Sir David Attenborough: Climate change 'our greatest threat' - <AUTHOR> https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-46398057 <comment><USER2> Contrast this with the fact that paris has had the worst riots in half a century due to a new carbon tax. [https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/france- anti-tax-protests-...](https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/france-anti-tax- protests-leave-gas-stations-running-dry-n942871)

<comment><USER3> It was painful at first. But do remember that this riot is complex, if not totally fuzzy, the carbon tax was mostly the straw that broke the camel's back, this is more about a long drift in sociopolitical tissue (more taxes, worse services) than carbon tax itself. Still, painful to see when surrounded by climate change emergency warnings.

<comment><USER4> I found the fact that Poland said that coal is not a major contributor to climate change even more painful - as being the hosting country.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> episode 7, _our blue planet_ , in the _planet earth ii_ series is some of the hardest television i have watched. i actually couldn't finish the episode. maybe this is hyperbole to others that have watched it, but it's unbelievable the effect that humans have had on earth and on our fellow flora and fauna.

<comment><USER6> Correction, in "Blue Planet II" series.

<comment><USER5> whoops, i did mean that. sorry, and thanks for catching it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> The problem is coordination of a Public solution where the will to act lacks a political majority or super majority. The opportunity is the most progressive eighth of the first world really wants to address it.

Then the solution is a Private sector one - for this high net worth eighth of the population to invest the vast majority of their savings portfolio into green energy sector. But this would be even more effective if we made investments outflows less possible, so we should create a hedge fund that would require around one decade of a commitment period. This will supercharge R&D into this sector leading to better solutions, maybe one a political majority will support.

It does seem risky to tie your personal finances to the progress of green energy, but since the climate threat is already the greatest risk of all, it seems a worthy swap. And since it seems like green energy is a "no-brainer" / inevitability, then the investment is almost a sure thing to pay off in the long run. So in the end you'll not only help the planet but help yourself.

</comment><comment> mark-r I think the insect apocalypse has the potential to rival climate change as our greatest threat. At least climate change has a known cause.

<comment><USER8> Well, one can lead to the other. [https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart- news/heatwaves-may-dram...](https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart- news/heatwaves-may-dramatically-reduce-insect-fertility-180970819/)

<comment><USER9> In all sorts of surprising ways. For instance, research shows that soybean plants produce less defensive chemicals in higher CO2 atmospheres, which is a short term boon to certain leaf-eating insects, presumably at the expense of long-term sustainability of the plant, future generations of the leaf-eating insects after the plant's crash, competitor insects, etc.

[https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/03/080324173612.h...](https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/03/080324173612.htm)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Instead of the usual doom and gloom, or abandoning all hope, are there any tangible ways a person can make a difference? Reducing consumption and consumerism, energy efficiency and habits changing surely help a little, but I'm interested in slightly longer term projects (say the next 10 years).

It seems like we're on track for a huge crisis, but as group we're slow to react.

<comment><USER11> Going vegan is a great way to reduce your impact on the environment and cut greenhouse gases. It is the smallest change that has the largest difference.

<comment><USER12> I think the message should be _eat more vegetarian_. If we even ate half the amount of meat the effect would be dramatic. Not everybody can do full vegan or even full vegetarian. Don't scare people with all-or-nothing messaging.

<comment><USER11> This is definitely true, reducing animal products of any amount helps tremendously. I did not intend to scare anyone, framing veganism as the goal is easier just because the vast majority of people can do it.

<comment><USER12> The vast majority of people can't ... but that's a discussion for another day (-:

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> A few things to consider on the topic.

It is estimated that there is, on average, a ten year lag between the time CO2 is emitted and the time its maximum effect is felt in the climate. Some estimate the lag can be even longer. So we haven't yet seen the worst of the ~36GtCO2/yr we've been releasing into the air for the last ten years or so.(1)

Methane is a much stronger greenhouse gas than CO2.(2) And it is at the heart of one of the positive feedback loops we have started by warming the earth. The arctic permafrost contains a difficult to estimate but staggeringly large amount (in the Gigatons) of methane, both in the form of methane hydrates (frozen methane) and stored carboniferous materials which, when no longer frozen, are quickly turned into methane by bacteria.(3) At this point existing warming of the planet has progressed to the point that there is no way to stop a massive arctic methane release.(4) And, in fact, if you look at the recent satellite data(5) you will see that the methane levels at most layers of the atmosphere are higher than the satellite instruments are capable of measuring.

And reducing our emissions may make things worse. The Aerosol Masking Effect (aka global dimming) is what scientists are calling the fact that sulfur and other pollutants in the air can reflect sunlight away from the earth and cool the planet.(6) If we stopped all CO2 emissions today the global temperature would rapidly rise as the aerosols fell from the atmosphere.

There's a lot more, but I'm feeling too much anxiety about this to go on.

1\. [http://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/10/3/031...](http://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/10/3/031001)

2\. [https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-bad-of-a- gree...](https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-bad-of-a-greenhouse- gas-is-methane/)

3\. [https://envisionation.co.uk/index.php/nick- breeze/203-subsea...](https://envisionation.co.uk/index.php/nick- breeze/203-subsea-permafrost-on-east-siberian-arctic-shelf-now-in-accelerated- decline)

4\. [https://climate.nasa.gov/news/2785/unexpected-future- boost-o...](https://climate.nasa.gov/news/2785/unexpected-future-boost-of- methane-possible-from-arctic-permafrost/)

5\. [https://www.ospo.noaa.gov/Products/atmosphere/soundings/iasi...](https://www.ospo.noaa.gov/Products/atmosphere/soundings/iasi/m1/rp/mrm_t1_D3.html)

6\. [https://arstechnica.com/science/2016/03/our-aerosol- emission...](https://arstechnica.com/science/2016/03/our-aerosol-emissions- are-blocking-a-third-of-the-climate-warming/)

</comment><comment><USER13> Why is it always FUD associated with climate change? Are there no _good_ eventualities? Longer growing seasons and more arable land come to mind as possibilities. Is it because you cannot get funding for your research/nonprofit/NGO if there is a rosy outlook for the future?

<comment><USER14> Sometimes, there are no good eventualities. Maybe Canada and parts of Siberia might see some benefits. Generally speaking, the rest of us won't. Sure, maybe you'll get an extra month to grow your tomatoes, but that will be balanced out by an increase in storms, mass fires, extinctions and sea rise.

But, I guess you can ignore all that. The scientists are just trying to scare you so they can get a few extra thousand in funding. That's the real problem here.</comment></comment>


Midair 3D Printing – Making coil springs without support - <AUTHOR> http://makefastworkshop.com/hacks/?p=20181112 <comment><AUTHOR> Direct link to video here: [https://youtu.be/kWE8AzJY8qc](https://youtu.be/kWE8AzJY8qc)

I'm the dev. Let me know if you have any questions/thoughts!</comment>


Prototypal inheritance in C - <AUTHOR> https://gist.github.com/70a221141a9d19196b1a

<comment><USER2> From .h file. "Don't use this for anything ever"</comment>


Federal agency frets about terrorism threats at Burning Man - <AUTHOR> https://www.readingeagle.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?avis=RE&date=20190403&category=AP&lopenr=304039570 <comment><USER2> BLM environmental study now considering terrorist impacts? As if terrorism is even an issue in the United States, other than being a great way to boost media outlet profits. Statistically, they should be enforcing mandatory sunscreen usage rather than anti-terrorism measures if they want to protect the people there.</comment>


Turning Saltwater From Earth and Sea Into Drinking Water - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/10/science/earth/turning-saltwater-from-earth-and-sea-into-drinking-water.html? <comment><USER2> Interesting that there was no mention of Dean Kamen's "slingshot"

<http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2008/03/colbert-and-kam/>

[http://www.thedailybeast.com/newsweek/2008/04/04/big- problem...](http://www.thedailybeast.com/newsweek/2008/04/04/big-problem-neat- solution.html)

<comment><USER3> Almost two years ago I commented in an HN thread about this,

"DEKA is a strange duck. They have some genuinely brilliant people there, working on some genuinely revolutionary inventions -- but they just can't seem to actually bring them to market. Or, they're not interested in bringing them to market. ... I've yet to hear of the Stirling engine / water purifier being deployed anywhere; ... I really don't "get" them. The best I can figure is that everyone (influential) there is happy just to be working on these puzzles, and they don't really care if anyone uses them or not."

(<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1793446>)

That opinion seems to be withstanding time's test.

<comment><USER4> Actually, I'd say the truly brilliant people are in the marketing department, building huge hype for something which... presumably doesn't work as well as advertised or else we'd have heard about it again in the intervening three years. I don't know precisely what _is_ wrong with it, but it's safe to assume that there's something.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> As for energy, it's probably much cheaper to reduce consumption. This is a hidden subsidy to agriculture and industry.

</comment><comment><USER6> Desalination is less of a problem than pumping water to farmland, industry and residences high above sea-level.

<comment> excuse-me Where do you get the saltwater high above sea-level?

<comment><USER7> I think they are talking about pumping desalinated seawater over a thousand miles inland.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Out in the archipelagos in Finland (and I guess also Sweden) converting salt water into drinking water is becoming more common as it's quite easy when the salt amount in the Baltic Sea is quite low compared to the oceans.

<comment> excuse-me They are having to start drinking WATER in Finland? Has the booze finally run out?

