Video Game Sales Slip Sixth Month in a Row - <AUTHOR> http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/technology/2009/09/video-game-sales.html

<comment><USER2> Zzzzzzzzz It's August the sleepiest month of the year for video games, which has been true since the beginning of time.

Look to see a big bump in sales in Sept when all the fall games start to come out and when the new PS3 price drop has effect.

As well the sales could still be year over year worse than last Sept and it wouldn't be the end of the world. The games industry traditionally follows a console cycle (though that will likely be broken up this time around with the launch of Natal and Sony's Waggle next year) and so once you're past the peak some years after a launch, your sales will necessarily decline until the next console launch.

<comment><USER3> The NPD data shows that this August is down 16% from last August - so it's not just summer sleepyness.

I think NPD only tracks retail sales though, so any money diverted to downloadable content, Steam, or iPhone games would seem to "disappear" from their charts.

<comment><USER2> I'm sure game sales are affected by the recession, but the console industry follows a cycle, going up after the launch of a new set of consoles, peaking, and then dropping down until the hype cycle begins for the next console launch.

Largely everything seems to be following the same set plan.

Next year might be an upset year of this traditional cycle though, since Microsoft and Sony are releasing hardware upgrades in the form of their motion controllers. Microsoft has been quoted as saying that the launch of their Natal upgrade would be akin to a console launch event.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Remember all those "video games are recession-resistant" stories a year ago? The truth was always that, at least in the US, game sales depend largely on the console cycle and are thus falling with lower console sales.

</comment><comment><USER5> It's not a 16% droping trend, or the recession. There tend to be good years and bad years for game releases. If you look at the NPD stats for more than one year in the past you can see that. Last year was amazingly good - loads of well-received big hitters. This year's a slow year and is consistent with sales from other off years.

Many of the big titles that were due this year have been put back to a 2010 release. This Christmas we have only have three big-hitters: Assassin's Creed 2, Uncharted 2 and Modern Warfare 2. Good for publishers of those three I guess. We also have the recent releases of the PS3 Slim and Rock Band: The Beatles.

Next year we get all the games that were delayed this year (Mass Effect 2, Bioshock 2, Splinter Cell: Conviction etc.) on top of a number of good releases that were originally due. I predict that 2010 will be an on year.

</comment><comment><USER6> It's very difficult because there hasn't been any major graphic enhancements or radical new story lines to convince consumers to purchase new games.

<comment><USER7> I think there's a simpler explanation; video game prices haven't dropped in over 6 months. Fable II was released almost a year ago now, it's still the exact same price. I remember quite clearly, because I bought my Elite 360 almost a year ago and I remember looking at it on the shelf in bestbuy for 59.99 it's _still_ 59.99 in bestbuy. I got Fallout 3 in the 1Q and it cost 69.99 (I griped because it went _up_ in price from 59.99) and it's _still_ 69.99.

This is from my experience in the games industry: big games prop up the big sales figures. The majority (over 70% IIRC) of sales are made _after_ a game drops below half of its original sale price. Add the two together for long enough and you get this sort of major sales slide.

<comment><USER8> There's an alternate explanation I'd like to add: there simply haven't been many good games in 2009.

Avid gamers, think back to 2008 and 2007... I spent way too much time in front of my TV back then, because there were quality titles coming out.

In 2009 I did not buy a _single_ game until Batman: Arkham Asylum _this month_. This is the first time in _ever_ that I can remember not buying _any_ games for the first 8 months of the year.

And the worst part is, this will get worse. Many of the most anticipated games of the holiday season have gotten pushed into Q1 2010. Q4 2009 is going to go down in history as a very, very painful quarter for game publishers.

<comment><USER7> That's very true, but I believe sales would have been _much_ better this year if last years games weren't still priced the same as the new games of this year.

I have a serious problem when buying games, because I worked as a reviewer so I'm used to recommending 'buy this one now, buy this one later, and just don't even think about it' and I happen to agree. There hasn't been a single game that I _had_ to buy this year. EVE Online has been winning my interest with the new expansion, and I usually detest MMO's. The games always held my attention, but I've never been able to justify the monthly payments, yet the lack of decent games this year and the fact that their expansions add a lot to the game without costing you more (I'd never play WoW because they charge you multiple times, for buying the original game, the expansions and monthly, and it never felt fun to play).

I've heard no mention of MMO sales, but I've admittedly not paid attention to that sector. So I would be interested to see if there has been a boom or bust. Have people been cancelling subscriptions or have people switched from buying a new game every month at $70 to a low monthly fee? I may have to look it up

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> #2 Wii Sports Resort... man, does that game suck. It is nothing more than a demo for the Wii Motion Plus. Period.</comment>


The Ryno: Why two wheels when you need just one? - <AUTHOR> http://solidsmack.com/3d-cad-technology/the-ryno-why-two-wheels-when-you-just-need-one/

<comment><USER2> Normally I think "Product X Killer" is kind of a ridiculous statement to make, but in the case of the Segway I would double that. For a competitor to kill another product implies that product is wildly successful and without any real competition. The Segway was hyped as "as big a deal as the PC" and "more important than the Internet". Instead it's fairly useless and banned in the places it would be most useful (ignoring the medical devices using gyroscopic technology). The Segway Killer is called your legs and a bicycle.

The Ryno isn't even a Segway competitor. You might make the bold claim that it would be a motorcycle killer, but even then... I mean, it's a one-wheeled motorcycle. Let's be practical here: the Ryno goes 20mph with a 20 mile range, can't be used on sidewalks or pedestrian areas, and only really exists to draw attention. It's not competing with the Segway, it's not competing with motorcycles, it's barely competing with scooters or bicycles. Hype it up because it looks interesting and has some neat tech, but don't make the claim that it will revolutionize transport just because it can stand up on its own.

<comment><USER3> Exactly. No way is this competing with legs or a bicycle. Legs can go on sidewalks and are free. Bikes are way more portable, cheaper, have a higher top speed (for most people), don't make you look like a goober (depending on your lycra addiction) and have no range issues.

<comment><USER2> The best part about a bike is, you can go 25mph to the city center, and when you get to the pedestrian area, you just get off and walk. Park the bike or don't, it won't keep you from getting through the walkway. If you're too tired to get home, just put it on the front of a bus and ride home.

Problem is, bikes aren't cool.

<comment><USER3> > Problem is, bikes aren't cool.

You're just living in an uncool place.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> It certainly looks cool, but I'll love to see an emergency braking with no front wheel..

</comment><comment><USER5> To call product X a killer of product Y, Y must have a substantial presence in the market. Segway does not. Even in Ryno delivers, killing the segway is not going to make headlines.

A better comparision IMO is to the mini-farthing YikeBike (www.yikebike.com), but I don't think that product has set the market on fire either

</comment><comment><USER6> This looks like a step backwards, applying traditional vehicle mechanics, where the Segway has already graduated from them.

Also, the Segway was always pitched as a _walking_ replacement, not a _driving_ replacement.

<comment><AUTHOR> [http://www.engadget.com/2011/11/02/ryno-motors-self- balancin...](http://www.engadget.com/2011/11/02/ryno-motors-self-balancing- single-wheeled-scooter-test-ride/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Ah nice. I've seen a guy on one of these in Brooklyn -- it certainly stands out.

</comment><comment><USER8> It's as if the maker of Ryno read Paul Graham's post on Segway and implemented his suggestions.

<http://www.paulgraham.com/segway.html>

"So there may be a way to capture more of the market Segway hoped to reach: make a version that doesn't look so easy for the rider. It would also be helpful if the styling was in the tradition of skateboards or bicycles rather than medical devices."

</comment><comment><USER9> I thought the Segway killer was the cost and confusion about how to integrate it with traffic codes. The Ryno doesn't appear to solve either of these problems.

</comment><comment><USER10> The Segway gets a lot of flack, but it's actually catching on as a tourist device. People who would normally exhaust themselves completely - or who wouldn't be able to do a tour of a place at all - now have the option of purchasing so-called guided tours on Segways.

The problem with the Segway was and is that it felt like an answer to a question no one had asked. We might still see a lot of Segways - or their equivalent.

<comment><USER11> The real problem with the Segway are two primary things you're glossing over:

1\. Gee-whiz technology, with non-trivial downsides, that could be obviated with a third wheel. [1]

2\. Everyone-will-want-one marketing for a device with deal-breaker-level problems that are trivial to identify. [2]

The Segway was pitched as solving a problem that was clear and known: bicycles are great, but they're only appropriate and convenient for a certain range of riders and situations. And, in short, the Segway just doesn't present a better solution for most of those situations or riders.

[1] You mention people taking assisted tours. But how much larger would even _that_ market be, if it included people who could stand, but couldn't risk going over the handlebars while learning to ride?

[2] A device of most interest in relatively population-dense settings that not only has no solution to, but actually amplifies the problems of a bicycle? e.g. stairs, parking. (by being massively more expensive and heavier)

<comment><USER12> > You mention people taking assisted tours. But how much larger would even > that market be, if it included people who could stand, but couldn't risk > going over the handlebars while learning to ride?

It wouldn't be significantly larger. The vast majority of people taking those tours aren't disabled, they're just looking for an easy way to do things. There aren't that many people who can stand but can't operate a segway and they're significantly dwarfed by the number of folks who can operate a segway.

Then again, I take segway tours whenever I can. What experience do you have with this market?

