Cracking the Scratch Lottery Code - <AUTHOR> http://www.wired.com/magazine/2011/01/ff_lottery/all/1 <comment><USER2> My favourite line in the whole article was about the way he alerted the lottery board:

"The package was sent at 10 am. Two hours later, he received a call from Zufelt. Srivastava had correctly predicted 19 out of the 20 tickets. The next day, the tic-tac-toe game was pulled from stores."

I know that we're supposed to be fascinated by the statistical work done cracking the code, but my real sympathy is for the head of security that received that package. How do you react in such a situation?

As an aside, the statistician seems really cool too - it's a very forthright interview and the article's much better than I expected. Both the statistician and the author seem to be very surprised by the lack of concern shown for the apparent evidence of security breaches. This, of course, has a direct analogue with the way large multi-nationals treat computer security. I was only surprised to get to the end of the article and not find that the statistician had been threatened with prosecution or similar.

<comment><USER3> The last thing the lottery people want is a lot of attention to the flaws in their games. Threatening the whistleblower would cause that.

<comment><USER4> The cynical bastard in me thinks that There Is A Chance To Beat The Lottery is the best headline a lottery PR team could ever hope for. It is like card counting in Vegas: a problem if and only if you can do it _well_.

<comment><USER5> Except "counting the cards" in the lottery version is trivial compared to doing it for real. Like the article said, he taught it to his eight year old daughter.

<comment><USER4> Right: that is the perfect target for the math abilities of the average lottery player. Do a controlled loss on one game, receive PR bonanza and watch as millions of lottery winners learn how to "outsmart" the lottery, introduce Game 2 with the same mechanic and cards which are countable in a fashion which is not exploitable, and watch as ticket sales soar.

This would be evil, of course, but if you're running a lottery your entire business is stealing money from poor people.

<comment><USER6> Not just poor people. The stoopid as well.

<comment><USER7> Now maybe smart poor people. This vision doesn't inspire.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Summary: If you are smart enough to crack the scratch off lottery you already make enough income that cracking the scratch off lottery is not justifiable.

<comment><USER9> ...but you can teach the technique to someone who is not so smart. Or you can use the technique to launder money.

<comment><USER4> Or you could write a Beat The Lottery iPhone app. (OCR plus counting... I somehow think they can make it work.) There are a variety of business models available at that point.

<comment><USER10> Oh dear. Why do I sense an impending deluge of iPhone apps in this domain?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> _In some states, the lottery accounts for more than 5 percent of education funding._

Am I the only one who finds this ironic?

Edit: Except, of course, for those who learn to predict 19 of 20 tickets correctly.

<comment><USER12> To make matters worse, my understanding is that when the state receives money from the lottery for the schools, that money does in fact go to the schools... and then an equivalent amount of money comes out of the school's budget and goes into the state's general budget.

So, for example: if the school budget for the year is $5 million, and lottery brings in $1 million for the school, the school doesn't get $6 million the way a lot of people seem to think. The school gets $1 million from the lottery and the state only has to pay $4 million out of the general budget.

<comment><USER13> Ha! So the lottery is paying for everything _but_ education.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I find it strange that they don't use some true random source in generating the tickets. I'm also surprised the article finds this obvious.

"Of course, it would be really nice if the computer could just spit out random digits. But that's not possible, since the lottery corporation needs to control the number of winning tickets"

Surely the lottery could quantify uncertainties and set up a system where the probability of them losing money would be arbitrarily small. Interesting interview, btw.

<comment><USER15> I think that "arbitrarily small" is not enough, especially if you are running a business for decades.

Try convincing your boss that the chance of all tickets be winners (which would bring the business down) is "small enough".

<comment><USER16> > I think that "arbitrarily small" is not enough, especially > if you are > running a business for decades.

Sure it is. How do you think casinos work?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> > "I'd have to travel from store to store and spend 45 seconds cracking each > card. I estimated that I could expect to make about $600 a day."

Or you could make an app for your smartphone that uses OCR to instantly tell you whether you are looking at a winning ticket.

<comment><USER18> or buy them directly in bulk

<comment><USER17> Wouldn't you want that app even more if you were buying them in bulk?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Why do they need a non random code to generate these? If they want to guarantee the number of winners, they can just ensure that they only release so many winners. This would require them "solving" all the tickets they were to release and holding/deleting/regenerating the ticket if they have enough winners already.

This may not be the most efficient system but it guarantees it isn't crackable with a couple of caveats:

1\. They weren't always releasing a winner at a fixed time - i.e. they had to have x win per week, and they released a winner at regular intervals to guarantee separation. You don't want all the winners for a month produced in the first hour. Although this would be random and should be a possibility.

2\. The random number generator was actually random.

<comment><USER20> It might work, but you lose some randomness by doing this. You'd need to check the statistics carefully.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> It seems that a large part of the problem (aside from flawed algorithm) is that they allow people to pick the tickets they want to purchase. If they required people to buy the tickets in order they're dispensed from the roll it would bring the abuse down dramatically.

Even if you were able to crack the code you'd have to wait for others to buy the losers before a winning ticket would show up. The flaw in this would be if the store selling the tickets was be in on the scam. They'd be able to sell a bunch of losers and pull any winners as soon as it was their turn to dispense. But as with most crimes, the more people involved in it, the harder it is to keep quiet about it and pull it off.

<comment><USER22> The only way this could work in the US was if the store was in on it. Returning unused tickets for a refund would not be succesful.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> I wouldn't have been surprised if they had known about the 'flaw', but didn't mind it, because, as Srivastava said "it wasn't worth the time to abuse the flaw". In similar vein, I once randomly generated 2 million out of 40 million possible codes. Consumers would buy products, obtain a code and it would allow them to 'buy one, get one free' for some other product. The code being short and without the usual mixup candidates (I, 1, O, 0, etc.) was much more important than people 'cracking' the system. Even at half the price, the other product still sold at a profit and nobody saw room for mass purchase/reselling.

Of course, later in the article it appeared that people were abusing cracks in the system and reaping the benefits, so it doesn't apply to this case. I just wanted to note that sometimes business concerns trump all actually interesting parts of a problem :/

<comment><USER24> It wasn't economical for the statistician, since he was making more than he could possibly make doing this. It would likely be economical for many other people, however.

He said he could make $600/day doing this. Even if you only do this 5 days a week and give yourself 2 weeks of vacation, you still end up making $150,000/yr ($600/day * 50 weeks/yr * 5 days/week). That's well above the national average for both the US and Canada.

<comment><USER25> Another key advantage is tax arbitrage. If you can make $800/day, that's because you have a certain skill set, you can't send a random college student in your place to collect your earnings for one month and pay almost no taxes. You have to pay your taxes on one $150k income.

With progressive taxation, if you get 12 students to redeem 1/12th of your winnings (for say 5%), you're paying taxes at the lowest level (likely even 0%) rather than the 35+% you would be if you had to claim 150k on a single tax return.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Great article, though, I take issue with this tangent:

"James "Whitey" Bulger, a notorious South Boston mob boss currently on the FBI's 10 Most Wanted Fugitives list—he's thought to be the inspiration for the Frank Costello character in The Departed"

The inspiration for that character is the original movie, Infernal Affairs, which The Departed is a remake of. They may have bleneded some features of Bulger into that character, but that doesn't make him the inspiration.

</comment><comment><USER27> I wish the article had talked about the legality of doing this. Assuming I'm not doing this to launder money and that I report all my earnings, is this legal?

