any subsequent version of the License, You must distribute and make the Covered Software available under the terms of the version of the License under which You originally received the Covered Software. Otherwise, You may also choose to use, distribute or otherwise make the Covered Software available under the terms of any subsequent version of the License published by the license steward.

The second sentence here pins the license at the specific CDDL version, if one was specified in the original software. It's pretty unlikely that almost no one has specified a specific CDDL version. The last sentence gives the license recipient the ability to distribute under "any subsequent version of the license published by the license steward".

Note that these two combined (regardless of lawyer or nerd) give a compelling case that it's plausible that Oracle _could_ take that action. They won't, and I don't think they should, and I find it hard to see that it as remotely reasonable that they should be pressured to. However, if they did, then it's likely that it would be legal since each other CDDL contributor accepted the license, and relicensed their own code with the same possibility.

Obviously some lawyer would make the case that it's not a new version since it has drastically different text, but at that point we're well into moot, counterfactual realms.

<comment><USER45> > Obviously some lawyer would make the case that it's not a new version since > it has drastically different text,

That's exactly what I meant with lawyers<->nerds: publishing a radically different version is a nice _hack_ , but _may_ not hold up legally.

> but at that point we're well into moot, counterfactual realms.

That's what I meant with confusion. If the legal situation isn't entirely clear, the kernel team, distros and related companies might very well decide to play it safe.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Best way to have mouth publicity for startup without spending money? - <AUTHOR>

I am co-founder of Rime (https://rime.co). Rime collects your publicly shared photos, videos, blogs, almost everything and puts in to one place that describes you completely. Whilst there are similar apps out there (e.g. HootSuite, Buffer), this is the first time a platform has been created, to bring all contents of users to one platform. Down the line we are looking ourself as Google for social search(content and people).<p>We have attracted more than 5K users in our platform and around 50 users active everyday. I want your advices to ramp up the user acquisition. <comment><USER2> Make your site engaging and have some kind of compulsion to post or invite friends.

</comment><comment><USER3> Keep posting good articles and links to social networks to attract users

</comment><comment><USER4> Unique Identity, and robust content and people search.</comment>


Commit 15 minutes (11/16) to explain to a stranger why you love your job. - <AUTHOR> http://www.projectxpresso.com/

<comment><USER2> Sorry to be negative, but ...

I clicked the about link at the bottom:

>" _ProjectXpresso is not endorsed by any firms, but rather is a grassroots effort supported by caring professionals donating 15 minutes of their time and a career full of wisdom._ " //

Which is weird because on the front page you show a handful of "endorsements" as logos of companies who are "participants". If it's only staff from those companies that are involved then this may be a trademark infringement as you're certainly suggesting an endorsement by the companies in using their trademarks; you could use their names IMO [but it's jurisdictional and IANA(TM)L].

On more practical matters; from this page I couldn't return to the "homepage" without reloading, the back link was broken and there was no "home" link evident. Similarly when I looked at the "I'm a student" page I couldn't then return.

Espresso.

<comment><USER3> We just got sued by a patent troll because they found our logo on the site of a software company they claim infringed. As a customer [at some point -- this was >10 years ago], and without proof our contract indemnified us from such things, it was perfectly reasonable for them to do so.

So yes, adding logos of companies as endorsers when they are really just individuals participating is disingenuous and could get you black-balled by any company that realizes it's happening. You should at least ask permission first.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> It took me a while to work out what (11/16) meant. I've seen some bizarre way to write dates, but this is just random. I know it's space limited, but why not "16th Nov"?

<comment><USER5> do you mean that its placement in the sentence is bizarre? or the fact that it's written "11/16"? the month/day format is very common in the US...i'd say it's the default for most people, actually

<comment><USER6> US population: 313.9 million (2012) Estimated people in the world: 7.124 billion.

US is the only country using MD, isn't it?

So most people, perhaps not.

<comment><USER7> I have a thing about when actual numbers get used.

The thing is the website is in English, so it does not target 7 billion people. It only matters what percentage of target audience can process the message, and it's targeting professionals, so not even entire 300 mil population of US. Basically I think about 300 mil and 7bil numbers are wrong in determining if it was OK to use US-format.

I am not saying you are wrong, I agree that spelling out November would make it clear, but just that the numbers quoted are not representative of who will see the site.

<comment><USER6> That's actually a really good point, especially with the target audience of HN.

What were the results of the previous "where are you from?" ASKHNs? Not doubting US is the top audience of the site.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Looks cool. But with just a company name and a job title you're going to connect me to a student? Seems like you'll get a lot of near misses.

Seems like you might be better off getting LinkedIn profiles or something and letting students choose from available open appointments.

</comment><comment><USER9> Completely off topic, but if you were going for the coffee vibe it really should be "Project _Es_ presso". As a coffee fan, a small part of me dies every time I hear someone order an "expresso".

<comment><USER10> I think they may be trying to get the impression of a mix of "express" as in "fast", with "espresso". Maybe with a bit of "expression" as in "express yourself"?

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Site appears to be leadgen for [http://tradeup.io](http://tradeup.io)

Not that there's anything wrong with that... Looks interesting, will check it out. Just sharing.

</comment><comment><USER12> But I __hate__ my job!

;)

</comment><comment><USER13> Cool idea. I'd like it better if the "professional" icon weren't so gendered.

<comment><USER14> Only if you consider neckties gendered.

<comment><USER13> It's not up to me whether an icon with a necktie is some sort of cultural code for "serious professional man."

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Cool idea, but I haven't enjoyed any job in tech yet. Would hate to discourage some kid.

</comment><comment><USER16> cool concept, i'm learning to code using a bunch of online resources and have always wondered if that would get me anywhere in the industry, looking forward to linking up with someone who can shed some light.

<comment><AUTHOR> awesome! I'd love to hear how your conversation goes.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> I registered as a professional, looking forward to getting more information.

</comment><comment><USER18> Would love to talk to someone interested in software. But I'm not a Skype user; haven't used that in 5 years. Not interested in installing it. Wish I could use Teamspace. I helped write it; I use it every day, and its head-and- shoulders a better way to communicate.

<comment><USER19> While I understand your point of view, both because not everyone is a skype user and because you wrote it. It is a fact that skype is the most used tool for video/audio communication. I would say especially for students. So I think it's a bit unfair to ditch a tool just because it uses the most common way to communicate.

<comment><USER18> Its because Teamspace is addictive. Going back is crippling. My work team uses Teamspace so I don't have to face this at work. I'm sure not going to volunteer to use Skype again.</comment></comment></comment>


Exoskeleton Turns Humans Into Terminators - <AUTHOR> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h2jlIRKswnQ

<comment> daniel-cussen It's cool and all, but it's the kind of thing that probably has ways to go. I figure it will take ten years to get an expensive prototype (back of the napkin calculation). It can do 200-pound pulldowns, but it didn't do much else that was particularly impressive...how much can it bench?

</comment><comment><USER2> Mechanics inspired by video games like halo? Maybe..

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> You might be able to use it instead of Viagra(R).

</comment><comment><USER3> Can we _finally_ retire the "robots are gonna kill us all" theme? I mean honestly, its not funny anymore.</comment>