<comment><USER11> > _"There aren't that many people who can stand but can't operate a segway"_

I think this is where we're disagreeing. I've met plenty of people who can stand, but couldn't handle a walking tour and simply cannot take the risk of a spill from a bicycle, Segway or scooter.

And while they're definitely dwarfed by people who _can_ use a Segway, I believe they make up a significant fraction of those people for whom an electronically-assisted, yet-more-stable tour holds a natural appeal over a bicycle, walk, or scooter tour.

<comment><USER12> > And while they're definitely dwarfed by people who can use a Segway, I > believe they make up a significant fraction of those people for whom an > electronically-assisted, yet-more-stable tour holds a natural appeal over a > bicycle, walk, or scooter tour.

Like I wrote, I've been on lots of Segway tours. Almost everyone on them is physically capable of doing walking, biking, or scooter tours, yet they do Segway tours. (In fact, I've seen those same people doing other kinds of tours as well.)

Your entire argument for assumes otherwise. What's your supporting evidence?

<comment><USER11> My entire point is about a _different_ market with different needs.

It's like we're both standing at an amusement park and we're looking at an electric go-kart racing ride.

I'm suggesting the general concept, an electric mini-car, holds a natural appeal for a different market. A market for whom a relatively quick and nimble electric mini-car would be great, and for more than just racing their friends in circles.

So I'm suggesting it's odd that one would create a company to deliver electric mini-cars but stick to the racing go-kart form-factor to the exclusion of, really, any other market where the general technology is appealing, but the existing form factor is inappropriate.

And you're replying that this other market doesn't exist, because you've done a lot of go-kart racing and you've only seen fit people in line. And they get in line, even though they could hold a bicycle or foot race. So why would I think anyone else is interested?

And do see how the motivations of fit people choosing go-kart racing are wholly irrelevant to my hypothesis? Even if I'm right, the mini-cars I'm talking about likely wouldn't ever replace the existing karts for racing. Even if the older and moderately disabled folks use _their_ devices for racing amongst themselves, that has no necessary bearing on what other people would prefer.

I'm talking about something wholly different.

And all I have is anecdotal evidence that the market exists. But I find it hard to believe you don't know, or can't even conceive of, any older or moderately disabled people for whom a more-stable device that retained the quickness and agility of a Segway would hold an appeal.

I've spent quite a bit of time with older and moderately disabled people, working in and around healthcare, and there is no shortage of these people who express a simultaneous interest in something that mobile, and a disappointment that it doesn't exist in a more stable variety.

<comment><USER12> > My entire point is about a different market with different needs.

This whole line of discussion started with:

>>The Segway gets a lot of flack, but it's actually catching on as a tourist device. People who would normally exhaust themselves completely - or who wouldn't be able to do a tour of a place at all - now have the option of purchasing so-called guided tours on Segways.

My point is that said market doesn't have those characteristics. My evidence is that I participate in said market.

If you have evidence about a different market, great - let's see it.

If you're just imagining a market ....

> And all I have is anecdotal evidence that the market exists.

What, exactly, are those anecdotes?

> But I find it hard to believe you don't know, or can't even conceive of, any > older or moderately disabled people for whom a more-stable device that > retained the quickness and agility of a Segway would hold an appeal.

I can conceive of them. My point is that they're not a significant part of the current segway tourism market. Moreover, said market is already significantly larger than the population you're talking about, so a segway alternative that served them can't significantly increase the size of that market.

> I've spent quite a bit of time with older and moderately disabled people, > working in and around healthcare, and there is no shortage of these people > who express a simultaneous interest in something that mobile, and a > disappointment that it doesn't exist in a more stable variety.

Great, but as I pointed out, irrelevant to the segway tourism market. Moreover, it's going to be smaller than the current segway tourism market.

It's good to come up with ways to serve an underserved market. However, that doesn't imply that an existing market is going to adjust to satisfy that underserved market.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Lots of haters here, just because the OP said Segway Killer in the title. I think this could have a legitimate market to replace things like gas powered scooters. Details seem thin right now, but if it works well and the price is right they could definitely sell these beyond the high end consumer market.

<comment><USER2> But what benefit does this give over a two-wheeled electric scooter? A two- wheeled scooter won't need to use its batteries to keep itself upright.

<comment><USER14> It's cool.

Take my money already!

<comment><USER2> I will give you that. It is cool.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> A few years ago, Bombardier showed off a concept that's very similar, but with a small retracting pair front wheel used at low speed.

<http://www.gizmag.com/embrio-one-wheel-concept/2350/>

</comment><comment><USER16> I have seen that before.. <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hXO4Ki8qsvk>

</comment><comment><USER16> Humm.. <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x2DgwY5QQBk>

</comment><comment><USER17> No front wheel. Makes you look even sillier than when on a Segway. Lame.

<comment><USER18> Interesting fact - in the gallery is no picture of actually someone riding on it <http://rynomotors.com/gallery/>

ps: Couldn't open the link by OP - maybe there is one. (seems down)

<comment><AUTHOR> Well here is one picture of someone riding it. [http://rynomotors6.files.wordpress.com/2009/11/ryno-down- tow...](http://rynomotors6.files.wordpress.com/2009/11/ryno-down-town- portland.jpg)

<comment><USER19> He's so bundled up he looks like he may be wearing body armor...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Um... how do you kill something that is already dead?

</comment><comment><USER21> Gizmoduck approves

</comment><comment><USER22> This is some pretty risky naming. It makes me think, "Cause of death: thrown trying to ride a Ryno."

That would work if it were an energy drink - but this thing will be in traffic, which really is a major cause of death.

I mean it doesn't exactly say stability and easy of riding, does it? (Which are the main reasons that people who aren't being gimmicky don't choose unicycles over bicycles.)

With a name like this it would attract a suicidal/desperado crowd, which usually doesn't invest in its future long enough to have much money at any one time. (i.e. you can't target early adopters at a premium price with this naming/branding, which is usually the key to marketing something like this successfully and getting it adopted widely as you learn how to make it better and roll out on scale.)

I would change the name.

<comment><USER23> >It makes me think, "Cause of death: thrown trying to ride a Ryno."

I mean, it won't appeal to the sort that will buy something that only goes 20mph, but you just wrote the advertising campaign for the thing.

<comment><USER22> It's terrible branding, because it helps give the wrong impression.

[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z1YoCfm7nxU&t=4m0s](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z1YoCfm7nxU&t=4m0s)

It's a great tagline - if you're 15-19. Who wouldn't want to show their daring trying to ride a Ryno!

Answer: any of the people that would be actual early adopter buyers for this expensive new product. (Middle aged rich people.) Segway did it a lot better here, and Ryno needs to do like them.

<comment><USER23> meh, look at who buys the high end BMW and HD brand motorcycles. They are almost entirely limited to the over 40 crowd. I mean, that's mostly due to the expense (just like the Ryno) but clearly, The 'death machine' mystique isn't limited to the young.

<comment><USER22> my entire comment is about the name Ryno, which I assume is a homonym for "Rhino". And you ride it, even though it obviously looks dangerous and unstable.

Do you have any specific examples like that from BMW and HD? This wuold be like, I don't know, calling a plane "freefall". Sure there's a danger mystique - but should that be in the name?

<comment><USER23> eh, I think naming a motorcycle "death machine" would be... redundant? silly? I mean, the statistics show pretty clearly that it's one of the most dangerous ways to travel. Even so, you do see people dressing up motorcycles with skulls and German military decorations, as if the fact that it is by it's nature a dangerous machine was not enough by itself.

The Ryno, on the other hand, has no such statistics. For all I know, it's as safe as a segwey. And, if the problem they are trying to overcome is the nerd factor of the segway, and if, in fact, it isn't dangerous (I have no idea) then I think making the name sound a bit more dangerous might make sense, in the same way that putting a HD logo and some 'iron cross' accessories on a pickup makes it easier to sell.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> How can one kill that which is already dead?</comment>


C is the desert island language - <AUTHOR> http://www-cs-students.stanford.edu/~blynn/c/intro.html <comment><USER2> I've had just a cursory read through the C++ vs C version. Constructors can never fail? Nope, exceptions. If you think constructors _should_ never fail, I think you haven't used malloc.

Templates are complex? Compared to preprocessor they're child's play. They're meant to replace most uses of preprocessor. Other compile time code like constexpr is not mentioned.

Exceptions are not mentioned yet are actually the most complex C++ machinery.

Scope changes are not mentioned but are critical to RAII and other useful anti-bug features.

That you can actually enforce compile time type safety is not mentioned either.

Lambasting the extra visibility keywords when C already has the nastiness of static, extern and inline is very peculiar. They are also essentially type safety measures.

C++ standard library which is strictly superior to C is not mentioned either.

C++ may not be perfect but at least it is being improved. C is the unchanged ancient form where the main gain is that it does not have stack frame unwinding and has trivial ABI.

<comment><USER3> Just another point of reference. The compiler the author uses to compile C, gcc, is actually now written in C++.

<comment><USER4> No, GCC is still written mostly in C. Try:

git clone --depth=1 [https://github.com/gcc- mirror/gcc.git](https://github.com/gcc-mirror/gcc.git)

cloc gcc/gcc

<comment><USER5> The files have the .c extension, but they're actually C++.