<comment><USER28> Not a lawyer, but I would be very surprised if the law that creates and regulates the lottery doesn't include a clause to make buying tickets by an algorithm illegal or something like it.

<comment><USER29> Why? The law says that you can buy tickets, and return unused ones. So just buy a bunch, scratch the winning ones, and return the rest.

There's no law which says that "if you can figure out how the lottery works, it is illegal". Their recourse is to only pull the lottery and discontinue it; they can't accuse you of fraud if you somehow figured out how to pick the right tickets.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Can someone describe the statistical analysis that would be required to discover something like this? Is it along the lines of guessing different parts of an algorithm till you find something that agrees with the data (IE He'd have to guess that only "singletons" could form winning entries and go from there)? Or, are there some more general approaches here to draw out correlations between the structure of visible numbers and any hidden structure?

More generally, other than saying "statistics," what specific fields of math are applicable to a problem like this? I'd guess there's some relation here with cryptographic attacks and attacks against pseudo random generators, but what specifically would one study to understand these types of problems?

<comment><USER29> My guess is the following. Lets say that the numbers in the game are in the range [1..N]. Lets further assume that there are M slots (or squares where numbers are placed). Suppose M is about 3*N. So, on average, you'd expect each number to occur 3 times. If you see that number occur only once in the (visible) column on the right, then you are pretty sure that it'll occur at least once or twice in the (hidden) column on the left. So if you see 3 numbers in a row (or column) that each occur only once in the right hand side, then you can be fairly certain that they'll occur at least once in the left side; so you're pretty sure to win the prize.

All you need is some basic knowledge of statistics, uniform distribution, etc. I don't see a need for high-falutin' cryptographic analysis and higher order math.

If you're dealing with online stuff, then some knowledge of PRNGs can help. I remember (a long time ago) hearing about some online poker algorithm which was just calling rand(), and had been seeded with unix time. That leaves a really small number of possibilities to try, and you can reconstruct the stream of random numbers it would generate.

<comment><USER30> That makes sense, but theres still the problem that, even if you have 3 in a row that you think have a higher probability of occurring in the hidden part, they can still be X or O, not necessarily winning. Maybe theres a statistical edge in knowing that, but I doubt that would give you an edge of 90%.

Also, that seems to indicate the issue is due to the overall structure of the problem of choosing numbers for a game like this, while I got the sense from the article that the problem was more due to the algorithm the company used to control winners and losers (maybe I'm wrong on that). If it is due to how the company controls wins in some way, I could see how observing 3 in a row of singles more often than expected by a random distribution (whatever the distribution is for choice of number and choice of spot on the board) is a giveaway to some nonrandomness introduced by their algorithm. But if you were to approach it by finding divergences from this distribution, wouldn't you need a lot of tickets before you could infer this?

In any case - any guess on the expected number of tickets you'd have to have to discover a flaw like this?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> I excitedly went to the Virginia lottery website, thinking maybe I could find a game or two possibly vulnerable to something like this and then buy a few tickets for the fun of seeing if this can still be done...

But manufacturers appear to have dealt with this by getting rid of "baited hooks"--every number on a card is under a surface that has to be scratched off.

I guess they lose the allure of letting people say "I want to buy a card with lots of 7s because that's my lucky number" but it's a simple and effective fix. Oh well, guess I'll have to get rich through hard work :)

</comment><comment><USER32> This story sounded familiar -- it turns out that some of our own HN'ers have done this too:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1823191>

</comment><comment><USER33> I'll open myself up to scorn by admitting that I buy these things often. You don't get to select your tickets in NY, they are ripped off one at a time on a roll that is in a locked container.

The most obvious vulnerability here is clerks and convenience store owners who unroll the tickets and hand out the loser tickets to customers. That risk is mitigated by the craziness of lotto addicts, who won't accept a ticket that doesn't come off of the roll.

</comment><comment><USER34> In Canada, are you able to say, "I don't want this one" until you get a potential winner? Here in Texas, you cannot pick your ticket. When you buy a ticket, you get whatever the cashier gives you or whatever the machine spits out. Or is the guy simply not wasting time scratching off the losers? I still don't see how this could be profitable since most games have 1:5 odds, including break even prizes.

<comment><USER35> yes, but if you work at/own a gas station, you can pretty much pick the winners and sell the losing tickets.

<comment><USER36> Not in the UK lottery; all the tickets get dispensed from clear containers and have to be the next one on the roll (which comes out at the back so you can't see what the next one will be). They've tried educating their customers* about not buying tickets that aren't on the roll.

This to me seemed to be the core of the problem; not that the cards were crackable, but that it was possible for a user to select what card to purchase rather than just what game to play. Remove that and the problem largely goes away through simple education about valid play procedures as I suggested.

(* I say educated, but there's the infamous 'Winter temperatures' scratchcard which rather undermines that concept - [http://menmedia.co.uk/manchestereveningnews/news/s/1022757_c...](http://menmedia.co.uk/manchestereveningnews/news/s/1022757_cool_cash_card_confusion))

<comment><USER37> Exactly. Force players to buy the next ticket on the roll (without seeing it) and don't allow unused tickets to be returned. Problem solved.

I grew up in Maine and tickets are dispensed this way. Not sure about returning tickets, but knowing Mainers, I'd be surprised if they would take them back. It doesn't pass the straight-face test.

<comment><USER38> Problem not solved. A savvy attendant just checks the tickets on the end of each roll. If it's a winner, go ahead and buy it. Otherwise, wait until a customer buys the loser first.

<comment><USER39> Disallow attendants to buy tickets while they're on the job. [However, they could signal accomplices to buy it for them. It would take a team, then.]

<comment><USER40> Most lottery tickets are sold from small convenience stores, either family owned or with just a couple of staff - hard to enforce this.

There is a crackdown on relatives of store owners winning the lottery - but is normally them defrauding winners who come in to check the ticket.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> I checked my national lottery (Belgium), but sadly none of the 15 scratch card types they sell have 'baited hooks' or other unique numbers, as far as I can see ( <http://lotto.be/NL/Spelen_en_Winnen/Krasspelen/default.aspx> \- in Dutch). I would laugh SO hard if we found some exploitable lottery...

</comment><comment><USER15> Why the hell didn't he hire people to find tickets for him?

If you are worried about people doing this without you, just make an app to calculate the values. Make the calculations server side, and only after checking if the phone is registered.

Just don't hire too many people, or the clerks may start to get suspicious.

<comment><USER42> Why not bring the clerks into it? The corner-store I go to near-daily knows me well, and they sell lots of lottery tickets. It'd be trivial for me to go in there and say "listen, I'll give you an X% cut in exchange for your silence and first pick of the tickets."

However, if they're knowingly selling losers, could that be construed as fraud? Then again, the lottery does that already...

<comment><USER43> >However, if they're knowingly selling losers, could that be construed as fraud?

Yes, it's also clearly immoral.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> I wish I were smart enough to figure out cool statistical problems like he is.

</comment><comment><USER45> Even though he knew the formula, at least where I buy lottery tickets, the person behind the counter gives you the ticket. Assuming there are many more losers then winners, without being able to select the tickets yourself, it would seem as though it'd be a losing proposition. Now, if you were the store owner and had access to the tickets yourself, that would be a different story.