<comment><USER8> You need some water to create booze. ;-)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Most people believe that bottled water is just tap water marked up a few thousand percent, it would be interesting if these desalinator plants sold bottled water. They could run at a profit apparently, and they could make an interesting argument:

"Conserve our precious natural water sources by drinking -Wapure-, purified water."

This would then make it a _good_ thing to drink bottled water since you would be keeping cows and what not alive.

<comment><USER10> My issue with drinking bottled water is the bottles. Estimates are around 1 billion bottles thrown away each year in California alone.

[http://www.consrv.ca.gov/index/news/2003%20News%20Releases/P...](http://www.consrv.ca.gov/index/news/2003%20News%20Releases/Pages/NR2003-13_Water_Bottle_Crisis.aspx)

<comment><USER9> This is one of those things where I wish the report would include their methodology. This report was brought up during the "Great Bottled Water Debate" at Google and a couple of people wondered how they came up with their numbers.

As it turns out, if you sit at a dump site (at least in Northern California, and Google is fortunate to be built right next to one) and watch the trash being unloaded you will note that there is little recyclable material left in the trash when it gets there, further the waste management company does some separation as well because they get to keep any money they get from the recyclables that get that far (unlike the ones in the cans at the curb which they split with the city).

What was clear though was that between a fairly large homeless population which relies in part on recycling fees and waste management contracts that are structured to provide a disproportionate benefit to the waste management company, they both get paid for disposing 'X' tons of waste which is measured on the way in, and they get paid for 'Y' tons of recyclables they recover post ingress weigh-in so its a double win for them.

The result is that in California there are several mechanisms in place which select for recycling. This results in very little recyclable material actually getting into landfills (which is good) but it also makes statements like the one you link, essentially false.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Question: why do desalination plants use a filtering system, instead of evaporation? (like that desert survival trick of spreading plastic over a hole)

(guessing) Is it because (1) evaporation is actually very energy inefficient compared to filtration, especially at scale; or (2) evaporation doesn't separate out impurities that also evaporate.

<comment><USER12> (1) is definitely a factor. It takes a very large amount of energy to boil water.

<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desalination#Methods>

> _Reverse osmosis plant membrane systems typically use less energy than > thermal distillation, which has led to a reduction in overall desalination > costs over the past decade._

But the wikipedia article says that 85% of desalination worldwide still uses distillation.

<comment><USER13> Seems like a good area to use solar energy though. Water is easy to store and if you can make enough on sunny days to carry you through nights and overcast times, efficiency doesn't really matter as much since your energy source is "free."

<comment><USER4> I'm sure it's possible, and that someone has sat down and done the mathematics, and figured out that it's just not worthwhile.

The most efficient way to do it is to use solar thermal, not solar electric, power -- build a huge array of mirrors to focus on heaters which boil your water and distill it out. But it's not really "free" -- you need a lot of land, a lot of mirrors, and a staff of people who keep the mirrors clean and replace the broken ones.

Oh, what the hell, I'll do the maths myself. To heat up and boil one litre of water from 20 degrees C takes 2.6 million joules. Sunlight, on a sunny day, is one kilowatt per square metre; let's generously assume we can get 50% efficiency over the eight hours of the day when the sun is high in the sky [don't forget, this is solar _thermal_ power, it's more efficient than photovoltaics]. So each square metre of collecting area in our plant can boil 5.5 litres of water per day. The desal plant in this article produces 27.5 million gallons per day so to replace it with solar we'd need nineteen million square metres, or nineteen square km, of mirrors. That's a _lot_ of mirrors, and a lot of squeegee men.

If you wanted a solar-powered desal plant I'm sure you could do it cheaper using photovoltaics plus reverse osmosis.

<comment><USER14> Wouldn't it be possible to somehow recover the latent heat of the boiling water when it passes back into the liquid phase, minus the salt? I'm pretty sure I learned the theoretical maximum efficiency for this in my undergrad physics class but I can't quite remember.

<comment><USER12> Maybe you could use the steam to pre-heat the water that enters the system? If the water is at 60C instead of 20C to begin with, that will reduce the amount of energy needed to boil it. Besides, all that steam needs to be condensed back to water anyway if people are going to drink it. (I think that's what they already do in advanced "multi-stage" distillation plants.)

Theoretically, you could also add a steam turbine to make some extra electricity on the side, but I don't know how efficient such an add-on might be.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> California, with its long coastline and big brain and capital pools, could transform itself into a fresh water sheikdom.

<comment><USER16> Your comment about California having a "long coastline" got me wondering how it compares to other places. It turns out that even if you measure the length of the coastline quite generously (i.e. tidal shoreline) the length of the California coast is 3,427 miles.

That sounds pretty impressive until you compare it with places with more crinkly coastlines - Norway has ~13,000 miles of coastline and even tiny little Scotland has 6,158 miles.

However, I suspect that there won't be much call for de-salination in Norway or here in Scotland (where it has been raining for most of the last week).

<comment><USER17> You don't even need to leave the US to find a state with a _longer_ coastline. Maine's comes in at 4,568 miles

<comment><USER18> That's a bit deceptive though because that figure for Maine includes all the islands and what not. Maine isn't very big, there's no way it has that much actual coastline.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19>
      (Production of desalinated water costs 2.1 times more than
      fresh groundwater and 70 percent more than surface water,
      according to El Paso Water Utilities.)

Copyediting fail. How about "110% and 70% more"?

</comment><comment><USER20> Can you couple this with osmosis based energy production for double win?

[http://www.renewableenergyworld.com/rea/news/article/2010/10...](http://www.renewableenergyworld.com/rea/news/article/2010/10/osmosis- re-emerges-as-a-promising-power-source)

<comment><USER4> No, because thermodynamics is a bitch.

Desalination works by reverse osmosis and costs energy. Rather a lot of energy, in fact.

Osmosis-based energy production goes by forward osmosis and produces energy. However if you were paying attention back there when I said "thermodynamics is a bitch" it should come as no surprise that the energy you get out by wasting your fresh water isn't as much as the energy you put in to get it in the first place.

<comment><USER20> > it should come as no surprise that the energy you get out by wasting your > fresh water isn't as much as the energy you put in to get it in the first > place

Agreed, but maybe the effect can be used to alleviate the cost of getting the fresh water? For example, it doesn't cost so much to heat up a building once it's been heated up if it has heat exchangers in its HVAC: the output heat is used to heat up incoming hot air. A wasteful process can be made more efficient with stupid tricks.</comment></comment></comment>


Missile interception caught on snowboarder's camera in Golan Heights - <AUTHOR> https://www.theguardian.com/world/video/2019/jan/21/missile-interception-caught-on-skiers-camera-in-golan-heights-israel-syria-video <comment><USER2> thats pretty wild to see

<comment><USER3> I can only see 2 trails, but not the actual interception. Theres's a slight flash at around 0:25, is that it?

<comment><USER4> Yes. There are two flashes in fact. Usually you also hear the booms and sirens beforehand, so maybe it was quite afar this time.

<comment><USER3> Thanks for the explanation. Does this look like an exercise?

What I can glean from the short clip is this:

\- there is a rocket launched at around 0:08 from a valley nearby the skateboarder with the camera

\- you can hear the noise of that rocket almost instantaneously, so the distance is not very high, maybe a few kilometers at most.

\- we can't see when the interceptor is launched, but I see it chasing the first rocket closely around 0:13, so the interceptor must've been launched almost at the same time as the first rocket

\- at 0:24 the first rocket tries an evading maneuver, a sharp turn

\- the interceptor is not fooled, follows closely, and the detonation appears to happen at 0:25. I am not completely sure, but it appears you can see the plume a few seconds later

\- the camera follows back the smoke trails (or maybe contrails?) and the two rockets appear to have started from virtually the same place

\- neither rocket appears to have two stages

This could be consistent with either an exercise (for example to test how an interceptor performs when the target takes evasive actions), or a staged show of military capabilities (better show you carry a big stick than actually use it), or a real interception of a rocket launched from the Syrian-Israeli border (this explains the proximity: the Syrian battery is located near the border, but so is the Iron Dome battery too).

Anyway, here's the wikiepdia short entry [1]

"On 21 January 2019, the IDF released footage online of a Syrian Arab Army rocket attack on the Golan Heights being intercepted by Iron Dome. The video was shot by skiers at Mount Hermon ski resort; Israeli authorities announced that the resort was closed until further notice The attack as in response to Israel's launching of nine rockets at SAA targets in western Damascus.[106][107][108]"

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_Dome#Mount_Hermon_video](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_Dome#Mount_Hermon_video)</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Show HN : how to wish you were here  - <AUTHOR> http://wishjoin.com/how

<comment><USER2> I'm not following the concept.

Is it specific to a type of goal or does it apply to any type of goal?

Is there some form of reward system for completing a goal?

The site is a bit vague on details.</comment>


Seattle shows San Francisco and New York how to fix the housing crisis - <AUTHOR> http://www.vox.com/2015/12/23/10657690/seattle-housing-crisis <comment><USER2> I would totally move to Seattle if it didn't mean I'd have to live in Seattle. It's not that it's a terrible city or anything, but my seasonal depression would be much worse there, I'm sure.