…Yes, really. They didn't change the filenames during the migration.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> _Despite its age, despite many flaws, C is still the de facto standard, the lingua franca. Why? As with other older languages, inertia is partly to blame, but this cannot be the only reason. C must possess a near-perfect balance of vital language features._

A flawed premise. _Why_ must C contain a new-perfect balance of vital language features to persist? _Why_ can inertia and familiarity not be to blame?

It's fine to list C's qualities, it has many (and it also has many warts), but if your opening statement makes two very powerful and clear assertions such as those, you would think they would be the point of the article, or at a _minimum_ addressed within the body. They are not.

<comment><USER7> A more accurate formulation might be something like this:

positives(C) - negatives(C) + inertia(C) > positives(other) - negatives(other)

There are multiple things on both sides here. The author more or less asserted without evidence that inertia isn't the dominant term.

Also, inertia might not be a good analogy. Things with inertia might move slowly but will move eventually even given the smallest force. This is probably more like energy wells where you can become trapped in a local minimum.

<comment><USER8> inertia + friction then.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I started off with C 15 years ago, but now I find myself migrated, by and large, to C++. Everything that's good about C exists in C++, and all of the missing components (string support, smart pointers, tuples, maps, STL data structures) make life much easier. On top of that, it's the exact same compiler for both C and C++ on most platforms.

<comment><USER10> For me it's exactly the other way around. Spent 20 years in C++ (before that 5 years of C), but slowly and steady got fed up by the language complexity, redundant features, standard library bloat and compiles times. Went back to C and it's like a breath of fresh air.

The turning point for me was realizing that C++ mostly helps with managing the complexity of many small memory allocations, but it's better to avoid such a "many small memory allocations" scenario to begin with. And without that, C++ looses much of its appeal over C.

<comment><USER11> Don't you miss virtual functions? I found that no matter how you did it, implementing polymorphism in C (with function pointers) is tedious and verbose ; also, it discourages the creation of new interfaces (too much boilerplate).

<comment><USER10> No, I don't use virtual methods (or inheritance, or runtime polymorphism) in C++ that much either.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Sure, C is great in its simplicity but the world has moved on to safer more powerful languages. Yes, I am referring to Rust, and yes, while it can be awkward and annoying sometimes with it's ownership lifetimes, as a professional it gives me great confidence to know that the next crash in the system will not be because of my code.

<comment><USER13> > Sure, C is great in its simplicity but the world has moved on to safer more > powerful languages.

Sure, we have more type safe languages. But I wouldn't call one language "more powerful" than another. Certainly Rust isn't "more powerful" than C. They are both turing complete and equally "powerful".

<comment><USER14> Most uses of the word powerful in this context actually refers to the expressiveness of the language and not the Turing completeness.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> There's way too much love for C when it has some huge flaws. I can agree on simplicity, portability, speed. But having archaic String and file handling are huge frustrations. Function pointers are nice, but modern languages already have functional programming constructs that supersede it. Goto's should be avoided for good reason. As for brevity? How about just having good naming in your variables. Something that isn't HammerHammerHammerFactory but something that doesn't require a user to sift through the entire code to guess what an important variable does because it's a three character variable.

<comment><USER16> > * it has some huge flaws*

It's like saying that assembler is flawed. It's not; it's just may not be the right tool for the job.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> This article is frustrating to me. So many modern languages and toolsets are omitted from the comparisons provided that the conclusions, to me, lack authority. But they're presented as if they're obvious, almost trivial.

I have great respect for C. But it's only one language and it solves one set of problems. I'm not even sure the concept of a "desert island language" is valid - except to ask "what tool would you want to have to build the tools you _actually_ want?"

In that case, the answer might be C, but the article doesn't do any kind of job showing that.

</comment><comment><USER18> This site is critically lacking a comparison of C and Rust. The latter would be my desert island language of choice. ;)

<comment><USER16> It would keep you busy for sure...

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> > Or as Linus Torvalds puts it, "C is the only sane choice".

I'd be very interested in his opinion of Rust

<comment><USER20> He's only ever made one statement, in 2016: [https://www.infoworld.com/article/3109150/linux/linux- at-25-...](https://www.infoworld.com/article/3109150/linux/linux-at-25-linus- torvalds-on-the-evolution-and-future-of-linux.html)

> Q: What do you think of the projects currently underway to develop OS > kernels in languages like Rust (touted for having built-in safeties that C > does not)? > > A: That's not a new phenomenon at all. We've had the system > people who used Modula-2 or Ada, and I have to say Rust looks a lot better > than either of those two disasters. > > I'm not convinced about Rust for an > OS kernel (there's a lot more to system programming than the kernel, > though), but at the same time there is no question that C has a lot of > limitations.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Pretty sure that Forth is the desert island language if that means that we are starting from machine code. If we get to pick an entire language ecosystem then I choose the one with the best boat building libraries.

</comment><comment><USER22> > easy for humans to understand

> I can roughly envision the assembly generated by a C statement, so I can > make educated guesses about time and space efficiency.

Ha, that sure went out the window in more recent years.

And everything else listed is pretty minor.

</comment><comment><USER12> > Do you say "taxi cab", or "taximeter cabriolet"?

Rly? Tht how u tlk?

<comment><USER16> In programming (and also in mathematics, physics, chemistry, microbiology, etc.), yes.

<comment><USER12> The article was saying that it's OK to do it in programming because we do it in real life. My point was that we don't.</comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: Simple Multiplayer 3D render with threejs, Tile38 and websockets - <AUTHOR> http://juanpabloaj.com/t38t/ <comment><USER2> Why are the projectiles moving slowly and not smoothly? Why do I keep jumping back to where I started whenever I collide with somebody?

<comment><AUTHOR> * the projectiles moving slowly because the position are computed in the server and send the position to the client, I try to not overload the connection. I need change this, compute the position in the client.

* you jump back to the start position because the game don't have a counter of life, is my first idea for a representation of death.

The real answer is because is a pre alpha version, currently aren't defined final rules.

<comment><USER3> You should check out [http://gafferongames.com/networking-for-game- programmers/wha...](http://gafferongames.com/networking-for-game- programmers/what-every-programmer-needs-to-know-about-game-networking/) for better ways of handling that first issue.

<comment><AUTHOR> thanks, I check this.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Elixir 1.0.5 released - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/elixir-lang/elixir/blob/3eb938a0ba7db5c6cc13d390e6242f66fdc9ef00/CHANGELOG.md#v105-2015-06-29 <comment><USER2> I sponsored the OpenBSD port of Elixir 1.0.5 & Erlang 18:

[http://cvsweb.openbsd.org/cgi- bin/cvsweb/ports/lang/elixir/](http://cvsweb.openbsd.org/cgi- bin/cvsweb/ports/lang/elixir/)

So it'll be included in OpenBSD 5.8.

<comment><USER3> That's awesome! Could I ask why? Are you using it to build anything public?

<comment><USER2> Hopefully some day! ☺

All my programming is public, so if I ever start making something with it, it'll be at [https://github.com/sivers](https://github.com/sivers)

But I'm a fan of OpenBSD, and like to make sure it stays current. I've contributed a few thousand $ over the years to help.

And I'm a fan of Dave Thomas from Pragmatic Programmers, so when I heard him raving about Elixir, I had to give it a try. I like it so far.

Good overview video:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hht9s6nAAx8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hht9s6nAAx8)

Good books:

"Introducing Elixir - Getting Started in Functional Programming"

[http://shop.oreilly.com/product/0636920030584.do](http://shop.oreilly.com/product/0636920030584.do)

"Elixir in Action"

[http://www.manning.com/juric/](http://www.manning.com/juric/)

"Programming Elixir"

[https://pragprog.com/book/elixir/programming- elixir](https://pragprog.com/book/elixir/programming-elixir)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Haven't looked at elixir yet, but being an erlang fan and quickly hopping through the source it looks like elixir is doing for erlang essentially what coffeescript does to javascript. Something many non-erlangers have long lamented is the syntax so this looks quite interesting, also adding the running compiler is a nice idea for the macro support :)

<comment><USER5> Hi, Elixir creator here, thanks for commenting! You may want to watch my talk at Erlang Factory SF 2015: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lqo9-pQuRKE](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lqo9-pQuRKE)

Elixir is not really about the syntax, we have great tooling, our own standard library (with proper Unicode support, collections, unified API for dictionaries, etc) and our own approach to some constructs in OTP.

Feel free to ping here if you have any questions. I will make sure to check this thread again later.

<comment><USER6> Love the language, I've been using it (phoenix) to build a more real-time version of my current rails app. But I have a concern with Elixir core's Enum. In particular, the Enumerable protocol has us implementing Enum.reduce for our own data-types, but Enum.map is written as

`reduce(collection, [], R.map(fun)) |> :lists.reverse`

is there any chance Elixir's enum core can take a page from Clojure's transducer idea and, instead of implementing map with reduce and [], implement it with transduce and some function that steps?

I've often had the need to map and filter over strings to achieve rails-like features such as #to_url, #classify, #underscore, and #humanize... but being forced to either rewrite Enum functions for strings or constantly peppering in String.split("") and Enum.join("") feels really bad.