<comment><USER46> It's not only an issue of rarely having control over which scratch-off card you'd like to pick, there's also the issue of most states having the majority of their games almost entirely hidden. Very few games allow you to see numbers or letters plainly - most require to you to scratch off "your" numbers and then scratch off the "board" as well.

</comment></comment><comment><USER47> Haha funny I just tried to post this and got directed here: looks like someone beat me to it! Pretty cool read.

</comment><comment><USER48> The lottery system can now confidently continue to extracting money out of idiots who don't know better. Somehow this whole story leaves me feeling that nothing good has happened.

The whole story just feels like a good Samaritan helping a schoolyard bully steal change out of the back pockets of unwitting classmates.

A happy ending would be the lottery system managers getting thrown out after suffering unexpected sustained losses.

<comment><USER49> These are scratch cards, so they already have a set payout for the number they produce. So unless the cards are getting returned to the lotteries and refunded (this might even happen in some cases, I'm not sure) they aren't losing any money. It's just the other people who play the lottery who will have a far lesser chance of winning (as they are sold all the losing tickets rejected by the cheaters)</comment></comment>


Features Of SQL Server 2012 - <AUTHOR> http://mcpmag.com/articles/2012/03/14/top-12-features-of-sql-server-2012.aspx

<comment><USER2> SQL Server has been one of my favorite software products of all time. As an admin it has been rock solid and not produced any headaches that weren't our own fault.

With that said, to really get the most out of SQL Server (and most likely most other SQL implementations) you really have to do your homework and put in the time to go through the features. Perhaps more than anything this is why NoSQL has taken off-- it's very simple to get going. At user groups I hear a lot of people saying they selected MongoDB because "They had millions of rows and SQL just couldn't keep up" and to me it just sounded like no one in their organization had any solid SQL experience.

It's too bad MS didn't build a 'SQL Admin' into their product that sent an email on occasion to say things like "You have a query that is called frequently and could be sped up if you simply included this column in this index. Here are some details!"

<comment><USER3> _SQL Server has been one of my favorite software products of all time._

I feel the same way about PostgreSQL, along with the bit about learning all the features. I suspect that most decent RDBMS's are this way.

 _At user groups I hear a lot of people saying they selected MongoDB because "They had millions of rows and SQL just couldn't keep up" and to me it just sounded like no one in their organization had any solid SQL experience._

hahahaha. I have customers with db's with 10's of millions of rows (And I expect hundreds of millions or rows in the foreseeable future) and I can't imagine MongoDB keeping up in terms of reporting......

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Purported new feature: "Columnstore Indexes -- This a cool new feature that is completely unique to SQL Server. They are special type of read-only index designed to be use with Data Warehouse queries. Basically, data is grouped and stored in a flat, compressed column index, greatly reducing I/O and memory utilization on large queries."

Many DB engines such as Vertica, SenSage, Sybase IQ, all use column-oriented storage. Perhaps the only novel-but-obvious thing here is that these "read- only" indexes are implied to live alongside the regular DB table data, though I'm not sure how these "read-only" indexes would mesh with the need to support deletion on regular tables.

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

<comment><USER5> Perhaps the engine will update the "read only indexes" when the corresponding data in regular tables are deleted, but not in realtime, but only on demand or on a predetermined schedule?

<comment><USER6> The columnstore indexes are purely read-only; they will not be updated without requiring a rebuild.

However, you can create columnstore indexes on specific partitions, and thus, by partitioning your source data, you can continue to add new data in new partitions. As most DW/"big data" solutions use partitioning anyways, this is a usable solution, giving you the benefits of the readonly performance as well as the maintainability aspects, while still allowing you to feed in new data.

Columnstore indexes are not meant for OLTP type solutions, so there's no need for realtime regular data deletion; it simply doesn't happen on this kind of historical data. You might switch out a partition of your data, or you might switch in a partition of new data, but you won't change the actual data itself.

Comparing SQL Servers columnstore index implementation with other columnstore based databases doesn't make sense. I won't laud columnstore indexes as a revolutionary new feature, but the way it's implemented is new, AFAIK. Comparing it to "normal" columnstore based databases will make SQL Server look bad - but the thing is, it's not meant to compete with those. Use it where it makes sense.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> A little OT, but this was very surprising:

 _"MS is making a push back to the command line for server products). Core is the GUI-less version of Windows that uses DOS and PowerShell for user interaction. It has a much lower footprint (50% less memory and disk space utilization), requires fewer patches, and is more secure than the full install. Starting with SQL 2012, it is supported for SQL Server."_

<comment><AUTHOR> What is surprising about it? Server core is for specific situations.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I'd be happy with simple syntax for things like OFFSET/LIMIT and GROUP_CONCAT at this point.

<comment><USER5> if they gave you that, it'd be too easy to port a lot of basic stuff away from sql server.

I worked someplace that was primarily a SQL Server shop, although was still largely Java and some PHP at the time. I was tasked with building something to paginate through records. There were several hundred thousand to paginate through, and I had to resort to getting the DBA to build some weird sproc with cursors and junk in it.

"I just need _some_ of the rows"

"Why would you need that?" (honest to goodness question from the DBA)

"Well, because I only need to show 30 items on the screen, not 400,000. Showing 400,000 might take a while."

"Just use TOP. SQL Server lets you do SELECT TOP(30) already!"

"Umm... but I might need to see the second 30, or the 99th 30."

"Why? No one does that!"

Insane. They experimented with some monstrosity of nested TOP() queries. They refused to allow MySQL to be used ("it's just a toy"), when it was perfectly capable for the requirement, and had developer-useful stuff like LIMIT in it. I got some overly engineered sproc that had to be updated whenever I needed a change, and I ended up leaving a few months later. Not specifically because of that, but that culture was one I couldn't fit in to. I've heard it's gotten better, but I don't really believe it's better so much as the people who've stayed there have adapted and worked around the cognitive dissonance it triggered.

<comment><USER9> I might be wrong, but I'm pretty sure I've implemented pagination in SQL Server and it wasn't as complicated as that. Maybe I produced the world's worst pagination technique but I don't think I ever resorted to TOP. The ROW_NUMBER() function takes care of this.

<comment><USER10> Yes.

[http://stackoverflow.com/questions/548475/efficient-way- to-i...](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/548475/efficient-way-to-implement- paging)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Now if only MS would sit down and create a useable NodeJS client for MS-SQL.

The lack of a good clients outside the Windows world is what makes me move away from this otherwise great product.

</comment><comment><USER12> There is some great features there but Reporting Services is a turd that should have been flushed, not polished.

<comment><USER13> I disagree. Reporting Services in 2008 (especially with R2 and Report Builder 3.0) is great. It serves as a great alternative to Crystal and it comes included with the SQL Server license.

IMHO SSRS in SQL Server 2012 has matured more than I expected and offers a lot of the same functionality that comes with others in the Enterprise Reporting space. It's worth giving it another shot.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Microsoft is so last year</comment>


Tell HN: Android app NBack and other cognitive tasks - <AUTHOR>

I have released an android app which has Dual N Back and other standard cognitive tasks. I have done this as I was learning HTML5 . Please let me know your feedback and suggestions on how to improve this.
App URL: https://market.android.com/details?id=in.microangels.bodhi
Website: http://bodhi.microangels.in <comment><AUTHOR> Clickable Links

<https://market.android.com/details?id=in.microangels.bodhi>

<http://bodhi.microangels.in></comment>


Excerise cannot undo effects of prolonged sitting - <AUTHOR> http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2016/08/the-new-exercise-mantra/495908/?single_page=true <comment><USER2> Refuting the HN headline with a quote from the article:

>Last month in The Lancet, researchers tested whether any amount of exercise could ameliorate the risk of premature death that comes with sitting for eight hours a day. Their epidemiological analysis found that 60 to 75 minutes of concerted daily exercise might to the trick.