<comment><USER3> I lived there and although I left for other reasons, the weather is not as bad as people say. Very mild, stays light "later" into the night (although it gets light later in the morning) due to being on the west edge of a time zone. Depending on where you live you may want to give it a shot.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> The tldr is that they build more housing faster. Not sure how this is even news.</comment>


Living paycheck to paycheck is disturbingly common - <AUTHOR> http://www.philly.com/jobs/labor/i-see-no-way-out-living-paycheck-paycheck-is-disturbingly-common-20181228.html <comment><USER2> I live in low cost area with a relatively high salary (astronomical for the area) and I'm actually saving close to 100% of my cost of living, but... that would be 400-500% if I weren't: 1) Married. 2) Having a kid.

Most stories I read in that article are like guys having 3-4 kids living in LA.

Geez people, forget treating the cause (wage slavery, politics etc), start with the symptoms or you may not live trough them.

<comment><USER3> Many people live in places like LA because they contain the vast majority of new high paying jobs. What treatment are you recommending for the symptoms here? Euthanizing the kids?

<comment><USER2> You're being mean. Solution, which can not be applied retroactively, is to not get married, if you get married don't make kids, if you do make kids limit yourself to one...

Until you solidify your finances so that you can offer your kids a future which doesn't hold the threat of homelessness and the certainty of slavery.

<comment><USER4> I'm all for population control, however history and science are not on your side. Victory goes to those who procreate the most.

I don't like it either, but seems true nevertheless.

For all of our advances, in the grand scheme of things, we're still ruled the same way we were a thousand years ago: by numbers.

<comment><USER2> I don't disagree in principle, but my advice for postponing wife and kids is directed at young, intelligent and not-destitutely poor HN readers.

Best predictor for future wealth (and accompanying success) is prior wealth. Valid in US and all around the world. If you don't have enough of that by family status, you need to build it yourself and you can only do that by buying yourself time (savings orders of magnitude higher than cost of living). With enough leeway you can either try start your own business and have enough buffer to recover if necessary and still land better than married guy with home staying wife and 4 kids in LA. Also you got much better chances of a career in classic corporation setup since you are in a position to demand be assigned to good projects or walk away. Good projects = !bad projects where bad projects (95-98% of available work) == responsibility without authority, usually cleaning up other people's shit. Usually the young, family-less who can afford to demand authority without responsibility positions then walk away when (their own) shit starts to stink.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


How to Become a Master in CSS in 5 Simple Steps - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@shemag8/how-to-become-a-master-in-css-in-5-simple-steps-53e4a031af33 <comment><USER2> Tip #5: "Work on your persuasion skills", is the most important. Sometimes being a developer is about convincing someone else you work with that a feature needs to change.</comment>


The Man Who Sold His Fate to Investors at $1 a Share - <AUTHOR> http://www.wired.com/business/2013/03/ipo-man/ <comment><USER2> I suspect I'll get downvoted for this, but for some reason, I find this quote chilling, "Children are a financial drain," Merrill wrote. "The time investment of raising a child is immense. The responsibility is epic. The impact on future projects would be drastic. In light of these factors, it makes sense to reduce the chances to nearly zero and have a vasectomy performed."

It seems to completely remove the joy and satisfaction that comes from raising children. Only a few things should be viewed from a financial lens. Wealth is not money, wealth is discretionary time.

<comment><USER3> YMMV. Not everyone wants kids, plenty of people are already having kids, many people who do have kids regret it entirely, and many people correctly recognize that you can't live your dreams and raise your kids right. It's not just a financial lens for many people it's a time lens too.

Having kids whose lives you very probably won't even be allowed to be a part of is a reality for many guys too. Even if you have kids in marriage the reality is you will probably get a divorce, the kids will go to the mother, and you will pay.

Why risk it if you know you can avoid it? Having kids it's a guarantee of joy or satisfaction. Writing books, creating epic things can give just as much joy and satisfaction.

10 year at a time male birth control is coming so vasectomies will no longer be necessary. <http://www.parsemusfoundation.org/vasalgel-home>

<http://reddit.com/r/childfree>

<comment><USER4> This is why India is ultimately destined to overtake the western world. Either directly or from within.

Having had occasion to debate about this on /r/childfree, I feel like a lot of their arguments are based on one of the following fallacies:

1) That there are "too many people." That may be true in parts of Africa, but in the developed world, the positive economic contribution of each additional person still vastly outweights the cost of their incremental strain on natural resources.

2) That depopulation in the future doesn't affect people in the present. If you're thinking of investing in a startup, what does it do to your calculus if you know that your customer base won't be any bigger in 20 years than it is today, and will be older?

3) There is no positive externality to having kids. Your average person is going to contribute millions of dollars in labor and social value (how much would you pay to save the life of a loved one?) over his or her lifetime.

4) Failure to look at the value of alternatives in incremental terms. The question isn't: what is the value of having kids versus doing a startup, it's: how much does having kids reduce my probability of doing a startup, and what is the weighted value of that relative to having kids.

5) Failure to account for the correlation between parent-child incomes. I'd say 90% of the kids from my high-income suburban middle school are now making median or above incomes. Maybe 7-10% are in the top 1% of income for their age bracket. High income people create a larger positive externality when they have kids.

6) Failure to weight the value of alternatives by probabilities. Your average person has very few alternative courses of action that is going to generate as much economic value as raising kids. Your high income person has has a greater probability of doing these things, but writing a best-selling book or founding a successful startup is far from guaranteed. So the relevant question is not: what has higher external social value, doing a startup or having a kid, but rather which of those has higher social value weighted by the probabilities that your startup will have any real success (low), or by the probability that your kid will achieve at least median economic success (quite high).

This is of course not to argue with anyone who chooses not to have kids. Nobody needs to justify personal decisions like that. But to the extent that they do try to justify it (and that's largely what /r/childfree is--people who feel the need to justify their decision), it's useful not to rely on fallacious reasoning to do so.

<comment><USER3> /r/childfree is still a useful place for people to gain some perspective - that there are actually people who never want kids and have mostly good, personal reasons for this. Not everyone cares about the fact that other countries will likely dominate in the future. Hey, good for them.

For individuals who weigh the risks and rewards in our society it is easy to make the judgement having kids does not make sense. A lot of things we do in modern society is that individuals value their own welfare more than the welfare of the group, and are unwilling to sacrifice in exchange for the group's future prosperity. I refuse to be a disposable slave. I value my time and my life, and I am worth more long term by not taking what seems to me as stupid risks.

<comment><USER4> You make an important point, which is that the value of kids is a positive externality that is not easily captured for yourself. And that's certainly true with regards to kids: you spend hundreds of thousands of dollars raising them, but it's their employers and society at large that capture their millions of dollars in productive labor. If you care more about yourself than your tribe (and there's nothing wrong with that), it does indeed make sense not to have kids.

My objection, again, isn't to people who choose not to have kids. My objection is to the people (and I think they make up the bulk of /r/childfree) who rely on specious arguments to justify their decision, and act like they're doing society a big favor in not having kids so they can focus on their music career.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The idea of selling equity in oneself is the topic of a great book (written in 2000) called "Future Wealth" by Chris Meyer and Stan Davis:

<http://www.amazon.com/Future-Wealth-Stan-Davis/dp/1565113942>

David Bowie sold bonds backed by his IP in 1997:

<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Celebrity_bond>

The book talks about equity being a logical next step and about the value of being able to diversify and distribute risk. I think there is definitely one possible future where this is very common. It probably starts with athletes and celebrities - as you can see, this guy has gotten a terrible valuation (for several reasons).

For years, I have been talking myself out of starting a company that serves as an exchange for people selling equity in themselves. It is inevitable that someone tries this because the crowd-funding industry is so sexy. It will be an interesting experiment, but I'm not sure the effects on society will be net desirable. At its best, it would give people the ability to sell a fraction of themselves for some up-front cash and give them the ability to take bigger risks in the projects they do. Anyway, if you want to talk more about this, hit me up.

</comment><comment><USER6> I think the amount of money involved is shockingly small.

To get some idea of what the present-time value of a person's work is, if you make $50,000 a year and work for 20 years, you make $1M in that period of time. He could make the $100,000 by working another 4 hours a week over the next 20 years and not need the $1K.

I mean, my wife and I regularly make small business investments in our activities of up to $500 without ever asking each other. We'd usually ask each other if it's more than that.

This guy is having to talk to a committee just to make a $90 investment that's just nuts. But I guess it's just a matter of time before cargo cult investing gets celebrated in Tired magazine.

<comment><USER7> Yeah, it seems that he undersold on the IPO. I guess investors were nervous about a new asset class.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I don't think this is about money at all. More likely than not it's some kind of sexual fantasy or something similar. No sane person would sell themselves for a couple thousand bucks like this just for the possibility of turning profit in the future.

<comment><USER9> I don't know. Many people do odd things for no reason other than their own curiosity. For example, there's the guy making soylent in an effort to create something that lets him avoid eating. Many would ask "why?" while they say "why not."

Also, selling only 10,000 shares lets him back out if he where to encounter a problem (such as one person buying all his shares and then demanding he act in ways he's uncomfortable with).

<comment><USER10> According to the article,

> _He kept the remaining 99.1 percent of himself but promised that his shares > would be nonvoting: He'd let his new stockholders decide what he should do > with his life._

So how does that really let him back out?

<comment><USER11> Well, he could just go ahead and back out. Which is separate from the discussion about the details of the ownership and corporate structure letting him back out, but still sort of successfully renders it moot.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I haven't had my tea yet this morning, so I'm a little slow.. This isn't real, right? There's no way this is real.. Right?