<comment><USER5> It would be possible to have something like `Enum.map |> Enum.into`. You could also do `Stream.map |> Enum.into` if you don't want to traverse it multiple times (similar to Clojure's `into`). In fact:

        iex> Stream.unfold("hello", &String.next_codepoint/1) |> Enum.to_list
        ["h", "e", "l", "l", "o"]

The reasons we don't have first class support for this though are:

1\. There are multiple ways you could traverse a string. By bytes, by codepoints or by graphemes. I don't think we should pick any of those as default. Ruby did that and to this day it is source of confusion (aggravated by the behavior change from 1.8 to 1.9)

2\. Modifying strings like this would be horribly inefficient. Using split/join wouldn't be recommended also as you are generating a bunch of intermediate garbage to go from string -> string. The recommended way is to rely on pattern matching and Elixir's bit syntax as the compiler will be able to optimize most cases well.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I've been reading about Elixir here-and-there for a while and decided to jump into it last week. I really like it. I'm a big fan of FP and, having increasingly found myself falling out with Python, can definitely see this becoming my dynamically typed language of choice.

<comment><USER8> Would you recommend Elixir for a first FP language? I am familiar with FP from using Python and JavaScript, but I have never used a completely functional language yet. Can I dive into Elixir or should I learn something more "traditional" first such as Haskell, Lisp, etc?

<comment><USER7> My current feeling [bearing in mind that it's been less than a week!] is that Elixir is to Haskell as Python is to C++. If you want to learn a dynamically typed FP language, then I think Elixir is a fine choice; especially from a JS/Python background, plus all the goodies that come with the Erlang VM. I've read it's also good for metaprogramming, so it ticks the same boxes as Lisp, without having to get used to S-expressions!... It's certainly something you can dive into :)

Then, if you find you're really in to the FP Kool-Aid, I would definitely give Haskell (or OCaml) a try as well. It's a completely different ball game, but even as just a beginner -- I kinda-sorta-understand monads -- I would say that it's already improved my general programming skills.

<comment><USER8> Thanks for the suggestion, I will definitely be giving Elixir a try!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I'd love to read about people's real life uses of Elixir, whether it be for their jobs or side projects.

<comment> vezzy-fnord I can't see how they would be much different from the use cases of Erlang/OTP, of which there are plenty of stories.

<comment><USER9> I'm interested in more than just the use cases (although still curious to hear _why_ someone chose Elixir, whether it be for the language, BEAM, or whatever.) I'm looking for stories of why it was chosen over another language and what the end results were.

<comment><USER10> Well neither will win any speed races, but if your problem requires soft- realtime functionality, concurrent execution, or incredible fault tolerance you'd do much worse than to choose Elixir/Erlang. And a simpler learning curve than many FP languages (in my experience, at least) sweetens the deal.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: What IDE do you use? - <AUTHOR> I been learning HTML5, CSS3 and JS raw for a while now and played with a few IDEs.
Bracket visual studio code JetBrain WebStorm intelXdK
I guess different training sites use different Editors or IDE. Which do you prefer? is there one that seem to stand out for most developers in the work Industry? <comment><USER4> I use IntelliJ for Java/AngularTS/ web development and Sublime for lite note taking/editing. IntelliJ is an excellent IDE and is far superior to Eclipse. Great refactoring, code completion everywhere, and very intuitive (I am often amused how it just reads my mind). If you are just starting out, spend some time experimenting and evaluating and cultivate a fine repertoire of tools over time.

</comment><comment><USER5> Visual Studio (for .net) and vim (everything else), contrary to many vimmers will tell you, it is an IDE, just not a very good one. I'm expecting that to get a lot better though with the feature set added in vim 8 and things like intellisense services ([https://github.com/OmniSharp/omnisharp- roslyn](https://github.com/OmniSharp/omnisharp-roslyn)), rust and other languages are providing similar tools.

<comment><USER6> If you would like vim style input to visual studio I recommend vsvim plugin.

<comment><USER5> It's OK. You still miss out on script ability and the better windowing of vim. The windowing is particularly important on over engineered code bases.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> IntelliJ IDEA for Java/Scala/Kotlin

Was using VS Code for Go, now using the Gogland EAP

Basically, if JetBrains makes an IDE for the language then I'm using it.

</comment><comment> Hash-Basher Intellij Idea is by far my favorite for Java/Scala/Clojure

Atom is great text editor for notes and such.

</comment><comment><USER8> Android Studio for the android development, with IdeaVim and a few other plugins.

Intellij for other Java related stuff. Before the dedicated IDE for golang came out from JetBrains, I also used IntelliJ for golang development with their golang plugin.

Aside from that, I use Sublime for dumping the logs/note taking etc.

Last, not least, vim!

</comment><comment><USER9> IntelliJ for Java web apps and some of the other Jet Brain's IDEs for occasional work in some other languages. Eclipse always feels improvised in comparison; you can 'see the joins' between various bits of functionality.

</comment><comment><USER10> Python - <USER2>

Atom/Gogland EAP - <USER3>

Vim when I done goofed and have to change something on a server

Gogland is IntelliJ's Go IDE. It's in early access and it desperately needs a new name. It's based on the Go plugin for existing IntelliJ IDE's.

I use Atom for everything else (including small Python scripts/packages). I used to use Sublime Text but IMO the plugins in Atom just seem to be much easier to install.

</comment><comment><USER11> You can make a poll - [https://news.ycombinator.com/newpoll](https://news.ycombinator.com/newpoll)

<comment><AUTHOR> Looks I need 200 karma to create a poll.

<comment><USER12> If you or someone make me a list I'll post it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> IntelliJ IDEA for complex (mostly Java / JavaScript) projects and Sublime Text for pure JavaScript / Web front-end projects.

</comment><comment><USER14> Wordstar.

Just kidding: Mostly RStudio (R), jupyter notebooks (python) and Sublime Text for everything else

Really liked Atom but it always crashed with big .txt files.

<comment><USER15> Sublime is great for hacking your way through a CSV file very quickly.

I write in Sublime at least 20% of my formulas and then paste it into Tableau and Talend. Easier (even without autocompletion) than working in a small window/pane than I usually have inside that tools, plus I use a new line for every change, so I can see what I had before (there is no version control for Business Intelligence).

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> 7 years vim for bash, awk, Forth, Rebol, Ruby

5 years Sublime Text for bash, JavaScript, CoffeeScript

1 year (since 2016) IntelliJ+Cursive for Clojure(Script)

I've seriously tried Light Table, Atom, Visual Studio Code, Nightcode too for several days and tried to customize them all to my needs.

I gave a try to Cloud9, Nitrous, Koding, but I usually live on low bandwidth, so none of these were viable options.

While the JetBrains family of IDEs are super smart, ultimately the speed of your machine and your patience is what matters when choosing and IDE.

Sublime Text is the winner if you consider speed and memory usage, but its code navigation features are not precise.

JetBrains is the winner from convenience perspective, BUT you need 4GHz i7 with 16GB RAM if you expect Sublime Text-like responsiveness. I think it worth the investment but I was not been able to afford it for many years either...

Btw, the killer feature in JetBrains IDEs is their git interface. I think they have the greatest, _cross-platform_ 3-way merge interface.

</comment><comment><USER17> Vim mainly, jupyter notebook for little python things

<comment> a-saleh Ha, forgot about jupyter!

I use it for prototyping python, javascript as well as haskell :-)

More over, I use it as presentation software. Being able to slap together stats from i.e. jira, github and our CI system into a self-updating set of slides is really awesome :)

Currently I experiment with [https://github.com/nteract/nteract](https://github.com/nteract/nteract) to have more desktop-like experience :-)

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> I work full stack mainly in Java/JS. At work I use Eclipse since the whole team uses it. But at home I use IntelliJ.

And Sublime for all quick edits.

</comment><comment><USER19> Visual Studio when I'm doing .NET stuff (mainly C#). I love it and I have not found a better IDE (though my next one is a close rival). Now, I've started working with Elixir in my free time and have started using VS Code and I absolutely love that too. It is close to topping Visual Studio.

</comment><comment><USER20> Visual Studio (C#, ASP.NET MVC, Xamarin) and Visual Studio Code. :)

</comment><comment><USER21> Visual Studio at work and home. For C# and C++, respectively.

</comment><comment><USER22> Vim + plugins + Unix tools (find, make, grep, ack, etc.)

For C# I use Visual Studio, Intellisense autocompletion is gteat.

For Java I use Eclipse, but in One project where I was forced to developer on a remote server with many restrictions I user vim + make + javac, It Is Crazy, I know, but It Is possible

</comment><comment><USER23> I used to use Eclipse for Java development years ago. Then I found Sublime Text and haven't looked back. If you just want a lightweight editor that does code highlighting and has an assortment of plugins that are optional then try Sublime. The optional plugins make it so you can get features an IDE has if you choose but don't have the bloat of an IDE.

Also it is truely cross-platform: Windows, Linux and Mac. So if you change jobs, want to use it at home or there is a shift in devs away from Mac to Linux you won't have to learn something new.

</comment><comment><USER24> I use Sublime Text for everything, even my todo lists ([https://github.com/tiffon/sublime-to- done](https://github.com/tiffon/sublime-to-done))

</comment><comment><USER25> I've gone from ST2 -> WebStorm -> Atom -> VS Code

I prefer code now because its features are nearly on par with WebStorm but it runs _far_ faster than WebStorm or even Atom.

About 6-9 months ago, it was still a bit behind on features but they've just been rolling out improvements at a furious pace. The integrated terminal you can open with ctrl + ` is super useful as are some of the auto checking features. If you use something like TypeScript or Elm, you'll get detailed debugging suggestions on hover any time you save a file with any errors.