<comment><USER3> Refutes the headline? Only if you failed to RTFA. There are two critical points.

Point the first, and IMHO the most important, is the rest of the paragraph that makes the "60 to 75 minutes" statement: _the people weren't necessarily healthy, just alive_.

In other words, the exercise was sufficient to reduce risks of mortality, but insufficient to actually improve health.

That's a damning condemnation of the effects of excessive sitting if ever I've read one: Sit too long and your health is pooched, even if you exercise enough to survive.

Point the second, the writer points out that exercise recommendations are a balance between what will bring the most benefit and what (most) people will actually do. Very few people will exercise 60 to 75 minutes a day...

...and I suspect that if they knew that that amount of exercise would have positive survival benefit but negligible health benefit they'd say to hell with it, and just keep sitting.

Hence explicit and implicit recommendations from the article: Exercise 150 minutes a week (more if you can), sit less (a lot less).

<comment><USER2> >the people weren't necessarily healthy, just alive.

Well, yes, when you do a study based on mortality you get a result based on mortality rate. For all we know all the other studies mentioned in the article were also based on mortality. The article was being a bit dishonest by implying that mortality rate is a bad metric without addressing the issue of why that might be so in this case.

The actual point is, as you point out, that sitting is bad. The headline is still wrong and pointlessly so.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> A while ago I got a sit-stand desk: [http://jakeseliger.com/2015/01/24/geekdesk-max-sit-stand- des...](http://jakeseliger.com/2015/01/24/geekdesk-max-sit-stand-desk-review- two-years-with-a-motorized-desk/) and it's been great. I'd never willingly go back to full-time sitting.

Even apart from whatever health benefits accrue, switching between sitting and standing to work feels much better than sitting alone.

<comment><USER5> I recently got one as well. I haven't used it long enough to report much about health benefits, but I absolutely enjoy standing up while keeping focused. The one I found is FAR more affordable than the others with similar quality / features, even with all the bells and whistles (automated, memory settings, stylish desktop, tall enough for me at 6.6").

Only problem was that it took about 2-3 months to get here. But they were always responsive when I asked about the delivery schedule. All-in-all, it was absolutely worth the wait.

[https://www.autonomous.ai/smartdesk-sit-to-stand-height- adju...](https://www.autonomous.ai/smartdesk-sit-to-stand-height-adjustable- standing-desk)

\- I have nothing to do with this company except as a fan of my desk.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Much the same as the main message (as I remember) of the "The Healthy Programmer" book (which you should totally read by the way ... most researched, elaborate and "balanced" (AFAIS) reading on the topic I've came across).

[https://pragprog.com/book/jkthp/the-healthy- programmer](https://pragprog.com/book/jkthp/the-healthy-programmer)

</comment><comment><USER7> Eat right, exercise, achieve healthiness, die anyway. We're all food for worms, boys, and any action we take now will certainly be found (in the fullness of time) to be deleterious. It's a matter of balancing what set of regrets we can live with the most. At the end of our run we still have to give our atoms back, and the universe will continue to turn.

</comment><comment><USER8> I wasn't sure from the article how specific they were about sitting. Are all types of sitting equally harmful? Does the chair matter? Does posture matter? According to the article, the primary conclusion of the health experts is that you should sit less and "move" more, where "move" means anything that "increases your metabolism 1.5 times that of being absolutely still". What about fidgeting while sitting? When working on a problem, especially when excited, I tend to bounce my legs while sitting. I wonder how much that increases my metabolism.

I read somewhere that standing alone burns about 20 calories per hour. That doesn't seem like much but according to the article, this slow burn is necessary and somehow promotes heart health in a way that is not matched by sitting for an hour and then burning far more calories later.

</comment><comment><USER9> Question : is laying worse than sitting?

<comment><USER10> In this context, laying 14 hours a day in addition to sleeping ? Yes it's worse than sitting. Only thing worse would be being in zero gravity ;)

Exercise, eating, laying flat when not exercising or eating all day is not worse.

<comment><USER11>
      Yes it's worse

      Exercise, eating, laying flat when
      not exercising or eating all day is
      not worse.

Wait, what?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> With all of these studies on the affects of "sitting," I'm curious if there is any distinction made between "passive sitting" and "active sitting." E.g. a yoga ball vs. a chair. If you are sitting in a position that forces you to work muscles, is that only marginally better?

<comment> et-al The study seems to focus on cardiovascular health and not so much muscular dystrophy and posture. Also, have you seen people sit on yoga balls? Most of them end up leaning on the table for support.

I don't doubt sitting with good posture is helpful, but the main thrust of this study is to tell people to _move_. Get up every 15-20 minutes to pace, go take that walk around the block, take the stairs, walk home if you can.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> I dream of the day that I can program while backpacking through the Appalachians.

Also, title should be fixed -- "Excerise" -> "Exercise".

<comment><USER14> Oh man, Wandercoding, I'm sold.

<comment><USER15> BBIAB. Gone codeabout.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> For a developer without the luxury of a standing desk, what alternatives do I have?

<comment><USER17> Cinderblocks. I went to Home Depot, spent $5, and jacked my desk up 18". I figured I'd take a flier on the standing desk idea, but it's working out so well that I don't think I'll bother with anything fancier.

Some kind of an anti-fatigue mat is kind of a must if you're standing on a hard surface. You don't have to go big on that necessarily, either - mine came from the home goods aisle at Wal-Mart.

<comment><USER16> I mean, I work as a developer at a company - so I can't get them to raise the desk for me or turn up with cinder blocks

<comment><USER18> > or turn up with cinder blocks

Why not?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Excerise? Ex cerise.</comment>


Analytics - Keeping track of the pulse of your startup - <AUTHOR> http://blog.shoutt.me/post/44953378583/analytics-keeping-track-of-the-pulse-of-your-startup

<comment><USER2> Can all products be measured according to just 3/4 metrics? Are there any examples of tech products out there we use today who we can't?

<comment><AUTHOR> Off the top of my head - No. I cannot think of any products which would require more than 3/4 core metrics.

Each product should be measurable by 3 to 4 metrics max. If there are more metrics which are considered "core metrics" it will be very difficult to ascertain _how_ its exactly impacting your product, to detect how change in one metric affects another will become too complex. i.e. metrics have some sort of relationship between them.</comment></comment>


Spinning spider silk is now possible - <AUTHOR> http://www.slu.se/en/ew-news/2017/1/spinning-spider-silk-is-now-possible/ <comment><USER2> How does this compare to the technology developed by Bolt Threads, which is already in at least pilot-stage manufacturing?

</comment><comment><USER3> What are the advantages of spider silk over modern materials such as kevlar and spectra?

<comment><USER4> From the article: "it is well tolerated when implanted in tissues, it is light-weight but stronger than steel, and it is also biodegradable".

In addition, we know that it's possible to produce protein fibers sustainably.

<comment><USER5> The biodegradability would make it okay for cloths, but not for much else, doesn't it?