<comment><USER13> It is real, there was also this piece[1] in The Atlantic earlier this month, and Mike's on the Today show this morning.

I'm Doug Stewart[2] (mentioned in the interactive "Who Owns Mike Merrill?" graph). If anyone has questions, I'll try my best.

[1]: [http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2013/04/putting-...](http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2013/04/putting- the-i-in-ipo/309255/) [2]: <http://www.kmikeym.com/users/137>

<comment><USER14> Just curious, do you really make more money as a photographer than as a developer? Or is one firmly _work_ and the other firmly _hobby_?

<comment><USER15> Or perhaps both are work?

He wouldn't be the first person in history to work two jobs when one paid more than the other.

<comment><USER13> Exactly/thank you. They're complimentary, and like most things in life, one single thing can't really satisfy all our creative hopes/needs.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> this is insane - the investors' plans are very unlikely to align with his personal wants and needs (unlike a business where the goal of making money is shared between the business and its shareholders).

some of the examples in the article make this abundantly clear:

* the sleep experiment, where he was obviously suffering by the end

* the gay relationship which, while the article doesn't mention whether Merrill is bisexual, certainly seems to imply that he isn't and went through with the relationship to appease his shareholders

<comment><USER17> It's not insane. By definition, insanity is doing the same thing over and over again expecting different results.

He changed his sleeping routine and had a homosexual relationship, found out they didn't work out for him, gave up on them. Nothing insane about that.

<comment><USER18> > By definition, insanity is doing the same thing over and over again > expecting different results

That's a pithy cliched phrase, but it's not the definition.

One really needs to read through the DSM (it's a flawed political document firmly embedded in the prejudices of its day (i.e. today) that's more pre- scientific taxonomy than science), but the short version:

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

Insanity, craziness or madness is a spectrum of behaviors characterized by certain abnormal mental or behavioral patterns. Insanity may manifest as violations of societal norms...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> As a single page <http://www.wired.com/business/2013/03/ipo-man/all/>

</comment><comment><USER20> This is essentially the plot of _The Unincorporated Man_. Only with micro- managing.

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

</comment><comment><USER21> The previous HN discussion mentioned in the article is here:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=723408>

</comment><comment><USER22> What's to stop a rich asshole buying up a massive majority and then just making him do fucked up stuff?

<comment><USER23> It's sort of a microcosm of capitalism in that respect, don't you think? It's a wonder that our system works as well as it does.

<comment><USER24> Because people can choose whether to "sell shares" or not? A controlling stake would be worth rather more than a minority one, surely?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> It's quite funny, and a consequent move in a robotic system. We can all live like robots if we want, he is taking it seriously.

At least on average, the more robotic you live your life, the more money you get. 9 to 7 instead of 9 to 5? Working on weekends? He is taking it to the extreme, he will be working 24/7. He is selling responsibility for his life for anyone giving enough money.

</comment><comment><USER26> There are a number of relationship types in human interactions: family/communality, reciprocity, and dominance.

At a minimum, any attempt to expand one relationship type (in this case, reciprocity) to encompass an entire life can be expected to entail high levels of _awkwardness_ \- the feeling a person gets when they realize their understanding of a relationship type with someone else is different from that other person's understanding.

The evidence also indicates that when the norms of reciprocity are imposed on erstwhile communal relations, the reciprocity paradigm consumes the communality paradigm and the relationship changes from communal to reciprocal. In effect, turning your entire life into a market transaction makes communal/familial relations impossible.

For most people, I can't imagine this would be conducive to good mental and emotional health. (Presumably, psychopaths won't have a problem with it.)

</comment><comment><USER27> I can't help but feel that if this was financially legally binding - for him to have to pay these dividends - it would be a great way to fund your way through college, E.G: I'm too poor to afford college, if you fund me the $40,000, you can have 10% of my life income.

It makes sense, assuming you pick your candidates wisely and aren't scammed (and that's a big if!):

$40,000 down-payment for 10%

10% per year for $3,500 per year [1] over a career of around 30 years:

30 * 3,500 = $105,000

Average profit: $65,000

[1] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_income_in_the_United_S...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_income_in_the_United_States#By_educational_attainment)

<comment><USER28> From the article:

"Upstart.com, a company founded last year by Google exec David Girouard, offers a bit of capital in exchange for a cut of a college graduate's future earnings."

<comment><USER29> How is this different from a student loan? Bank gives student $100k, student pays bank $250/mo for 30 years (or whatever the terms are).

<comment><USER30> The bank wants their money regardless of how much you earn. With this scheme, if you don't earn anything you don't pay anything and when you do pay it is always a managable amount. This sort of arrangement could be very handy for a programmer-mendicant or compulsive volunteer.

<comment><USER31> Or a a nefarious person. Upstart deal sounds too good. With some Hollywood accounting, you might even be able to skip paying them anything.

<comment><USER32> This happened in the 90s with the Hope Scholarship, which failed for the obvious reasons.

<comment><USER33> The HOPE scholarship, if you're referring to the one in Georgia (<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HOPE_Scholarship>) is still alive. I went to school, getting full tuition plus a book and fee stipend for my undergraduate degree. Eligibility became more difficult sometime after I graduated, but it's still around.

<comment><USER34> That can't be it; there's nothing in there about repayment or treating the loan as equity rather than debt.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> Obviously this is a joke. Look at his sleeping excursion, it didn't work so he stopped. It's a fun cute thing to do but little beyond that. Does he have the same legal protections and obligations as a company? No. Would any of this hold up in a court of law?. No. Congratulations to the hacker news reader who got a comment in the paper. I also don't know what to make of the sentence about "fooling around" with that guy. Can some explain what I just read there?

<comment><USER36> I think it's pretty obvious what you just read. But if you really need someone to explain it, you can read up about male + male sex on pretty much any search engine.

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> How much for a kidney?

</comment><comment><USER38> Wouldn't this be illegal under the 13th Amendment? Isn't it equivalent to partial slavery?

<comment><USER39> He still controls 98+% of shares, which he is choosing not to vote with.

<comment><USER40> That probably changes things then. I mistakenly assumed that his shares were actually non-voting shares, and that he had no contractual right to vote. If he has voting rights but is just abstaining from using them, then that's quite a bit less crazy.

<comment><USER41> You weren't mistakingly assuming it, it was mentioned in the intro of the article:

 _"He kept the remaining 99.1 percent of himself but promised that his shares would be nonvoting."_

There's also no mention of it in the FAQ on kmikeym.com, I'd say it'd be pretty important information to disclose to (potential) investors.

<comment><USER42> There's a difference between actually non-voting and with voting powers that he has promised investors he will not use.

<comment><USER41> I'd love to see a source for that. I've browsed quite a few of his websites and read several articles about the project, but I've not come across him saying he has voting shares that he promised not to use.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> I think it's a great idea. I feel like I commonly give advice to people, but not knowing what else is going on in the person's life. Also, the outcome of my advice usually doesn't have a direct effect on me. At least a bad decision (or multiple bad decisions) have a financial impact on the stock performance and/or the willingness of the company to continue to participate.

</comment><comment><USER44> Brilliant ending. Would love to see a follow up. What happens when he wants out? Does he ave to buy everyone out? File for ch 11?

<comment><USER45> I can't imagine this arrangement is legally binding. The 13th amendment kind of interferes.

<comment><USER44> but he intentionally entered into this arrangement on his own free will.

<comment><USER45> That doesn't matter. A voluntary agreement is only valid to the extent that it is legal.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> At the frontiers of slavery. This guy is getting too much attention, he better have a great lawyer, troubles ahead.

</comment><comment><USER47> I think someone took _The Unincorporated Man_ a little too seriously.

The reason that we don't allow people to sell shares in themselves is because it will inevitably result in indentured servitude, or even de facto slavery.

</comment><comment><USER48> That is _so_ Portland.</comment>


The startup economy is fundamentally broken and the virus will make it worse - <AUTHOR> https://theweek.com/articles/915265/startup-economy-fundamentally-broken-virus-make-worse <comment><USER2> I appreciate the comments about what these kind of startups to do the 'reliability' of the pricing system, per Hayek.

I suspect the pricing system has always been more 'broken' than many, certainly Hayek, would like to believe. Selling under the 'true cost' because of subsidy from investors is in some sense just another form of 'externalization', like not paying for environmental devastation byproducts which has always been traditional, since at least 1492. (Or 'artificially' low prices due to a labor force held hostage by enslavement, or violent retaliation to organizing, at different points in history).

The 'true cost' ends up being a pretty slippery notion, as the OP later approaches a bit in suggesting the price system is not in fact a "naturally- occurring phenomenon".

> In turn, the major reason for that situation is for years there has been far > more investor capital than there have been high-quality investments for that > capital. "We find ourselves in a liquidity surplus,"

Also interesting. Marxist economists have been talking about this since Marx.

"A crisis of overaccumulation of capital occurs when the rate of profit is greater than the rate of new profitable investment outlets in the economy"

— [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capital_accumulation#Marxist_c...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capital_accumulation#Marxist_concept)

<comment><USER3> The pricing system still works just fine, for the most part you cannot do predatory pricing for long because of arbitrage. If you sell stock below cost, I can buy it all up till you are out of money, then sell it at a profit.