</comment><comment><USER26> Emacs with the right package for the language I'm using.

</comment><comment><USER27> For Java development, currently, I use NetBeans IDE because there is GUI editor that helps me easlity to build a desktop-based application using Swing API. I plan to use JetBrain for next development.

Android Studio for Android application development.

Beside that, I also use Vim. Well, actually, it's not a IDE. If I work on something using C, PHP, or scripting language (JavaScript, Ruby), I go with it.

</comment><comment> a-saleh Long time ago, when I was learning Java, I liked Eclipse.

Currently on my desktop, I mostly switch between Atom and Visual Studio code, because I mostly write for nodejs, or I am trying out something weirder, like purescript, or elm, or clojure, and these two editors usually have good plugins to deal with them.

When I am on ssh, I use vim.I develop stuff in vim, in tmux over ssh often, because that is the simplest I can drag my colleague to my work env to help me :-)

<comment><AUTHOR> how do you live preview let's HTML APP on VS Code? Like Brackets has it. I guess I can hit f1 and view in browser but is not "Live" and gets tiring refreshing the page.

<comment><USER28> I think there's plugins for that. Checkout [https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=hdg.live...](https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=hdg.live- html-previewer).

I do a lot of front-end dev and use VS Code as well. I do remember Brackets being pretty nifty for doing just HTML/CSS stuff. In practice, however, I'm pretty much exclusively writing JavaScript that outputs html, so the usefulness of Brackets' live preview or similar is almost nonexistent.

I think VS Code hits the sweet spot between actively-developed, speed, free, and features... for front-end at least. It's also pretty good for Golang.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> I'll go against the grain--

I recommend Cloud9. Isolated environments and a uniform editor/experience.

<comment><USER30> I second this, as a student I definitely recommend Cloud9 as well.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> It depends on the language so I keep jumping between Vim or one of the jetbrains IDEs

</comment><comment><USER32> Two words: E Macs

</comment><comment><USER33> WebStorm & PhpStorm ... I'm using the free student license however... I'm not sure if I'll buy them when it expires

</comment><comment><USER34> PhpStorm. There is no other IDE that comes close for PHP development.

</comment><comment><USER35> While it's not an IDE, if you want to tackle a million line code of an existing package and want to insert a tiny feature, I highly recommend Coati.io. It's a must.

</comment><comment><USER36> I use Emacs. I don't completely like it, but I haven't found anything better out there.

If Jetbrains could embed actual Emacs as its editor, that would be the holy grail for me.

</comment><comment><USER37> I use Intellij. Mostly work in the JVM so it's the right choice. Pretty heavy, but we're all used to that in JVM land.

</comment><comment><USER38> WebStorm

</comment><comment><USER39> IntelliJ for Java. Emacs for everything else.

</comment><comment><USER40> Butterflies.

</comment><comment><USER41> When I'm editing HTML, CSS and JS I normally just use notepad++. (Windows PC).

</comment><comment><USER42> Emacs

</comment><comment><USER43> Atom. Been using it 8 hours since day 0 and I have very few complaints.

</comment><comment><USER44> vim + make, but occasionally miss the Visual Studio debugger a lot.

</comment><comment><USER45> My work IDE is eclipse. My text editors are Notepad++ and vi

</comment><comment><USER46> Code Blocks for C++, PyCharm for Python, and Geany for PHP

</comment><comment><USER47> IntelliJ for Java, Vim+Tmux for everything else.

</comment><comment><USER48> Sublime Text for LaTeX, MATLAB for the rest.

</comment><comment><USER49> Visual Studio for C# and Xamarin.

</comment><comment><USER50> Notepad++ for classic asp code editing

</comment><comment><USER51> PyCharm + Sublime + NetBeans

</comment><comment><USER52> NetBeans

</comment><comment><USER53> Typora for notes.

Atom for Web Development.

</comment><comment><USER54> Emacs and IntelliJ IDEA.

</comment><comment><USER55> NetBeans + Eclipse

</comment><comment><USER56> Eclipse and Atom

</comment><comment><USER57> vim & (make|gradle|maven|ant)

</comment><comment><USER58> Atom or Vim

</comment><comment><USER59> Linux.

</comment><comment><USER60> vi

</comment><comment><USER61> grep find locate nano make

</comment><comment><USER62> still using Light Table

</comment><comment><USER63> sam</comment>


History of Bitnet Relay -- the inspiration for IRC - <AUTHOR> http://web.inter.nl.net/users/fred/relay/relhis.html <comment><USER2> Fascinating - the few commands and protocol details he mentions are very reminiscent of IRC. Does anyone have a similar early history of IRC, and the (presumable) downfall of Bitnet Relay?</comment>


Thanks Obama: Apple Pay Gets US Government Backing - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2015/02/13/apple-pay-coming-to-federal-institutions-starting-in-september/

<comment> o0-0o I'm not sure that 1984 ad was not parody.</comment>


Germany Considers Fining Facebook $522,000 per Fake News Item - <AUTHOR> http://heatst.com/tech/germany-considers-fining-facebook-522000-per-fake-news-item/ <comment><USER2> Anybody else get the feeling that Germany is joining the newfangled "fake news is really bad" brigade because Merkel is now being roasted mercilessly online due to recent events and Germany has elections coming up soon? It wouldn't be hard to manipulate public opinion if you literally decided what news would be allowed to be displayed on social media.

Who decides what news is true or not? Is that healthy for a free country? What realistic option is there for companies to immediately comply to any government demands or face financial death?

<comment><AUTHOR> Clinton pushed the same narrative her first speech after losing, and the Wikileaks show her talking with Merkel. I think there's a group of world leaders that get together and decide to push the same story at the same time.

There was a real problem with clickbait sites that generated entirely fake stories. But let's be honest: Politicians aren't going to let a term with such rhetorical kick like "fake news" be used to narrowly target a few rogue clickbait farms in Algeria. Once they've convinced people there's a problem, they'll use the term much more broadly whenever it benefits them.

This is no different than using "national security" as a pretense for passing a surveillance law. "Never let a good crisis go to waste" and all.

<comment><USER2> There are different types of "fake news".

When the establishment is talking about "fake news", I don't think they truly give one tiny hoot about a clickbait site that invents an entirely fake story out of thin air. In fact, I think it's actually beneficial to them because then it becomes easier to discredit many other ideas by association.

I think they're far more concerned with labeling actual true stories from the alternative non-corporate controlled media as fake news. I think this is what the censorship is all about.</comment></comment></comment>


Netflix Prize - is RMSE a good measurement? No. - <AUTHOR> http://locut.us/blog/2007/12/17/netflix-prize-is-rmse-a-good-measurement/ <comment><USER2> I don't understand a basic concept here. How does Netflix assign a monetary value to the improvement in rating prediction?

For example, does rating prediction affect their inventory management? Or is it more of an issue of customers trusting/liking Netflix better if it's recommendations are better?

<comment><USER3> It seems that Netflix is trying to offer a prize to stimulate innovation much like the X-Prize worked to raise interest in privately funded rocketry/space launching.</comment></comment>


National Apprenticeship Week: what inspires us to teach and learn - <AUTHOR> https://blogs.endjin.com/2011/02/on-apprenticeships/

<comment><AUTHOR> I'd love to hear more stories about apprenticeships and mentoring in the tech industry. We don't talk enough about the people who individually inspired us to learn our craft.</comment>


Ask HN: Recent censorship on HN? - <AUTHOR> I've noticed that a lot of stories regarding a certain US political figure (who I won't mention here) have been silently killed recently.
Is this HN mods enforcing policy, a rogue agent abusing their power, an organized attempt to limit discourse (as happens in Russia) or something else entirely?
In any case it's not very transparent what's occurring. What are people's thoughts? <comment><USER2> [https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)

 _Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they 're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon._

Political discussion online pretty much always tumbles in to a flamewar. HN is better off without it in my opinion.

</comment><comment><USER3> At least those in your submission history are flagkilled, -> enough users clicked the flag link on them, as you can see from the [flagged] in the title (if you have showdead enabled in your profile, they still appear in listings). Not everything is a conspiracy.

<comment><AUTHOR> So I guess the question is if this is organic and these are real users or if they are bots controlled by someone with an agenda.

BTW you don't see [flagged] on your own posts. They look normal but are simply absent if not logged in. Similar to hell-banning.

<comment><USER4> It's real users. I frequent the new submissions page a lot and I would've flagged all three submission (I wasn't online then).

My reasoning is that Drumpf is not HN material. Same with Leonardo not winning an Oscar, Kane tweeting about his new studio album or the superbowl. Even with school shootings and terrorist attacks only very few articles make the frontpage.

It's not disagreement with the campaign (I enjoyed the show on youtube) or political agenda, just trying to keep quality up. My guide is [https://news.ycombinator.com/best](https://news.ycombinator.com/best)

[edit: on slow work day (weekend) I probably look at 75% of submissions and flag 5 maximum. Flagging comments is very very rare. It needs several users to flag to become active, I don't know personally or collaborate with others users on flagging.]

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Something else entirely.

HN is not reddit. US political figures are uninteresting here -- unless they've invented a new geospatial-temporal database or something.

</comment><comment><USER6> It could also be people flagging.