<comment><USER4> There's plenty of applications for disposable materials such as medical supplies and bulletproof vests. If it's biocompatible, we could use it for flexible sutures and organ scaffolds. Further, proteins are easy to modify. Perhaps we can key the biodegradability to a specific chemical/environmental catalyst, so in normal usage it is as durable as plastic.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Canonical claims LXD crushes KVM - <AUTHOR> http://www.zdnet.com/article/canonical-claims-lxd-crushes-kvm/

<comment><USER2> I do seriously wonder how this stacks up to Intel's "Clear Linux / Clear Containers" which are also a sort of hybrid kvm/container model that uses hardware VT for better isolation:

[https://clearlinux.org/](https://clearlinux.org/)

</comment><comment><USER3> Huge difference: KVM can run any guest (eg: BSD), LXC can only run Linux guests.</comment>


Why I Quit Facebook Relay - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@OverclockedTim/why-i-quit-facebook-relay-eeab0177f92f#.a9d7yuve8 <comment><AUTHOR> If true, then this is worse than the worst aspects of Angular:

"And of course then we would go on to update the parent, but which parent? Both of them! Yes, that's right, even though the Car page has nothing to do with the CarPart part of the database, it would need to include a carPart fragment just so it could make its child container getFragment call. And likewise the CarPart page has to include a Car fragment so _its_ child container can get a Car fragment when it needs to."

But my impression is that this not true.</comment>


Economists don't understand much about the macroeconomy - <AUTHOR> https://qz.com/1709972/bill-gates-economists-dont-actually-understand-macroeconomics/ <comment> d--b Having worked at a successful macro hedge fund for more than 10 years, I can tell that:

1\. There is no point in trying to predict macro economy further than 3 months

2\. It's hard to predict which way the economy will go, but it's easier to foresee that there will be volatility or not.

3\. If you want to make macro bets, you'd better have quant strategies that work in the case your macro bet goes South.

4\. It's important to read and understand macro economists, not as much because they know what is going on, but rather because they are influencers, who participate in risking / de-risking movements

5\. The most important things to understand in macro economics is that it is very much a people's problem. If you could get in the head of every central bank people, you'd get a strong edge over the market.

<comment><USER2> > _Having worked at a successful macro hedge fund for more than 10 years_

Do you mind sharing which one? (Ok, stupid question) Or whether it's a "quant" or global macro fund?

> _There is no point in trying to predict macro economy further than 3 months_

I disagree. Sometimes you can identify systematic factors. I remember Bob Litterman once telling me at a conference that a lot of their "quant" success was actually due to factoring in certain central bank policies that the central banks were willing to accept a certain, let's call it, slippage for in order to achieve certain goals. That apparently worked for years. Another example that comes to mind is the Euro convergence trade. Didn't that also go on for years? Unless you mean specifically GDP. Then yeah, I agree. In fact, I remember a class in financial econometrics where the teacher drew fancy equations on the blackboard only to conclude: "But you know, in practice a simple AR-model will perform just as well. It's just so you've seen it" :D

> _It 's important to read and understand macro economists, not as much > because they know what is going on, but rather because they are influencers, > who participate in risking / de-risking movements_

Obligatory quote here:

"""You might suppose that the feud could be settled by testing ri- val claims. Alas, macroeconomics rarely works this way. Macro- economists cannot run experiments as laboratory scientists can. Statistical analysis of the world is muddied by the vast number of variables, many of which are correlated with the thing whose ef- fect the economist is trying to isolate. _Macroeconomic arguments tend not to produce winners and losers: only those with more in- fluence and those with less._ Post-Keynesian ideas were never pro- ven false, unlike the Ptolemaic model of the solar system. Rather, they declined in status as mainstream Keynesianism rose."""

[1] The Economist. Free exchange: Magic or logic? page 69, Mar 16 2019.

Which of course leads directly into your

> _The most important things to understand in macro economics is that it is > very much a people 's problem. If you could get in the head of every central > bank people, you'd get a strong edge over the market._

I've been saying this for YEARS, mostly to deaf ears. Thank you for confirming my personal biases/opinions ;) Finally someone else says it. It's why I (used to) like reading biographies, however shitty, of key people in power. Just to get a sense of their thinking or psychological makeup.

Very good comment, I'll keep it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Scott Sumner (an economist) responded, I thought his take was spot on

[https://www.themoneyillusion.com/the-animal-spirits-fudge- fa...](https://www.themoneyillusion.com/the-animal-spirits-fudge-factor/)

Two quotes

> "Macrophysics" (predicting complex physical systems such as hurricanes and > earthquakes) does just as poor a job of prediction as macroeconomics.

> The real problem is modeling the policymakers. We don't know exactly how the > 12 members of the FOMC will behave.

<comment><USER4> > "Macrophysics" (predicting complex physical systems such as hurricanes and > earthquakes) does just as poor a job of prediction as macroeconomics.

Which is why people do not trust the weather men and neither should they trust economists.

> The real problem is modeling the policymakers. We don't know exactly how the > 12 members of the FOMC will behave.

This sounds hard. What about 327 million consumers? The real problem is a discipline in the social sciences which mistakes itself for hard science. It is serving today the same purpose "scientific socialism" once served in the Soviet Union: Taking power away from the people and placing it into the hands of an enlightended elite. What's called "depoliticisation" today. In which you remove spheres of public interest from the democratic decision-making process and cede them to unaccountable power. The exact thing we just haven't had enough of just yet according to this guy.

Listening to informed opinions is important but economists enjoy a kind of widespread unquestioned respect that has no basis in reality at all.

<comment><USER5> > Which is why people do not trust the weather men and neither should they > trust economists.

People who's livelihood depend on the weather (farmers) _do_ trust weathermen. They just know the limitations.

1: any forecast more than three days out cannot be counted on. (If you're close to mountains or other similarly confounding factor, that 3 day number is a lot smaller)

2: An 80% forecast of rain doesn't mean that it will rain in one specific place, but that it will rain in a good portion of the forecast area.

The same thing applies to economists. Some of their predictions are very accurate, but much are wishes and guesses. But due to human nature we primarily remember the times their guesses were wrong.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Macroeconomics is study of object with gradually changing dynamics.

Economists started to understand the dynamics of post-war type growing economy and how it behaves better and better. There is gradual shift away from these conditions.

* Wage share in OECD countries peaked late 70's early 80's and has started to decline.

* The return from increased education is slowing. Marginal return from increasing education is smaller.

* Women are now fully in workforce.

* Demographic change in OECD countries when people age. The share of working-age population is in decline. Paying for the care of older people dominates the growth of public spending and requires increases in taxation.

Now macroeconomists are trying to learn the dynamics of new conditions.

<comment><USER7> What all this amounts to is that there is no theoretical understanding of the the social interactions that constitute the economy, only fitted relationships to the actions of aggregating entities like companies.

<comment><USER6> That would require relatively complete "Theory of human" and also understanding the variety of human behavior. Human are also chancing their behavior. Different generations respond differently to same signal.

But all this does not mean that macroeconomics is useless or that it's not getting results. They are just relatively modest.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Well, he's not wrong.

It's a system which is slow to change, nigh on impossible to experiment with, we only have one experimental unit, and it responds to interventions. No wonder it's difficult to science it properly.

'Macroeconomics' by Williamson is my go-to example of the worst textbook I ever had to read (setting aside postmodernism). Overly certain, badly argued, with fishy math. So, a good place to go to for everything wrong with the discipline.

</comment><comment><USER9> I think it was Tim Harford (possibly quoting someone else) who said "Microeconomics is everything we think we understand, macroeconomics is everything we don't".