Even for those things where you cannot arbitrage (like Uber rides), the money- losing can't go on forever and prices will rise again, unless Uber figures out a way to cross-subsidize like Amazon.

<comment> vertex-four You can only buy it up and sell it at a profit if what is being sold is a good, not a service or licensed code with attached terms and conditions. And with the advent of small enough computers, nearly nothing is a pure good.

<comment><USER3> Sure, maybe in the future every Banana is bluetooth-enabled and will be sold exclusively at branded Banana stores - at a massive loss.

We can talk about market failure again if that actually happens. For now, I don't see it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Investors have a clear interest in turning their companies into monopolies and supporting anti-competitive behaviour. As long as they are allowed to create unfair advantages by distorting market conditions they will. Those that play by the rules have the odds stacked against them and will loose unless the rules of the game itself change.

The fact that there isn't a level playing field is becoming more obvious and I think the backlash against "big tech" is an inevitable result. This will result in either a reform of antitrust laws or a code of ethics being subscribed to by all the big players.

I think Tethics is the answer and I'm really looking forward to finding out who will be the real-life Gavin Belson Professor of Ethics in Technology at Stanford[0].

[0] Silicon Valley: Ten Years Later - [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ab1H602yc_Y](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ab1H602yc_Y)

</comment><comment><USER5> Is it far fetched to say that Uber's business is actually taking money from the rich and giving it back to the people?

<comment><USER6> Yes, Uber is more of a reverse Robinhood: its a net positive for those who skew to the right of the income distribution, and a net negative for those in the left. Who benefits from Uber? Uber employees, stockholders, riders. Who is worse off? Mainly Uber drivers, and maybe the vision fund (but who cares).

<comment><USER7> Uber drivers are made worse off by Uber yet they join and drive in droves and overall seem happy about it. Do you have an explanation for this apparent contradiction?

<comment><USER8> Information asymmetry and failure to consider depreciation as a "real" expense.

<comment><USER9> Ye I think this is a good point. They use their cars as a credit card. I.e wear for 100USD to get a similar amount in cash.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Wait, the government gives investors essentially infinite cheap credit, resources get allocated in an incredibly perverse manner, and it's _Friedrich fucking Hayek_ who has it wrong????

I certainly don't think Hayek is above criticism, but this author definitely is not making the point he thinks he is.

This isn't some kind of "no true Scotsman" thing either. The current market is exactly what someone like Hayek would expect given the monetary manipulations of the past 10+ years.

<comment><USER11> Exactly. I'm not a libertarian or Hayek fanboy by any means but these types of companies are what you would expect in a world of shrinking investment opportunities and lots of excess capital (as evidenced by the falling interest rates). Add to that a few oil rich countries which desperately try to diversify their economies and therefore put lots of their petro dollars into various VC funds.

<comment><USER12> Are investment opportunities really shrinking or is this a result of central banks never having really unwound their whole QE programmes, in fact many of them buy up as many 'safe' assets as possible.

I'm pretty sure Hayek would identify the issue as government intervention. It's not only central banks with their massive buy-ups of high quality corp/gov debt that's the matter here (forcing investors into ever riskier asset classes like VC funds). Given current world events I'm pretty sure a part of it is academia is broken too.

One thing that puzzled me for a long time is why there aren't more biotech startups, or why there aren't any (it seems) unicorn biotech firms. The potential of biotech seems unlimited. One day I found out a possible reason - VCs are afraid of biotech firms because they virtually all start by taking some academic paper that sounds promising, and building a lab to try and replicate it. But the papers don't replicate, so the company tanks and the VC loses everything. The figure I heard is around 50% of the papers don't replicate, which seemed shockingly high at the time.

Well, later I encountered an even worse figure: AmGen Oncology claimed only 11% of cancer papers replicated.

The cost of trying to find the next big idea in biotech seems astronomical with those kinds of odds. In effect the biotech world is flooded with ideas that sound good but fall at the first hurdle. No wonder investors prefer the software world, it's way less dependent on universities. Not many startups get started by saying, "we're going to commercialise this amazing sounding paper put out by the U of X". Even AI startups which I suppose come the closest are mostly being driven by corporate research labs, and even then, a16z dunked cold water on AI as a startup category.

</comment></comment></comment><comment> tech-historian ZIRP has created a lot of this madness across the tech landscape.

<comment><USER13> Yup. In a free market all lending would require having money, thus interest rates would be driven by a lending firm's ability to successfully invest, which would allocate capital to ventures with better risk/reward profiles. Firms that lost most investments would go broke. But instead the central bank prints money to ensure solvency for lenders that would go bankrupt (fractional "reserve" banks).

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> I'm struggling to fully understand the point. The author states that accumulation of capital led to this economy where investors are almost forced to lose money because they don't have enough good investment opportunities. That implies there is a transfer of wealth from those investor to the workers in those money-burning companies. The author also states that this probably won't work for Uber to gain monopoly status anyway. This really sounds like a redistribution mechanism naturally occurring in the market itself. Then the author pushes for this to be regulated out of existence. What am I missing?

</comment><comment><USER15> How though. Their unit economics should be easy to manage.

I understand spending money on customer acquisition, but why can't they just take 5-10% on top of whatever a driver wants to charge, and be done with it?

<comment><USER16> I suspect they keep having to win back the business from competing rideshare services.

I dropped Uber for a month in the Toronto Area as Lyft gave me a pile of coupons. Then I dropped Lyft when those coupons ran out and Uber was giving me discounts to come back.

Whenever I visit a major US city like New York, I check if there is an alternative provider like Via. They also have coupons. I went from NYU to Laguardia for $15 + tip last time I was there. The Uber trip without coupons would have been 60.

The lack of customer loyalty means that you have to win the customer every ride or they go somewhere else.

<comment><USER17> Lack of loyalty means the end game is monopoly.

<comment><USER7> This phenomenon has played out exactly the opposite in retail gasoline purchase behavior I think.

<comment><USER17> Aren't most gas stations, independently owned franchises scraping by on tiny margins while the big gas companies profit?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I cant find a source for the claimed figure that customers pay 41 percent of the ride's cost. The links bottom out in intrasite articles.

This reads like investors want to have their cake and eat it too. Burn cash for market share, then regulate the competiton for market share closed when they have taken the lead.

If they dont want to burn money, then don't. There's plenty of other hard problems that take big money to solve that payoff decades later. What happened to fiscal responsibility on the investor side?

</comment><comment><USER3> Foolish foreign investors subsidizing rides and pizza deliveries? Why would you want to regulate that away?

This is the market working very efficiently, the resource (money) is in the wrong hands and must be allocated to literally anyone else.</comment>


Should Your Specification Language Be Typed? (1999) [pdf] - <AUTHOR> http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/people/lamport/pubs/lamport-types.pdf <comment><USER3> The opinion piece (that's what it is) starts with an assertion that types make it easier to find bugs. I think the reality is more nuanced.

When types were pushed into the C language (function prototypes, etc), it fixed a lot of bugs. The compiler would prevent you from pushing a short into an int, etc. Because that was a common and hard to debug mistake, this experience increased the popularity of types.

Typing of higher level objects is less useful. When you pass an object into the wrong function, the code usually doesn't even pretend to work (unlike an integer passed in as a float parameter). Also, because objects are so different, it's rare to accidentally pass an object as something else. The only time I've seen that happen is in very convoluted, multi-layered code bases.

We can see something similar in languages like Ruby or Perl, where it's actually kind of nice that you don't have to worry about whether a variable holds a string or integer or whatever. (For some reason, Javascript's implementation of the same idea seems to be a bit more annoying, but that could just be me).

So strong type systems are not necessarily a boon. (Of course, on the other hand, we have Haskell, where the type system can help reduce bugs).

<comment><USER4> Types help you enforce invariants. When you need to care about representation, representational types are quite useful. But it turns out, when we don't care about information interchange or a whole lot about performance, we usually don't care about representation as long as it's handled correctly, and a lot of automatic systems are okay (or better) at handling representation.

More of what we care about is domain relevant, and that's a place where enforcing invariants can be important. As an incredibly simple example, passing a "bid" price where an "ask" is expected could be an expensive error, and is unlikely to trigger an exception.

A type system like Haskell can be a big win, but we can enforce surprising things in something as simple as C. I had a project where I had several threads devoted to different activities, operating on their own static data. With a little creativity, I was able to track at compile time which threads a function could be run from and detect when I accessed data from the wrong thread. Without adding any run-time overhead, and while leaving me a free hand in organizing my data and functions in both my source files and my executable. It was tremendously convenient, when changes in specifications required me to move functionality from one thread to another, to be told everything that needed to change along with that. Over the course of the project, I can count on one hand the number of concurrency issues found in testing and only one - <USER2> complicated livelock - ever made it into production.

<comment><USER5> That sounds really fascinating and educational. Could you possibly provide some more details or examples of how you accomplished that in C?

<comment><USER4> I'm a bit sleep deprived (new baby) but I'd like to try to respond before the reply link goes away.

There's a few layers to this.

I threaded knowledge of what thread a function could run on through as the first argument. It was always called `th` and took the form of an _empty_ struct. It turns out, if you pass an empty struct by value and don't do anything but pass it along, modern C compilers seem to generate identical byte code as if you removed the argument entirely (obviously, this isn't something you could strictly rely on, but it made no difference for correctness only efficiency, and if you're at the level where you care about that scale of efficiency you should be verifying all manner of assumptions when moving between compilers!).