The US presidential elections certainly have a worldwide impact but not everyone outside of US is interested by the minutia of the campaign, especially when reading HN.

Edit : I interpreted that you were talking about Trump (or Clinton) but I might be wrong...</comment>


The Cavendish banana is slowly but surely being driven to extinction - <AUTHOR> http://qz.com/559579/the-worlds-favorite-fruit-is-slowly-but-surely-being-driven-to-extinction/ <comment><USER2> This article by the same author from March of last year (2014) is longer, and does a more thorough job explaining the context and the threat:

[http://qz.com/164029/tropical-race-4-global-banana- industry-...](http://qz.com/164029/tropical-race-4-global-banana-industry-is- killing-the-worlds-favorite-fruit/) (and HN discussion [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8296326](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8296326))

I'd recommend just reading that one and skipping the current article, which consists of a tiny bit of background wrapped around a link to the recent study [http://journals.plos.org/plospathogens/article?id=10.1371/jo...](http://journals.plos.org/plospathogens/article?id=10.1371/journal.ppat.1005197)

<comment><USER3> > This article by the same article

The singularity has arrived! The articles are writing themselves! ;)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Not all is bad, though. The Cavendish is not exactly the most tasty banana, and all the replacements that people are looking at (Goldfinger, which is shorter, thicker and straighter, Sedas, which is apparently a resistant Gros Michel) are all tastier than the Cavendish.

<comment><USER5> Here in Vietnam I see at least half a dozen different kinds of bananas of all shapes and sizes every time I go to the market. Most taste better than American supermarket bananas too.

<comment><USER4> It was the same when I was on vacation in Indonesia. There's clearly a wealth of bananas in south-east Asia. Most of them were really tiny though, and probably hard to sell in the west.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Bananas are astonishing. Compare them to apples, from the viewpoint of a North American consumer.

1\. Bananas are grown thousands of miles away. Apples are typically grown within a few hundred.

2\. Bananas have to be transported in refrigerated ships, trucks, and trains, and even then only keep for a couple weeks after harvest. Apples are easy to transport and keep for months.

Yet bananas are cheaper than apples!

How that came to be is covered in this interesting article: [http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/18/opinion/18koeppel.html?ref...](http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/18/opinion/18koeppel.html?ref=opinion&_r=0)

<comment><USER7> > Over the past decade, however, a new, more virulent strain of Panama disease > has begun to spread across the world, and this time the Cavendish is not > immune. The fungus is expected to reach Latin America in 5 to 10 years, > maybe 20. The big banana companies have been slow to finance efforts to find > either a cure for the fungus or a banana that resists it. Nor has enough > been done to aid efforts to diversify the world's banana crop by preserving > little-known varieties of the fruit that grow in Africa and Asia.

It astounds me that Big Banana has been "slow" to react, given that "By 1960, the Gros Michel was essentially extinct and the banana industry nearly bankrupt"!

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> This is horrible news. I love bananas and eat at least 365/year. I recently got a blender so that I could make smoothies -- to fool my kid into eating both a banana and a glass of milk in the morning :)

The article didn't make it clear, though, whether every variety of banana is affected, or just the big yellow ones called "Cavendish". When I lived in Taiwan (early 80s), there were all sorts of bananas -- Cavendish, little yellow ones, little red ones. In fact these little reddish-skinned ones with a tart yellow fruit grew in my back yard at the time. Really tasty.

Maybe it's time to install a small tropical greenhouse in the back yard and grow one's own bananas. If mainstream bananas become scarce and expensive, this could be like tomatoes -- everyone will want to grow them. A business opportunity for someone, possibly.

<comment><USER9> The particular problem strain of the Panama disease affects the Cavendish specifically. This has happened before; the Cavendish, itself, only became the dominant cultivar after other strains of the same disease killed the previous dominant cultivar, the Gros Michel. All members of a given cultivar are clones, so they're genetically identical and thus very susceptible to being wiped out by disease as they have no mechanism to evolve resistance. We'll probably just have to switch again.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Between seedbanks and genome sequencing, there is really no excuse for us letting major (sub-)species go extinct anymore.

<comment><USER11> Cavendish are seedless, they only grow vegetatively. They are genetically identical. That's the problem. Panama disease is a fungus. Fungi are nearly impossible to eliminate.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> If you haven't seen it already, I highly recommend this article:

[http://www.damninteresting.com/the-unfortunate-sex-life- of-t...](http://www.damninteresting.com/the-unfortunate-sex-life-of-the- banana/)

In fact, I recommend any of their articles.

</comment><comment><USER13> Didn't we have the gros michel?

<comment><USER14> Thus the song, "Yes, we have no bananas".</comment></comment>


Ask HN: How much time in your working day do you spend in actual work? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> As founder: about 12 hours, I take about 4 hours total breaks in the day to swim and often an hour or two nap in the middle, nap required because two 6 hour chunks is quite strenuous

This is not rigorously followed - sometimes 3 hours then an hour break then 3, sometimes 6,

I eat when I'm hungry and I sleep when I'm tired, I don't have fixed meals or fixed schedules

First ~6 hours normally admin, emails, proposals, reseller support, mentoring juniors

Next ~6 hours is 100% coding

Work from home so no commute, nothing else to waste time on

Work 6 days a week, Sunday's reserved for rest, reading and research

</comment><comment><USER3> If "actual work" is running Candy Japan, about 2 hours per day this month.

<comment><USER4> Do you run Candyjapan.com? If so, how'd you get into this?

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I'm semi retired so not that much, certainly nothing like I used to work.

When I was a kernel engineer at Sun, there were stretches where I worked around 14 hours per "day". "day" had a different definition for me, I worked on about a 34 hour "day". Which meant that my day time hours were constantly shifting. A coworker put a clock on my door that said "where's larry?" and it showed when I'd be in next. I think it was a joke but some people said they liked it.

The reason I did this was I would be working on stuff where it could take ~8 hours just to regain the state I had in my head when I stopped working the previous day. So if I did 8 hour days I'd never make any forward progress. So you do 8 hours to page in the state and then you go as far as you can go to move things forward.

I didn't have much of a social life back then but I didn't care, I was getting stuff done at Sun and loved it. It was a super productive time of my life.

<comment><USER6> >> it could take ~8 hours just to regain the state I had in my head

Sounds interesting, can you please share more details about what you were working on?

<comment><USER5> It was almost always performance stuff. I'd get stuck with stuff like "Oracle's cluster database sucks on our systems, can you find out why?" and then you have to go figure out where it is slow (find the hot spot) and then figure out why we were slow.

That meant keeping all of the hardware in your head, the kernel in your head, and the app in your head. If you didn't have all that state it was super hard, maybe impossible (for me at least), to figure out the problem.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I come from a factory background where it wasn't uncommon to spend the entire 8-12 hours working at the fastest safe pace I could. After a year of developing, I still spend almost no time on water-cooler talk and web browsing, the only things that are clearly not work. I don't see anybody else wasting time like that either. I wonder if the 'barely four hours a day' people would not count stuff like editing a wiki, investigtating a log, and so forth.

My job isn't 100% programming by any stretch. But when I do have programming, I spend 8 hours straight. It doesn't seem to make me very productive, but I do spend it all hard at work.

</comment><comment><USER8> Rescue Time puts it at about 2.5 hours/day of programming time.

The max I've ever pushed for and recorded was 250 minutes. Even that left me too exhausted to drive back home.

</comment><comment><USER9> 4 hours total of pure undeniable work throughout the whole day (so wake up to sleep). K. Anders Ericsson, a professor on the study of "expertise", notes that the best violinists in the world top out at 4 hours of practice. So I don't feel guilty after 4 hours.

Another thing Ericcson noticed, the violinist who practice the most and are the best take midday naps.

</comment><comment><USER10> Contractor, currently with a large ag company, remote. I work 1 or two hours out of 8. The rest spent waiting for their antique tool chain to get stuff done. Read a butt-ton of HN the last month.

Previous contracts - I worked an hour for every hour I billed, moving their project forward. Usually 5 or 6 hours a day. The rest spent working on more contracts etc.

</comment><comment><USER11> Not much - automate as much as possible and enjoy the freedom, but be available when the crisis strike :-)

<comment><USER8> Living the dream.

<comment><USER11> Absolutely, the bad side is I cannot retire early, love the job and every year I am postponing...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> As a research scientist:

~7 hours (after breaks), of which only 3h are programming.

The rest is organizational stuff like meetings, writing research proposals, answering emails, making powerpoints, supervise students, etc...

<comment><AUTHOR> So do you count your work hours as 3 hours or 7? And curious, if you try and optimise for more 'real work' time? I feel I'm quite hard on myself and consider it unnatural if I read an article or even browse randomly at work.

<comment><USER12> A few months ago I had the feeling I get nothing done (programming), because of all the other stuff I had to do.

That is why I started tracking my time consumption on a half hour base. "If you want to control something you need to measure it" was my thinking. The time tracking itself doesn't cost much time. Did it earlier for my private life for a few months.

The first weeks my average programming time was only 1.5h! I slowly got it up to 3h now.

But do I count it as 3h or 7h work?

Hm - As a student I sure had more time for programming itself. But I actually get more work done now. I can much easier pursue multiple projects and delegate work to students. It is just that I didn't (have to) see all the organizational stuff that needs to happen beside the programming itself as a student.