My problem with macro-economics/economists is that so many of them seem so convinced aboout their own models and beliefs, or at least the conversation is dominated by those who are. It doesn't matter which view you have, there will be promonant economists who are convinced that it is the 'one true way" and the alternatives are bunk. Government policy then seems to swing depending on who is being listented to at the time.

I wouldn't mind macro-economists so much if they would just admit that a lot of thier views on the economy are largely faith, backed by cherry-picked data.

</comment><comment><USER10> Does the opinion of economists even matter in practice even if they end up being correct? Politicians pass a lot of laws that simply do not make sense economically in the long run.

Here is an example: Globalization leads to concentration of economic opportunity in certain locations. If you simply go by the book then workers simply move to where the economic opportunity is and therefore everyone is better off than before globalization.

But local politicians of those locations want to avoid displacing their existing residents. Therefore they pass laws that make sense in the short term for their residents. Over the long term however they prevent the mobilization of all those future workers and the vast majority are worse off as a result of globalization.

<comment><USER11> When politicians create and force change, as a matter of dogma, and become known for carrying their books or following unproven theory from Hayek or Freedman, yes it probably matters. When those same politicians or economists point at the Chile miracle (that was a disaster), or economists become widely known as the "Berkeley Mafia", yes it probably matters.

Globalisation was about externalising costs and impacts. To hell with the local consequences - we got a decade or two of deindustrialisation, with lives and regions ruined for generations. Political fashions tend to stem from economic fashions without regard for the bigger picture. Or environment, citizens and residents.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Economic as a discipline has a painfully narrow focus on mathematical modelling. Anything that doesn't fit into the models tends go get ignored: one of the reasons few economists spotted the global financial crisis is that _their models didn 't allow for such a crisis_.

It would be silly to expect a biologist to write down an all-encompassing equation describing a cat, solve it, and thereby understand the animal. Why should that approach work on something infinitely more complex, like a whole economy?

</comment><comment><USER13> I think that part of the problem is that macroeconomists think of the economy as a single system. Therefore, if you change a financial parameter, such as short interest rates, it will change supply and demand in the business economy.

It seems that the financial economy, which is the trading of various financial instruments between a lot of different parties, and the business economy, which produces, distributes and consumes goods and services, are two loosely coupled systems. Monetary volumes of financial trading are one or two orders of magnitude greater than the monetary volumes of good and services. Further, the financial economy is even more globalized than the business economy. The financial economy is showing signs of instability as regulators attempt to use it to control the business economy. Direct control of the business economy by fiscal measures, subsidies, tariffs and regulations would be more effective and cause less distortions than continued use of financial measures.

</comment><comment><USER14> I've always thought that macroeconomics should be studied with a realistic perspective, and that does somewhat seem to be the direction economists are going with agent based modeling. Though perhaps too much on the math side and not enough fundamental thinking.

This is how I've always done my analysis. Start with 1000 people. Group them into 500 households along an age curve. Give each person a money account and assets along a wealth curve. Set up 100 businesses and the government. Study the dynamic system and gradually increase the realism/complexity with central banking, credit cards, etc. This is the hard unsimplified way but you will uncover the absolute truth of our system.

</comment><comment><USER15> weird/crazy idea: using individual transaction data from various sources (credit cards, cash deposits, etc), would it be possible to build up a macro view from 100s of millions of people?

Start small (not the US), in a geo where electronic payments dominate, and where privacy isn't as important. If the model proves valuable, build modeling tools and scale up.

Counterpoint: there's a very large percentage (by value) of transactions that are invisible e.g. business partnerships, cryptocurrency, etc.

<comment><USER16> agent based modeling where the probability of the agents' actions is dependent on actual economic data...

more realistic sim city (city skylines)

<comment><USER7> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agent- based_computational_econ...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agent- based_computational_economics)

I don't know that they've managed to produce the sort of general results that older economic theory.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> > [Look at] the role of the bond rating agencies in 2008, which is completely > unreformed. Why would that be? Well, there must be a lack of consensus.

I think we have a an obvious reason for the lack of consensus here, which is cognitive/regulatory capture. You'll always find someone willing to muddy the waters for a little cash and some sort of career advancement. Economics is the ideological science _par excellence_.

</comment><comment><USER18> First:

>Gates is right, in a way: Economists don't understand much about the macroeconomy. No one does. Any responsible economist is the first to admit that.

Then:

> Economists' research has contributed to fewer people living in poverty, low > predictable inflation, and less risk and uncertainty.

How exactly?

<comment><USER19> Because macroeconomy is a large subset of economy, and wereas some subset of macroeconomy are well-understood, how those subsets interact with each other and with human/group psychology, however, is way harder to understand.

But also, you can be right for the wrong reason, especially in "soft" sciences.

<comment><USER20> The article presents that economic research was causal in these wins (poverty etc). There is no justification given for that in the article, it is pure dogmatic belief.

Said another way, how do we know these macroeconomic improvements are not in- spite-of this research?

<comment><USER21> Are you calling for a debate about the nature of cause and effect, or do you have a specific observation? Do you have some evidence that completely unmanaged economies have performed similarly in those measures?

<comment><USER20> As the GP states, the article accepts the claim:

"Economists don't understand much about the macroeconomy"

But then says that in fact economists have e.g. contributed to fewer people living in poverty. I'm simply saying I don't accept that the research of economists has improved e.g the poverty situation without some evidence of that fact.

Before the discipline of 'economist' existed human societies experienced rises and falls of poverty, inflation etc. Is that sufficient evidence for you that 'completely unmanaged' (your words, which I don't even really understand your point here -- are you claiming economists 'manage' the economy?) economies have in the past had periods of ups like ours today?

The article is bordering on claiming that economists have nfi what they are doing, but the effects of their efforts have been amazing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Does it make sense then to limit the impact by de-globalising economic activity to a scale that can be more easily understood?

<comment><USER23> How do you do that without also limiting the up-side? Globalisation has lifted hundreds of millions of people out of poverty. Localising economic activity would undo much of that.

<comment><USER24> Since 1970 the world has added about 4 billion people, I don't think the claim that "100 million" have been lifted out of poverty can be taken by itself. What if 100 million have been added to the "not super poor" class while 3.9 billion have been added to the "effectively" slaves class? Not saying that's what has happened but "lifted hundreds of millions of people out of poverty" sounds like a focused view that ignores all else.

<comment><USER23> I didn't say 100 million, I said hundreds of millions. That's a very cautious low ball though. That's probably the rough scale of people added to the middle class, not just raised out of poverty, in China alone. We don't need to guess what happened to the global population though, they're out there in the world. We can ask them.

Just since 1990, the share of the global population living on less than $1.90 a day has fallen from 44% to about 9.5% in 2015[1]. The graphs there are broken because different studies have used different measures of poverty at different times, but the trends and absolute numbers are clear. Global poverty as a proportion of population is about 1/6th what it was in 1960.

[1][https://www.worldvision.org/sponsorship-news- stories/global-...](https://www.worldvision.org/sponsorship-news- stories/global-poverty-facts)

<comment><USER21> > in China alone.