So now at any given point in any given thread-pinned function, you've got a variable in scope called `th`. Calling another thread-pinned function on the same thread looks like `foo(th, other, args)`. If that function isn't supposed to run on this thread, you get an error about trying to pass something of type `server_thread_t` as an argument of type `main_thread_t` (or whatever).

Controlling data access could be done with getters and setters. I took a slightly different approach (which I'm not convinced is better, but it didn't cause me any pain this project), which was to define a macro used to declare global data that was bound to a thread, which would mangle the name and also create a no-op checking function. I had another macro that would take the simple name, check the thread, and resolve to the thing with the mangled name (as an LVAL). Having called that macro `L`, I now can treat `L(foo)` just as if it were a global variable named `foo`, and at runtime that's all it is, but at compile time my access to it is checked.

I had a few other macros for putting a "lying" `th` in scope for those places I really needed to cross threads (`CROSSTH` for "I am accessing thread X from thread Y, `BEFORETH` for "I am touching this threads data before any threads were spawned", &c).

Oh, the definition of the `th` argument in functions was baked into a macro so it looked like `int foo(TH(main), int something, char else)`. `TH` also added some attributes - I know there was `unused`, there might have been others...

Hopefully that gives some sense of it. Let me know if you have further questions! :)

<comment><USER5> Thank you for that write-up! Sorry that my response is so slow. (Seems I can still reply several days later, wonder what the limit actually is)

That's definitely both a nice solution to the problem, and I found it pretty enlightening (having sadly not used anything as strongly typed as Haskell).

In the case of global variables, if performance didn't matter then it would be possible to just pass around a pointer to a struct of the thread-local/thread- locked data for use directly. I spent a while trying to come up with some alternatives or generalisation of your approach, and found it was really hard to match the same guarantees without a run-time cost. One idea I got from your description is putting access to certain data/function in scope in a type- checked way. So you could put multiple such contexts (pointers or other access methods like functions or even macros) in scope at the top of the function/block, rather than having to type-check every access throughout the function using an implicit control (e.g. the 'th' variable.) But really, that's just equivalent to using the L macro like so:

      void inc_foo(video_thread_t th) {
         video_thread_data_t *vid = &L(video_data);  // checked global access
         vid->foo++;
         vid->bar++;
      }

I think something like this looks more natural though.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> (Somewhat OT, but...)

 _Constructive logic accepts the truth of_ every integer is either even or odd _, but only because we have an effective means of determining which alternative holds for any integer. It does not accept the statement_ every real number is either rational or irrational _; given a real number, say as a convergent series, we have no effective means of determining whether or not it is rational._

I don't understand this. Consider the smallest number N so that any N points in the coordinate plane in general position contain a subset of 7 points that form the vertices of a convex polygon (taken from [0], recently discussed here on HN): is this number, which is definitely an integer, even or odd? We don't know, because we don't know what the number is. Isn't that the same situation we are in with regard to the convergent series? What's the difference? If we actually computed the decimal expansion of the value of the convergent series, we would be able to look at it and see whether it was rational or irrational. There is the minor difficulty that the expansion is in most cases going to be infinite, but so what? We're talking about mathematics here, not computation.

[0] [https://liorpachter.wordpress.com/2015/09/20/unsolved- proble...](https://liorpachter.wordpress.com/2015/09/20/unsolved-problems- with-the-common-core/), "Fifth grade" section

<comment><USER7> I don't think that the expansion being sometimes infinite is a minor difficulty. In fact it sounds pretty major, similiar to the halting problem. Unless you can prove if it's infinite or not a priori.

I'm not knowledgeable about this topic but the quote suggests you can't prove that.

<comment><USER4> _" In fact it sounds pretty major, similiar to the halting problem."_

I think it's _identical_ to the halting problem. The issue is that, for irrational numbers, there is _never_ a point at which you can stop and say "okay, we know it is irrational now".

In fact, if we had an algorithm that could _always_ tell us whether a sequence converged to a rational number, we could solve the Halting Problem:

For any Turing Machine you wish to check for halting-ness, produce a sequence S by successively appending a full encoding (any will do) of the Turing Machine state at every step to the decimal expansion of the previous value in S. Apply your algorithm to S. If S is irrational, then we know it never halts. If S is rational, then we know it halts or repeats after a finite number of digits - so we can simply run it until it does one or the other (this may take arbitrarily long, and an arbitrarily large amount of storage, but _finitely_ in both cases).

<comment><USER6> Everyone has gotten distracted by the infinite expansion and has missed the point of my question. Let me try again, with no infinite expansion.

The constructivist position is to refuse to accept the statement "every real number is either rational or irrational" because they're not in possession of proofs, for each possible real-valued expression, that its value is rational or, alternatively, a proof that its value is irrational. And yet, according to the quoted paragraph, they accept the statement "every integer is either even or odd", quote, "because we have an effective means of determining which alternative holds for any integer". My argument is that they should reject this statement on the same grounds: I named an integer whose value is not known, and therefore it is not known whether it is even or odd. There is not, in fact, an effective procedure for determining the evenness or oddness of the value of an arbitrary integer-valued expression. It's only after one actually knows the value that answering the question becomes easy.

<comment><USER8> Constructivists don't accept that you've named an integer. They would say: an integer is any member of the smallest _constructive_ set that contains 0 and one more than any member of that set. Since the set is a constructive set, if you have anything you claim to be an integer, you must be able to either prove that it is 0 or one more than an integer. The number you named isn't zero, so presumably it must be more than some integer ("one less than the number you named"). But if I then ask you whether that number is one more than an integer, and then the same about that one, and so on, at some point you will be unable to answer me. Since you can't provide the evidence that qualifies something as an integer, there's no reason for me to think it is an integer.

<comment><USER6> I see. The difference, then, between that situation and the situation where I provide a real number named as the sum of an infinite series is that in the latter case I may be able to provide also the modulus of convergence, thus proving that the number is a constructive real number [0]. This is different from a situation where I have a number defined non-constructively and no series is known that converges on the number.

[0] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constructivism_%28mathematics%...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constructivism_%28mathematics%29)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> A bit quaint in the light of the past 15 years. I find it amusing that the paper uses the phrase "type-based formalisms" instead of "type theory".</comment>


Building a startup from $0 to $1 – Day 5: Build part 2 - <AUTHOR> https://www.twitch.tv/branzzel <comment><AUTHOR> Hello, everyone, I'm building my new startup publicly from $0 to $1, if you could give me some advice It would be cool. Any suggestions are very welcome.

</comment><comment><USER2> What do you mean, $0 to $1? Am I missing something?

<comment><AUTHOR> I mean I'm building a startup from zero and my first goal is win $1, then $100, and so on. However, I want to start with small goals.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Anyone else understand a language but not able to speak it? - <AUTHOR>

I can understand hindi, but not for the life of me be able to speak it.
Little background: My parents are from india, I grew up in the US. Both my parents do speak english very well. I never grew up with any friends who spoke hindi, or had relatives my age who spoke it, so I guess because I never needed to try to speak it I never learned how to, and I find it extremely hard to speak it now(im 26)
Anyone else have something similar? <comment><USER2> I have the same issue with Mandarin. I'm a conversational Cantonese (actually Taishan) speaker but Mandarin continues to elude me.

It really is 50% confidence and 50% practice. Two weeks in Taiwan did more for me than months studying it on my own. Unfortunately, I've since reverted back due to lack of practice (and subsequently confidence).

<comment><AUTHOR> I agree confidence is key. I will be india for a month let's see how that goes.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I'm a lot like the OP [Xtac]. I was born in Oklahoma and raised to speak English. I picked up Hindi off my parents, who are from India.

It's not difficult for me to speak Hindi, but it's not easy either. My limits are very basic Hindi, or phrasing answers that are very based on the question asked.

<comment><AUTHOR> That's interesting, I also forgot to mention that my parents spoke punjabi, and I find myself understanding punjabi more so than hindi. While alike they are very different and often confusing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I have the same issue with Mandarin. I believe with practice you will develop the confidence to speak it.

<comment><AUTHOR> Are you actively trying to learn it? Do you find it hard to tie words together?

<comment><USER4> I have lunch with a mandarin speaker once a week to practice. My parents native tongue is cantonese, so it's similar in grammar at least to mandarin. I found I really suck at speaking cantonese, but a couple of months ago I went to China. With no english speakers around me, I was forced to adapt, within 3 days I was speaking fluent cantonese to my cousins. So I'm a firm believer in practice makes perfect.</comment></comment></comment>


As a VC, how is a $41 million investment in Color, justified? - <AUTHOR> http://www.quora.com/Color-Labs-startup/As-a-VC-how-is-a-41-million-investment-in-Color-an-unproven-social-media-application-justified?srid=zhc

<comment><USER2> _Several of the highly-voted answers here consist of baseless speculation, facts that are very probably untrue, and mostly fantasies of uninformed pundits._

Reminds me of this comment by Paul Buchheit (<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1503075>) about another unfortunate quora answer ([http://www.quora.com/Google-Inc-company/What-were- the-4-or-5...](http://www.quora.com/Google-Inc-company/What-were- the-4-or-5-key-decisions-that-Larry-Page-and-Sergey-Brin-made-in-the-early- days-of-Google)) and the pitfalls of simple up/down voting systems.