The other 4h I do valuable stuff. Some of it should imho be done by others, but we are currently a little bit short on staff..^^ It's a nice learning opportunity though.

So to answer your question: I would count the whole 7 hours.

<comment><USER12> But honestly all the work-related reading on the web (e.g. hackernews) I do should count as work time too. Then you can add some 4 hours or so.

<comment><USER13> How do you decide if it's work-related reading/browsing or not? So watching a music video on YouTube is clear but I'd say HackerNews is muddy, leaning towards entertainment. For example you need to sleep to work too, but that doesn't count. HN may provide general nourishment about latest tech news and have interested articles that elevate your general knowledge but hard for me to pin that down as hours worked. That's the problem with work today, it's not easily measurable, in the old fashioned way of thinking of work as putting caps on bottles I'm guessing most people do far less than they believe, I wouldn't be shocked if it was only a couple of hours for many.

<comment><USER12> Yea well you have to dig through a lot of trash to find the gems. But since it is part of the deal you need to take the time into account that you need to wander through the mud. Officially I won't count the hours that I use for this at home. But at least for me that is definitely work related.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Solution architect here, probably around 5 true productive hours. If you count all the time people ask me question, arount 8 hours per day.

</comment><comment><USER15> Based on my time tracking, around 6 hours. Sometimes less with lunch, but on average I spend 1/4 of my day taking breaks.

</comment><comment><USER16> 10 hours or so mostly programming but also other work.</comment>


Ask HN: What should I learn to make my full stack deployment easier? - <AUTHOR>

I consider myself to be a novice full-stacker, with a preference for python. However, there's a lot of tools out there for many different purposes. I just wanted recommendation on what to learn/use to make my life easier. So... What is it that you guys use that can make my life a little easier? Don't be afraid to get specific (ex. docker, ansible.. etc) <comment><USER2> I recently picked up Ansible with nearly no system administration background. I came from a Python background, but I didn't want to learn Chef/Puppet/Salt since there is apparently a fairly significant learning curve.

Anyway, Ansible has been great for small/medium sized projects. I haven't used it for anything large, so I can't really speak if you're planning on working on big projects. I was able to pick it up in a day, and after a few days I felt I was comfortable with it. For me, copying parts of other people's playbooks from Github and trying to understand it was the best way to learn after getting an overview from the documentation. Just start with something small - like installing & configuring a database, and work your way up the stack. Can't speak to any other dev-ops tools since Ansible is the first I've learned, but I've been happy with it.

</comment><comment><USER3> I've been working with ansible recently and I really like it having spent a bit of time with chef prior to using ansible.

I'm sticking with ansible for certain and I'm happy about it.

Here's about a dozen ansible "roles" I've created if you want to poke around the code. They are all tested with travis ci too.

[https://github.com/nickjj/orats#ansible-roles- used](https://github.com/nickjj/orats#ansible-roles-used)

It's geared towards deploying a rails app but a lot of it is neutral and the rails role itself could be adjusted for django/etc. without much work.

There was a talk recently where a dude from twitter explained how they are using ansible to deploy many thousands of services so I'd say it scales.</comment>


Is hipchat owned by Twilio? Check the footer. - <AUTHOR> http://status.hipchat.com/

<comment><USER2> That status board is from Twilio.

<comment><AUTHOR> Did they rip it off or what?

<comment><USER3> We use stashboard, <http://www.stashboard.org/>, which was developed by Twilio and open sourced for the public to use.</comment></comment></comment>


GCC Still Months Away from Transitioning to Git, Reposurgeon Being Ported to Go - <AUTHOR> https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=GCC-Reposurgeon-Py-To-Go-90 <comment><USER2> What the... how can converting a svn repo to a git repo take that much memory? Can't you go through the svn commits one by one, and each time create a matching git commit??

<comment><USER3> You certainly can, but then you lose all the branches. The SVN history is purely linear, with branches represented as directories containing copies of the files. Older versions of SVN kept less metadata about how those branches were created, so reposurgeon has heuristics to make reasonable got branches out of them, which the user can then fine-tune and correct.

Added to this is the damage introduced by various tools used to convert to SVN from CVS, and the lack of metadata that CVS kept about branches.

You could easily partition the list of SVN nodes and process each subset individually, but the results would be wrong. I don't know that its necessarily impossible to parallelize, but its not very easy. It may be possible to have a first pass that identifies the dependencies between commits, and the future passes use those dependencies to partition the work (perhaps with a work-stealing queue). However, the user needs to be able to arbitrarily modify those dependencies, and its not even clear if detecting the dependencies is less work than doing the whole conversion. Also, all the graph traversal operations have terrible data locality.

I'm only peripherally involved, but its a fun project. When I used Reposurgeon to convert an SVN repository some years ago, I found that it took 40 hours to complete. This was easily 20 times longer than the largest Repository anyone else had converted, but my repo was only 2 or 3 times larger; the performance is certainly not linear in the number of commits. With some profiling and some patches, I was able to get it down to a few hours, and others have improved it more since then. It's still nonlinear though, so the time will still blow up on large repositories; there's no escaping those annoying exponents.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Could anyone elaborate on why he's not simply using git-svn?</comment>


Happy Webmasters Day - <AUTHOR> http://blog.jitbit.com/2011/04/happy-webmasters-day.html <comment><USER3> Sorry, it's already National Cordon Bleu Day and National Hug a Newsman Day.

source: <http://goo.gl/3FUci>

<comment><USER4> is there a day that isn't "The Day of Something"? i like the idea of webmaster's day!

<comment><USER5> Or what is the first day that is not known for anything? <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interesting_number_paradox>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> What is this doing on the HN front page? It's fluff, and not particularly good one at that. Please remove/flag this.

<comment><USER7> That is your opinion and PG has given you the opportunity to act on it by so pressing the flag button.

Others, me included, might want to press the up arrow because it was a clever idea, 404, 4.04, and a day to celebrate webmasters is really cool. Maybe it could be celebrated by gatherings, conferences, etc.

<comment><USER6> I'm well aware of the existence of the flag button. From experience, however, a comment urging others to hit the flag button helps bury lousy entries like this a lot faster than average. As demonstrated.

I should also urge you to look at the submissions guidelines for HN - <USER2> falls rather squarely into the 'unsubstantial, crap content' category. Again, speaking from experience - I make it a point to alert other members when I can (the flagging usually begins shortly after). Front-page space is precious; it's too expensive to waste it on something like this (edit: that rarely encourages interesting conversation).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Yes, it should be the official webmaster's day.</comment>


Shuttle Will Fly Over Heart of US for Monday Morning Landing Attempt - <AUTHOR> http://www.universetoday.com/2010/04/18/shuttle-will-fly-over-heart-of-us-for-monday-morning-landing-attempt/ <comment><USER2> If you're in Silicon Valley, NASA's tracker applet ([http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/shuttle/shuttlemissions/st...](http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/shuttle/shuttlemissions/sts131/news/131_landing_webfeature.html)) claims that you'll be able to see the shuttle streaking just above the north horizon at 6:06 AM, just before sunrise.

...I might actually have to get up for that

</comment><comment><USER3> Isn't it a bit pessimistic to call it a landing "attempt"?

<comment><USER2> Not at all! If you'd ever followed a shuttle landing, you'd know that a lot has to go just right for the landing to be successful. Specifically, flight controllers will be watching weather conditions at the landing site and along the entire reentry flight path for anything even mildly hazardous. If they decide to go ahead with the first "attempt", then the shuttle begins its deorbit burn around 7:30 AM. If they decide it's too risky, then they skip the first "attempt" and go for the second "attempt" on the next orbit. Typically there are 4 or 5 "attempts" per day, and after 2 or 3 days, if none of the KSC "attempts" were successful, they'll start looking at alternatives like Edwards AFB in California.</comment></comment>


Why We're Failing in Math and Science - <AUTHOR> http://radar.oreilly.com/2008/08/why-were-failing-in-math-and-science.html <comment><USER2> This article is complete bullshit.

I'm an academic. I do math and science for a living. I'm also an immigrant. I lived most of my life in India. I also have a lot of European friends, and actually just got back from a Europe trip hanging out with a number of European academics. Finally, I've also looked at the statistics on this subject.

Every way you look at it, the U.S actually kicks ass in math an science, whether you look at top research or the averages. Take SAT math. Think of a country that has a reputation for excellence in high school math. Eastern Europe immediately comes to mind. Shall we say Romania? Guess what, cynics? U.S scores are on average 30 points higher than Romania's. Or take Nobel prizes. No other country even comes close to the U.S. If we're so bad at science and math, why do we have Silicon Valley and no one else has anything remotely as good?

For several years I've been trying to understand where this self-loathing perception comes from. My friend (also an academic) says that academics spread the "sky is falling" perception in order to get more funding dollars from the NSF/NIH/DARPA, and the media picks it up and runs with it because they always love a scare story. That's the best explanation I have so far. Anyone got a better one?