More like in China almost entirely. Global capitalist structures take a lot of credit for improving living standards all over the world, but when you look at the numbers, it's really a very dramatic improvement in China, a country that deviates from those structures in significant ways (and is demonized for ir.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> No one seems to understand! Macro or micro economy, for me it's just another pyramid game. For some reason most people are completely unable to see that and can only humdrum what they've learned at school; that 'our' economy is a boon. Well, it might be a boon for the rich, but not for us commoners/slaves. And as a side effect this economy(of waste) is destroying not only billions of lives, but also our entire planet and species.. And we are so smart that we have an opinion whether to choose between Trump or Clinton, while neither of them desire to end this idiocy.

I would not be surprised if we eventually find out humanity has already multiple times wiped everything from this planet in the last billion years. And IMAO we are stupid enough to do it again and again.. It all comes down to: Greed, Vanity, etc..(you know your sins don't you?). The flesh is weak, so weak we'll probably never learn..

</comment><comment><USER26> No matter how complicated you think economics is, it's more complicated than that. Just the act of trying to understand and theorize about economics changes economics, like an observer effect.</comment>


Lead Emacs developer considering forking over GCC and AST issues - <AUTHOR> https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-devel/2015-01/msg00171.html <comment><USER2> Basically, a bunch of folks are trying to convince RMS to allow GCC to provide more information about parsed C++ programs to Emacs. This would allow Emacs to implement a bunch of modern types of program transformations, e.g.: [https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs- devel/2015-01/msg00...](https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs- devel/2015-01/msg00149.html)

Stefan Monnier, the lead Emacs developer, argues that this is important for Emacs and he's willing to support people in creating a GCC plugin to output this info. Linked post and also here: [https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs- devel/2015-01/msg00...](https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs- devel/2015-01/msg00091.html)

RMS's concern is that allowing GCC to output its internal representation including the AST (Abstract Syntax Tree) would enable non-free software to also use it as a preprocessor: [https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs- devel/2015-01/msg00...](https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs- devel/2015-01/msg00015.html)

Perry E. Metzger points out that people are already using Clang+LLVM for preprocessing: [https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs- devel/2015-01/msg00...](https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs- devel/2015-01/msg00088.html)

He and others are concerned that LLVM has overtaken GCC in terms of mindshare within academic research because of its modular structure: [https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs- devel/2015-01/msg00...](https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs- devel/2015-01/msg00141.html)

LLVM has an MIT/BSD-style license though, which RMS disagrees with: [https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs- devel/2015-01/msg00...](https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs- devel/2015-01/msg00162.html)

Meanwhile, Eli Zaretskii's trying to document the use cases for info from GCC, so that a decision/design can be made with the full perspective: [https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs- devel/2015-01/msg00...](https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs- devel/2015-01/msg00176.html)

<comment><USER3> Eli's attempt to collect information seems well-intentioned but very silly. There's no way to make some finite list of the things you might want to do to enable an intelligent decision about what information to export from GCC. You want to be able to do _everything_ , so you can write new program transforms as you think of them.

Think of a Guile REPL with C++ syntax trees as values and a set of functions mapping trees to trees. That's the sort of thing that would be very helpful in thinking of what to do in the first place.

It doesn't sound like Richard would appreciate this scenario though, which I find a little sad.

<comment><USER4> I hate to say it but RMS comes off as a bit petulant in this exchange. The "I'd advise you to stop 'pressuring' me or else" bits in particular.

The other developers are trying to show him that he's keeping GCC crippled by design in order to preserve freedom. They argue that in doing so, the affect will be to drive people away toward more wide open tech, achieving the exact opposite of what RMS hopes to accomplish.

When they cite examples of this already occurring, RMS responds with either a shrug ("it's already happened, so we can't stop it") or with the aforementioned "I'm offended."

Stefan asks point blank:

"Are you saying that if David writes this, and writes code for Emacs to make use of it, you're going to use your leverage to try and make sure this code doesn't make it into Emacs?"

To which RMS responds:

"We do not want to promote that sort of plugin."

That's kind of sad.

<comment><USER5> He feels a threat to his authority and ideology and is responding accordingly.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Per David Kastrup earlier in that thread:

> It is a greater problem for us to definitely block free applications from > being developed, either completely or by putting up prohibitely high > administrative or technical hurdles, than it is to accept the possibility of > non-free ones here.

I think this is a good example of why trying to actively fight certain use cases - in this case, potential use by non-free software - might as well be considered harmful. In this particular case, clang/LLVM is proving itself to be more free than GCC.

I'm a pretty strong free software advocate, and at this point, it's sounding like LLVM is the way to go for even that reason alone. Deliberately crippling a compiler to satisfy an ideological agenda does not encourage the development of free software, especially in comparison to making a free software project like LLVM that demonstrates the ways in which free software is better software.

Basically, while I admire RMS' strong convictions, I'm beginning to believe more and more that they're doing the precise opposite of what he - and many other advocates of software freedom - actually want.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> In advance: I honestly have no intention of doing link-baiting, but I found it hard to summarize this submission accurately.

If anyone has any better suggestions, I'm all for it and encourage the mods to change the title.</comment>


Because Most Americans Are Cowards - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/race-class/because-most-americans-are-cowards-1541f13487ba

<comment><USER2> Thanks so much for this articulate and eye opening article on such a painful subject. As a white guy, who always belonged to the ethnic majority in all the countries I every lived in, I must admit it was always hard for me to understand the feeling of being discriminated against.

I agree perfectly that racism is cowardice. I have frequently identified feelings of fear when interacting with people of ethnic minorities, who are always tainted with a criminal disposition, by default. I also frequently identify this attitude in people around me.

I'm not an American, and have lived in America only briefly, but this problem is actually not limited to America. You can see the same phenomenon in other countries, even those enlightened European countries (I currently live in France) where racial relations are much more relaxed, there a lot of mixed couples and a great emphasis is put on equality. Beneath the surface, in day to day dealings between people, in small talk or offhand remarks, or even looks that people give each other on the street, racism is always there, and it's because we're cowards.

</comment><comment><USER3> I think that this essay could use a good deal more thinking through. Having the upper hand and preferring to retain it is not lovable, but it is not the same as cowardice. Having a badge, a gun, and a bad attitude is quite orthogonal to cowardice. There are undoubtedly bad-ass racists who are as brave as you want them to be.</comment>


Where Is the Sun Located in the Milky Way? - <AUTHOR> https://www.syfy.com/syfywire/where-is-the-sun-located-in-the-milky-way <comment><USER2> Far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the western spiral arm of the Galaxy lies a small unregarded yellow sun. Orbiting this at a distance of roughly ninety-two million miles is an utterly insignificant little blue green planet whose ape-descended life forms are so amazingly primitive that they still think digital watches are a pretty neat idea.

<comment><USER3> Wouldn't it be wondrous if the galaxy had plentiful intragalactic public transit and we don't have access because we're the planetary equivalent of the suburbs?

<comment><USER4> You are not very far from what could be the reality. According to some research the Solar System has 10% less hydrogen than other galaxies, so Bussard ramjets will have an harder time

<comment><USER5> What if dark matter turns out the key to a decent space drive? There appear to be galaxies without it (a good reason for believing it exists where there is evidence) and so any aliens there would be SOL.

<comment><USER6> Astonishingly enough, you might not be far off. That is the operating principle behind the Alcubierre Drive. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alcubierre_drive](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alcubierre_drive)

Edit: Apologies, it seems it does not in fact use dark matter.

<comment><USER7> Unfortunately, Alcubierre doesn't use dark matter. It uses negative mass (or even imaginary mass) matter. Dark Matter is believed to have regular positive mass (if it were negative mass, we'd be wondering why galaxies seemed to have less matter than they should).