</comment><comment> brown9-2 Discussion on the same link from yesterday: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2376422>

</comment><comment><USER3> I think a lot of people are missing the big picture. For the past few decades, the economy has been transforming to be increasingly technological, moving away from oil and unnecessary manufacturing, transport, and administration. Several technology companies are now worth more than many oil giants. This part of the economy is experiencing an enormous growth, with large companies routinely showing annual revenue growths of 20-40%. They are now making massive investments in technology not seen since the days of Bell Labs and NASA. With such amazing growth comes a form of competitive inflation. To successful investors such as Sequoia, $40 million is simply not that much money these days. It's what you need to be able to get ahead of the competition and be successful, yet small enough for a VC to be willing to take the risk.

The .com bubble was the moment people first started to realize what was about to happen. Being completely inexperienced with this new phenomena, they overvalued garbage and undervalued treasures. Nonetheless, inside the bubble was a core of solid gold. In 2010, Mark Zuckerberg was chosen man of the year, only 11 years after Jeff Bezos was man of the year in the midst of the greatest "bubble" the world has ever seen. A few years later, he had revolutionized shopping, computing, publishing, and became one of the richest people in the world. I'm also reminded by the tulip bubbles, which preceded the Netherlands becoming the world's dominant flower exporter for the next 400 years. I think bubbles are a whole lot more rational than people realize.

</comment><comment><USER4> Maybe in ten years there's going to be a post on Hacker News about how it's a little known fact that version 1.0 of Color was a colossal and epic failure. So the team was forced to pivot to the Color we know and love today.

How were they able to successfully pivot? They had $41 milliion dollars ;<). Either that or Google, a Sequoia company, buys them in a year for $60 million to get the team.

</comment><comment><USER5>
      It seems easy for a two-time experienced entrepreneur like
      Bill Nguyen to know where to spend $25M

With what we know about Color... what would _you_ do with $25M if you were in Bill's position?

I have real trouble getting my head around these sorts of numbers and it would really help me to have someone break down the likely way he'd use that money.

</comment><comment><USER6> You can't invest in the product -- not if it's really new, never seen before. You have no way to evaluate it, so you invest in the team. The team at Color has a proven track record; if the product is bogus, the will be able to pivot. Color is a good investment, but a little out of my price range.

<comment><USER7> I don't view it as a 'good investment'. I view it as a large, high-risk investment that will likely leave one group of people saying 'I told you so!'

But it's not obvious to me which group will be wagging their fingers in victory.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> If you cant fit your reason in a simple sentence or paragraph...

</comment><comment> daniel-cussen Because, as nytimes showed, 40M is merely the rate a corporate accounts pay for a few afternoons worth of hacker time: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2377299></comment>


About Musl - <AUTHOR> https://musl.libc.org/about.html <comment><USER2> The musl community is one of my favorite things on the internet. It's obvious that many members of it could be making a generous salary at any number of companies but they're just hanging out on IRC because they don't give a shit and they love software.

I don't get the sense that they think they are infallible, just that they are right far more often than not. You can't achieve the sort of spartan aesthetic that you see in the musl codebase by handling things like everyone else. The ability to distill things to their essence betrays a very high level of understanding.

As they say in the streets, the dope sells itself.

</comment><comment><USER3> The libc situation is pretty unfortunate. You can go with glibc for compatibility, but ideally you don't actually use the upstream version but copy the one from Debian that has crucial fixes that most of the world uses that they didn't bother to upstream because for a while there, glibc was maintained by the biggest asshole in all of software engineering.

On the other hand you have musl, and we can all appreciate its design goals, but then it is similarly maintained by people that believe they and their work are utterly infallible. Hence why to this date they have not made it possible to _detect_ musl and would rather cite you a POSIX standards meeting from 1980 than fix an incompatibility _everyone else handles differently_. Just ctrl+F musl on [http://landley.net/toybox/](http://landley.net/toybox/) for some insight.

The last time I felt like smashing the desk because of musl was when I realized you can't stacktrace a thread in a syscall because they refuse to annotate their 10 lines of assembler doing the syscall with the required CFI directives. They would rather wait for someone to write a 200 line AWK script that does it ([1]) than fix debugging on platforms like arm64.

1: [https://github.com/bminor/musl/blob/master/tools/add- cfi.x86...](https://github.com/bminor/musl/blob/master/tools/add- cfi.x86_64.awk)

<comment><USER4> The inability to detect musl is indeed frustrating.

One example of this problem is in detecting C11 thread support. This is a feature of the C library, not the compiler, but it's the compiler that sets C11 feature flags. For threads, you can only detect that they aren't supported by __STDC_NO_THREADS__. But of course since this can't be defined retroactively in old versions of musl, you can't use it to detect C11 thread support in musl. And since you can't detect musl at all, you can't even just assume the version of musl is recent enough and turn it on unconditionally.

The musl team seems to advocate guessing at supported features by detecting with test compilation (a.k.a. configure scripts.) They don't believe in depending on specific versions of musl because features can be backported or disabled. Okay fine, but then why not give us explicit means to detect it? Why not just define MUSL_C11_THREADS or something so we can detect it at compile- time instead of during a slow, fuzzy, non-portable configure step?

Does anyone know of a workaround for this? Does musl define any kind of feature macro that can be used to detect C11 thread support?

<comment><USER5> Do you have a real system that uses threads if available, but can also work without them? What does the architecture look like?

<comment><USER6> BEAM, the Erlang virtual machine, could be compiled with or without threads until release 21 (from 2018).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Biggest problem for musl isn't actually a problem _with_ musl at all, it's this: the C stdlib isn't an ABI. What this means is, something compiled for glibc doesn't necessarily work with musl and will just crash. This problem goes much further than you'd expect. For instance, if you use .NET 3.1 with Alpine, you can't use Google's gRPC client (thankfully, you can use Microsoft's).

<comment> ur-whale This actually goes further than that as different version of glibc aren't ABI compatible with one another.

<comment><USER8> They are backwards-compatible (which is all you can do of course).

<comment> ur-whale Are they ?

If seen my share of old x64 binaries refusing to run on modern linux distro, spouting some sort of undecipherable glibc error message on startup (something along the lines of "version `GLIBC blah' not found)

<comment><USER9> That message happens when a new binary is run on an old glibc, not the other way around.

<comment> ur-whale Yes, you'd think so indeed.

Unfortunately, I've seen the exact opposite in production: older binary running atop newer glibc and crashing with that kind of message.

glibc abi compatibility is and has been a joke.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Excerpt:

"Attention to correctness

musl was the first Linux libc to have mutexes safe to use inside reference- counted objects, the first to have condvars where newly-arrived waiters can't steal wake events from previous waiters, and the first to have working thread cancellation without race conditions producing resource-leak or double-close. All of these are requirements of the specification that were ignored by other implementations, and getting them right was a consequence of careful reading of those specifications.

musl's entire development history has been a process of reading specifications, seeking clarifications when corner cases aren't adequately covered, and proceeding with extreme caution when implementing functionality that's underspecified."

<comment><USER10> So basically a lawyer view of software engineering.

It is very good to adhere to specs when possible, but not always.

<comment><USER11> So, as Einstein could have said it, "We should follow the specs as far as possible, but not any further."

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I had some problems with musl last year and had to back out using it for an embedded system. Typically for example, 2 threads listening to their own socket bound using REUSEPORT wouldn't work; half the connection would arrive on a thread and the second one wouldn't get anything. That scared me a bit as I was on a deadline to deliver, so I had to quickly recompile my distro with glibc, and the problem disappeared.

I really wish it worked as I like the lean&mean&precise approach they've been using!

<comment><USER13> Other than #define'ing SO_REUSEPORT, libc has no role whatsoever in its behavior. You can see this yourself by grep'ing for SO_REUSEPORT in the glibc and musl source code. And both glibc and musl implement 1:1 threading, so it's the kernel making all the thread scheduling and inbound connection queueing decisions.

Your problem lay elsewhere, unless you were using a really old version of musl that lacked the SO_REUSEPORT definition.

<comment><USER12> I do not have an explanation either. I'm more of a kernel guy so I realized it "should" have worked but it didn't. I suspect perhaps a thread wakening issue of some sort, as the connections were definitely 'queued' on the listen socket. I know that that same code worked perfectly with glibc!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Alpine Linux uses musl libc, and SourceHut runs Alpine on all hosts and VMs. It's lean and mean and fast, and together with Alpine makes for a wonderfully simple and auditable system. I wouldn't dream of using anything else in production.

<comment><USER15> Dependency management can be a pain. Want to install numpy? You have to use alpine's version because compiling it from pip requires glibc.

<comment><USER14> Using anything other than distro packages is a pain. pip is an anti-pattern and one giant security risk.

<comment><USER16> Disagree, although pip should assume --user option by default which installs the packages in user directory instead of system directory (some distros (was it Debian?) modify it to work that way).

The best way of using Python though, is to create a virtualenv (since Python 3, venv module is built in which makes it straight forward, python -m venv <directory>) and install packages inside of it. This gives you control to use exact versions of packages you need in your applications and makes your application not tied to the OS, so system upgrades and Python version updates are much easier to perform.

<comment><USER17> > This gives you control to use exact versions of packages you need in your > applications and makes your application not tied to the OS

Is this true for drivers, too? like the coupling of cuda versions to tensorflow versions?