<comment><USER3> when i arrived at a chicago airport recently, there was a poster thingie saying

"home to 90 nobel prize winners..."

i thought holy shit that's a lot O_O i remember China only having a handful. we have here in just one shitty city an order of magnitude more. factor in per capita and it's really a huge difference

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nobel_laureates_by_country>

<comment><USER4> Yeah, let's factor in per capita: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nobel_laureates_per_capita>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> "In China today, Bill Gates is Britney Spears. In American today, Britney Spears is Britney Spears and that is our problem"

Thomas Friedman talking about the waning interest in engineering & science in America's youth in his book "The World is Flat"

<comment><USER6> Thanks for the Friedman quote, I always love the opportunity to repost this review of the World is Flat:

 _He has an anti-ear, and it's absolutely infallible; he is a Joyce or a Flaubert in reverse, incapable of rendering even the smallest details without genius._

[http://www.nypress.com/18/16/news&columns/taibbi.cfm](http://www.nypress.com/18/16/news&columns/taibbi.cfm)

<comment><USER7> Every time someone quotes Friedman in seriousness my jaw opens some. I am continually shocked at how many people take this simpleton seriously.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> short summary: America, for its fear and litigious society, is neutering herself.

This does not nail it though on why the country is failing at Math & Science. Parental influence is the top correlation between children and success in school. It's not a surprise that 50% of STEM degrees are going to International students (who make up less than 10% of the general US student populous) -- their parents push them towards the most difficult degrees -- Sciences, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics.

</comment><comment><USER9> If you've got an extra 9 minutes, there's an entertaining clip over at ted also about our safety craze that I just watched last night with my parents, who got a kick out of telling me about all the dangerous stuff they had when they were kids, which of course they never let me near until I was quite a bit older.

[http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/gever_tulley_on_5_dangero...](http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/gever_tulley_on_5_dangerous_things_for_kids.html)

<comment><USER10> I gotta remember Tinkering School with Gever Tulley for when I have kids. I just pressed Ctrl+D in my head :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> My parents limited me to 1 hour per day of computer / video games. I was allowed to watch TV pretty much as long as I wanted to though. Funny enough, I spent most of my time reading programming books and making designs all day, and then furiously coding for that precious hour. (And of course finding all kinds of hacks to get more than an hour in - waking up extra early, jumping from the chair to my bed with a book in hand when a parent walked down the hall, etc)

</comment><comment><USER11> Article, if taken seriously, might explain something about chemistry. But maths?

<comment><USER12> Math is easy to explain. The only place where a student can be exposed to _real_ mathematics is in select universities. All the other places teach arithmetic which is most useful to a dumb calculator. The central problem with teaching arithmetic is that it is only suitable for the average calculator and so the average human gets bored and over time, we get the perception that mathematics is boring and "just a dumb tool," neither of which lend themselves to a high proficiency in mathematics.

<comment><USER13> Very true. It wasn't until I went to university that I learnt my first interesting maths. It was literally mind-expanding, suddenly a whole class of things I couldn't even think about before was, not easy, but certainly possible.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I really doubt America is worse off than anywhere else in the world. The difference is that America is generally very self-critical.

</comment><comment><USER15> The article is very fun to read, despite the sad contents.

But it misses one big point: the image of a scientist. When I reply to "what do you do for a living?" and I say "I'm a neuroscientist", people smile condescendingly and pat me on the back. Because I'm not a lawyer, medical doctor or businessman (i.e. in my way to big money) and thus I can only be either stupid or a fool.

<comment><USER16> Sounds like you're misinterpreting people. Typical aspergers case maybe. People are probably either disbelieving you or are impressed enough to feel awkward.

<comment><USER15> I bet a bigger part of the answer is that I live in an environment where becoming rich is the only measure of success. That is West Los Angeles.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Is the US failing at math and science? I don't take a metric like test scores or diplomas at face value. Maybe I could entertain international patents granted, but not without some more detailed analysis.

I don't think I've ever seen a proper analysis of the question of whether the US really is all that poor on math and science.

I think the huge US military industrial complex may play a big role in confusing the issue. An enormous amount of US scientific prowess is busy serving the pentagon. The casual observer sees the technological output of, say, Japan more readily because it's in consumer goods.

<comment><USER6> Related to this, when we talk about a nation falling behind in math and science, what we actually care about is applied math and science (technology innovation) and how it affects economic competitiveness. A nation of Grothendiecks, Erdoses and Perelemans would not be a huge player in the world economy.

What these metrics don't measure is that a lot of people who create important technology advances and businesses are dropouts, misfits, guys who did bad on their exams and people from completely different fields.

<comment><USER17> _...a nation of Grothendiecks, Erdoses and Perelemans..._

mmm</comment></comment></comment>


What Is Fatigue? - <AUTHOR> http://www.newyorker.com/tech/elements/what-is-fatigue?intcid=mod-most-popular

<comment><USER3> Huh. I wonder if I should put up a bunch of positive and encouraging signs and images in my home gym to exploit this effect.

Also, my lifting buddies and I often joke around with each other with certain phrases. Some of those, like yelling, "light weight" after a particularly tough set, seem to cut with the grain of this article. On the other hand, phrases like, "no pain no gain," or talking about "this heavy ass weight" (not that the weight I'm lifting is really that heavy) cut against. I wonder whether changing our terminology/"battle cries" would have a positive effect on the work we can accomplish.

Very interesting link. Thanks for posting, iKenshu.

<comment><USER4> This has to be the first time Ronnie Coleman has been referenced on HN. I approve of this.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> _Marcora believes that this limit is probably never truly reached—that fatigue is simply a balance between effort and motivation, and that the decision to stop is a conscious choice rather than a mechanical failure_

Perhaps, mechanical failure is also possible. Extremely strenuous exercise can actually cause muscle tissue to break down and enter the bloodstream, resulting in rhabdomyolysis, a potentially lethal kidney condition[1]. This was quite rare, but recently many cases of it have happened to people who do Crossfit.[2]

[1][http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhabdomyolysis](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhabdomyolysis) [2][http://www.huffingtonpost.com/eric-robertson/crossfit- rhabdo...](http://www.huffingtonpost.com/eric-robertson/crossfit- rhabdomyolysis_b_3977598.html)

<comment><USER6> There are many other things that can go wrong long before this happens. Think joints, ligaments, tendons...

I say this as someone who once walked 100 km in a bit under 21 hours. I am not an athlete. When I was done my knees had swelled to the size of grapefruits and I could not bend my legs anymore.

<comment><USER7> Why did you do that?

<comment><USER8> I was on the support team for my friends earlier this year for the Oxfam 100km trailwalker[1] - a fundraising event - though I know they're other endurance events where people run for 200kms and longer

1\. [https://trailwalker.oxfam.org.au/melbourne](https://trailwalker.oxfam.org.au/melbourne)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> A great companion to this article is the "Limits" episode of Radiolab. It features a low-speed, long term bike race with interesting results - both in what the athletes can endure, and the ways in which they endure it.

<comment><USER10> Was about to post this.

Here's the link to those who want to listen:

[http://www.radiolab.org/story/91709-limits/](http://www.radiolab.org/story/91709-limits/)

<comment><USER11> This is extremely interesting.. also interestingly produced which surprisingly I could stand because of the content!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I wonder how this translates to psychological fatigue when it comes to creative work?

I remember thinking- I can't stand the crazy "work your asses off, zero days off, 24/7, successful people don't have time to sleep" rhetoric some people have, but I also can't shake the notion that I'm nowhere near as productive as I actually could be. I imagine people at the top of their fields are operating at near max optimal capacity- but I've just been so annoyed and frustrated lately by how difficult it is for me to reasonably tell whether I'm actually tired or I'm just bullshitting myself to procrastinate from my obligations/work (stuff that I actually like doing, that I actually think is important to me.)

I have yet to have a conversation with anybody about this that I have found remotely satisfying. Maybe I'm looking for something that doesn't exist, and that I should focus entirely on the present. But I also know that I screw that up all the time... ah well. Back to work.

<comment><USER13> Have you done research on this? If not, I'd recommend it - you will probably find it encouraging.

A surprising amount of the people at the top of their fields - <USER2> creative fields - actually don't do the 24/7 thing.

Sleep and breaks tend to feature quite heavily.</comment></comment>


Coronavirus: Satellite traffic images may suggest virus hit Wuhan earlier - <AUTHOR> https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-52975934 <comment><USER2> I've mentioned before that I have had a doctor asking about visiting Wuhan (here in the West) as early as November of last year. Very blank, matter of fact sort of way. Of all the places.

However, this is an anecdote. It's meaningless. It runs counter to the HN orthodoxy which is to flippantly dismiss anything that isn't supported by an authoritative source and studies and citations.

I'm not sure what kind of evidence you're expecting from a country that won't even honestly report the death toll from this.

So now we have the BBC in on this. Not surprised in the least.

<comment><USER3> Did you read the article? It's a study by researchers at Harvard Medical School. They looked at satellite photos of Wuhan hospitals and saw an increase in parking lot utilization. They also analyzed search terms used on the Biadu search engine for occurrences of "diarrhea" and "cough". They found an increase in both vehicle counts and searches for those terms starting in August. I don't believe the government of China was involved and the same government has called the study absurd. Using the volume of searches for a particular term to detect disease outbreaks even before public health or hospitals are aware is nothing new.

[https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/jun/09/coronavirus- ma...](https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/jun/09/coronavirus-may-have- been-in-wuhan-in-august-study-suggests)

<comment><USER2> Yes, I did the due diligence of reading the article. Did you read the study yesterday regarding the Baidu search and the related HN post? If not, parts of what I'm talking about will seem disconnected. But it's all linked - HN is a terrible place to have a discussion about this topic anyway.</comment></comment></comment>