<comment><USER16> Unfortunately that's one weakness, but unless you package your application using system packager (which comes with its own set of issues[1])

If you have any dependencies that depend on system libraries there are two options:

\- the libraries can be compiled statically, they call them manylinux wheels, this generally works well, except if your dependencies are overlapping with python or other packages' dependencies. Most commonly this happen if package depends on openssl. If the compiled-in openssl is different than the version on the system in certain circumstances python might crash. This is for example why psycopg2 was initially distributed as manylinux but now they opt for the second method (they still provide psycopg2-binary but they discourage its use; most time it works fine but it is a problem on certain distros)

\- make python create bindings on installation, this makes installation process do small compilation to create bindings between system library and python, this makes the packages robust, but tied to the OS. In my experience this is not an issue, but it can be annoying, because you still don't have 100% control of dependencies.

This issue is what made me investigate Nix[2] package manager, because it gives you full control of all dependencies down to libc making everything fully reproducible, so you can control the exact version of python to use and all system and python dependencies.

[1] in one of my previous jobs on a team that I joined they were running their applications on CentOS 5 that was already EOL, because rebuilding RPMs to CentOS 7 (at the time the newest version) was a lot of work, another issue was that they were bound to python package version that came with the system, they could create their own RPMs, but no one did it because maintaining that was adding more work. I spent time converting the python code to be packaged using setuptools. Once that was done switching the OS was trivial. We finally also could use the latest versions of many of our dependencies.

[2] This is IMO good article which describes tooling that makes Nix much more enjoyable to use: [https://christine.website/blog/how-i-start- nix-2020-03-08](https://christine.website/blog/how-i-start-nix-2020-03-08)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> _musl, pronounced like the word "mussel" or "muscle"_

Oh. I've been saying mew-sel this whole time.

<comment><USER7> I've been saying muzzle.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Alpine Linux is by far my favorite distro and I wish it had more support. Not only is musl nice, but it lacks a huge amount of obsolete cruft and the package manager is nice and simple and not over-engineered. It also lacks systemd.

It probably lacks a lot of the "enterprise" cruft in CentOS/RHEL or Debian, but that's a good thing for everyone else.

<comment><USER20> I use Alpine as the OS on my home server (it used to be SmartOS/Illumos) and I compile my entire stack myself using my own cross-platform (Solaris/Linux/OS X/FreeBSD/OpenBSD) build system similar to BSD ports. While there are some portability gotchas, by and large it's manageable.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> I've been using musl on embedded systems for a while, and its simplicity is indeed quite a feature.

My biggest issue is the lack of ASan, or ever HWAsan. valgrind is nice, but quite slow. I know Rich has been working on a new allocator that will make ASan easier to implement, but it's still a few months away.

</comment><comment><USER22> We were using Alpine Docker images. Every few months the docker build would fail with some random glibc / musl glibc-compat new issue.

The docker file is full of comments like the following:

# libc6-compat needed by outdated grpc-tools # we get # sh: node_modules/grpc- tools/bin/protoc: not found # can be removed if we remove grpc-tools and assume an existing protoc for dev # i.e. developers would independently intall protoc in order to generate # grpc-web # we install separate from the packages above to avoid a failure noticed on # 2019-11-01 # apk update && apk add protobuf grpc gcompat libc6-compat # ERROR: unsatisfiable constraints: # musl-1.1.20-r4: # breaks: libc6-compat-1.1.24-r0[musl=1.1.24-r0] # satisfies: musl-utils-1.1.20-r4[musl=1.1.20-r4] #RUN apk add libc6-compat

Bottom line is that it's awesome to have something lean like Alpine, but that can hardly justify the effort to maintain it. It feels like Linux two decades ago.

<comment><USER23>
        # libc6-compat needed by outdated grpc-tools
        # we get
        # sh: node_modules/grpc-tools/bin/protoc: not found
        # can be removed if we remove grpc-tools and assume an existing protoc for dev
        # i.e. developers would independently intall protoc in order to generate
        # grpc-web
        # we install separate from the packages above to avoid a failure noticed on
        # 2019-11-01
        # apk update && apk add protobuf grpc gcompat libc6-compat
        # ERROR: unsatisfiable constraints:
        # musl-1.1.20-r4:
        # breaks: libc6-compat-1.1.24-r0[musl=1.1.24-r0]
        # satisfies: musl-utils-1.1.20-r4[musl=1.1.20-r4]
        #RUN apk add libc6-compat

formatted that for you

<comment><USER22> Thank you! I missed this doc [https://news.ycombinator.com/formatdoc](https://news.ycombinator.com/formatdoc)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Huh, nice domain name, is that new? It was musl-libc.org with a dash before..

<comment><USER24> It's fairly new, I remember there being a tweet about it but I can't seem to find it…

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Related from 2012: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4058663](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4058663)

2014: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7434554](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7434554)

2015: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9791709](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9791709)

2019: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19284648](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19284648)

</comment><comment><USER26> I've heard a lot of libc but not stdlib from other languages. I assume that most of languages that depend on C (such as Python, JVM) depend on libc as well. Is there any languages implements a runtime in C but implements its own low-level interfaces?

<comment><USER27> some k-family languages do that.

[http://kparc.com/b/A.S](http://kparc.com/b/A.S)

<comment><USER28> But why?

<comment> yjftsjthsd-h The k family likes to be the whole stack; they would view libc as an unnecessary huge[0] dependency.

[0] To k, every other language/library/program is too big.

<comment><USER28> Seeing that libc is undoubtedly already loaded in memory as a dynamic lib on all systems, that doesn't make much sense. Moreover kdb+/q links to libc, and it has very good performance and memory usage.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> The bad thing is, it's pretty hard to compile Linux with musl. I don't remember the specifics, but it had to with the #define mess that glibc uses.

<comment> friend-monoid But the kernel itself doesn't use glibc?

<comment><USER30> Definitely not. The kernel has its own implementations of any standard C functions which it needs.

<comment><USER31> Is that because of circular dependencies of glibc on the kernel, or something else?

<comment> ur-whale >Is that because of circular dependencies of glibc on the kernel

That but also because lots of code in glibc would simply not work in kernel space

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> Alpine (the docker distro) uses musl, but this means that you can't use many python wheels because they aren't musl based :-/

<comment><USER33> Alpine is not "the Docker distro". It predates Docker by quite some time and was used in lots of lightweight systems.

Python wheels compiled using the manylinux infrastructure actually do work on Alpine + musl.

That said I wouldn't recommend running Python on musl as I have seen incredibly weird behaviour including corruption of Python's low integer cache resulting in some truely awful consequences. i.e amounts of currency suddenly being 10x what they should be.

<comment><USER32> Presumably those manylinux wheels do not have c bindings, when they do they are glibc based.

<comment><USER34> manylinux wheels are exclusively binary wheels with compiled parts, so they're all glibc-based (as the manylinux ABI is glibc).

<comment><USER32> Then, I can't see how they work on Alpine w/ musl.

@jpgvm Do you mean they work if you manually install them? b/c pip won't install glibc wheels on alpine.

<comment><USER35> There's no guarantee that they do and I certainly don't expect any random manylinux wheel off pypi to work on alpine. I maintain one that definitely doesn't. We build a musl wheel too but there's no musl platform tag so we don't have a good way to distribute it on pypi.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: How to legally collect/share data like names, address, etc of disputes? - <AUTHOR> Additional info: I hate scammers and it seems there is endless supply of them. I want to create a searchable database to collect information on all scam related and business loss incidents. An example of this is fraudulent charge-back among marketplaces such as eBay and Amazon. There are also organizational theft, bad business practice, and other topics that can result in significant monetary damages to business owners, consumers, or both. There are ridiculous app such as Peeple so I believe it's not impossible for this, but I prefer to start it right or at least with a good faith. <comment><USER2> oh boy... this is a hard topic... i really like your idea but i have a feeling that this will end in endless witchhunts maybe something like the SCHUFA in germany will work</comment>


Tech giants to freeze eggs for their female employees - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-29626291

<comment><AUTHOR> I am not sure about the exact success rates off the top of my head, but if I remember correctly it is roughly 50% chance per cycle.

Each cycle requires a group of eggs and only a certain percentage survive the freeze.</comment>


Internet-free international calling - <AUTHOR> https://www.rebtel.com <comment><USER2> This looks just like a calling card provider? There's plenty of them around.

I get free international calls on my mobile phone plan anyway. Don't need one of these :)</comment>


Show HN: FillTheContainer.com Collective Factory Ordering - <AUTHOR> http://www.fillthecontainer.com

<comment><AUTHOR> We are a small team located in Vancouver, BC. We believe existing global trade supply chains are extremely inefficient.

We are launching with Medium to High end Furniture product line. We plan to add more Product Lines and Categories as we grow.

Your feedback is welcome :)</comment>


Yes, Apple's iMessage is totally screwing up the order of your texts - <AUTHOR> https://thenextweb.com/apps/2018/01/23/imessage-bug-order-messages/ <comment><USER2> This is the 12th submission you've made to HN in 15 minutes.

You should slow it down a bit.

<comment><AUTHOR> Lol, I have an RSS crawler ( self created) that has a button with post to hn, that links to the submitting.

I just opened it on new tabs on my phone and pressed submit.

I was wondering if it was a bit too much though.</comment></comment>