The existence of negative mass exotic matter remains an open question.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Slightly offtopic, but what extraordinarily well done alt text for the major images on this page. An example:

> "The most current map of the Milky Way is shown in an artist's > representation. The Sun is directly below the galactic center, near the > Orion Spur. The Scutum-Centaurus arms sweeps out to the right and above, > going behind the center to the far side."

They aren't quite following best practices with attribute usage, a screenreader may read both the alt and the title text for example and they're the same here, but to have the level of detail is really commendable.

<comment><USER9> It's also a really good example of how captions (this is a caption really, not exactly alt text) are context-dependent.

The caption you mention continues:

> The maser observed is almost directly opposite the Sun from the center in > the S-C arm, 65,000 light years away.

...which makes no sense (there's no maser visible in the image or mentioned in the article) until you realise that this image was uploaded for another article and is being reused here.

Evidently the website's content management system asks for caption text when uploading the image, rather than when selecting it for use in the article. The latter is the right way to do it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER2> Its also a great time to replay the Contact Opening Scene [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EWwhQB3TKXA](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EWwhQB3TKXA) which has to be one of the greatest scenes in history.

<comment><USER10> Related Abstruse Goose cartoon.

[https://abstrusegoose.com/163](https://abstrusegoose.com/163)

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Off topic, but after my daughter was born I realized how sad and worried I was that she wouldn't be familiar with looking up at the sky on a clear night and seeing the Milky Way. Stuff like what's in this article is much more intuitive if it's part of your schema of the night sky; it's more difficult to appreciate when it's invisible.

She's too young to appreciate it now when I point it out to her when we have the opportunity, and I worry that when she's old enough to appreciate it she'll be someplace she can't see it. For me it was a common thing up until I was a bit older, and now it's uncommon to be in the right place at the right time to see it. I wonder if the unlit night sky will become something like old-growth forests or other ecological sights that are long gone.

<comment><USER12> Go to the Southern Hemisphere, the stars are still epic there.

Story Time: I'm from Australia, but didn't got for almost 10 years. I lived in the Yukon, roamed all of Alaska, etc. etc.

When I got to Australia after 10 years I walked outside in the middle of a city of 50,000 people and almost fell over the stars were so bright and colourful and (seemingly) close. They were so good, in fact, I took photos right there in the middle of that city that are better star photos than anything I have ever taken in Yukon/Alaska.

If you're still in doubt, go to Australia!

<comment><USER13> The most incredible night sky I've seen is on the top of Mt John (there's a small observatory) on the southern island of New Zealand. Mauna Kea wasn't close.

You could see the band of the milky away across the sky. It was like something from Hubble.

There's nothing like looking up in the sky and getting some perspective.

<comment><USER14> I could very clearly see the bands of the Milky Way from the summit of Haleakala. My wife initially thought it was a cloud.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> When I was a kid, in the back of a sci-fi magazine I saw a t-shirt advertised, with a picture of the galaxy. It had an arrow pointing towards the edge saying "You are here." And another arrow pointing to the center, saying "All the action is here."

</comment><comment><USER16> (Edited to correct/clarify)

Out of curiosity, what is the galactic centripetal acceleration for the Milky Way that the Solar System is experiencing?

<comment><USER17> It's not easy to define a gravitational acceleration for the milky way since for planets it's defined on the surface and the milky way has no clear boundary per se.

That said, the escape velocity of our galaxy is 537 km/s; almost 50 times that of the earth. Most of it is due to dark matter.

[https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn24249-stars-escape- ve...](https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn24249-stars-escape-velocity- shows-how-to-exit-the-milky-way/)

<comment><USER16> Thanks! I worded the question poorly but this is also a cool number to know.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I thought there was some recent paper that claimed our galaxy was not in fact a spiral galaxy but more spherical than we thought?

<comment><USER19> this is very surprising, considering that you can actually see it with your own eyes at night and it is not spherical at all. There are also countless panoramic photos of the whole thing, which always look more or less the same, and there is no way it can be spherical. See for example [https://www.eso.org/public/images/eso0932a/](https://www.eso.org/public/images/eso0932a/)

<comment><USER20> OP might be thinking of the recent finding that the galaxy is not flat.

[https://techcrunch.com/2019/08/01/the-galaxy-is-not-flat- res...](https://techcrunch.com/2019/08/01/the-galaxy-is-not-flat-researchers- show-in-new-3d-model-of-the-milky-way/)

<comment><USER21> Or maybe the older discovery that the Milky Way is a barred spiral galaxy. And may not have a pronounced central bulge.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Is there any working directory of stars of the Milky Way with [x,y,z, t] coordinates ? a galaxy class coordinate system ?

<comment><USER15> I've seen databases of nearby stars, with just the 3D coords. Biggest I think had 100,000 stars.

I don't think we have detailed data for the 100 million stars of the entire Milky Way.

<comment><USER23> There's at least 100 billion (not million). Maybe as many as 800 billion. We can't see most of them.

<comment><USER15> Oops, of course you're right.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> > But where is it vertically in the cake? Right in the center of that frosting > layer, or off by a bit up or down?

Did the author answer these questions? How far above the center of the cake is 55 light years?

<comment><USER25> He mentions that the height is 2,000 light years, so the deviation from the center is 55 ÷ 1000 = 5.5% (+- 0.16%)

<comment><USER26> I had no clue that the Sun's orbit looked like that. Bobbing up and down relative to the galactic plane. More or less in a sine wave.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> so the Sun has both a vertical orbit as well as a horizontal one, with the vertical orbit in 1/4 phase with the horizontal orbit. interesting.

<comment><USER28> The period of the vertical orbit is closer to 1/3 that of the planar orbit: roughly 70 million years, versus about 225 million years for the azimuthal ("horizontal") period. Since the periods aren't in an integer ratio (and you wouldn't generally expect them to be for galactic orbits), it's also not neatly closed like the schematic suggests.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> Is the galactic center moving and if so how?

<comment><USER30> Relative to other galaxies? Yes, in fact I believe there's a galaxy or two on a collision course.

<comment><USER31> AFAIK we (Milky way) are on a collision course with Andromeda.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> Sol (our sun) is located between the Sagittarius and Perseus arms of the Milky Way spiral galaxy. Specifically, our home is located on the Orion Arm.

<comment><USER33> The article is about how much above or below the plane, specifically the central plane of the galaxy we are. Spoiler: We're currently above (north) of the central galactic plane by tens of light years, and still traveling upwards, but it's cyclical and we'll be below the plane again in a few million years.</comment></comment>


Make Slack Bots in Java in Minutes - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/ramswaroop/botkit <comment><USER2> If it meets the guidelines, this might make a good "Show HN".

Guidelines: [https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks very much @brudgers. I will give it a look and publish there on Show HN.

<comment><AUTHOR> I have done it and the same can be found here: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12239667](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12239667)</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Best platform for developer portfolio site? - <AUTHOR>

I've got a growing list of mobile apps that I'm working on (Android/iOS) and I'm looking for a good way to present them. At the moment I've got a Posterous blog with "Posterous pages" for each project, but this is kind of backwards as the work is hidden behind the blog.
Requirements are for it it to look good, be mostly up, and not cost too much.
Is Wordpress the way to go for these things or is there a more new-school alternative? If there's nothing out there I'll have to hand-roll one by I don't have too much time at the moment.
The current setup is here http://themodernink.com <comment><USER2> I still think Wordpress is the best way to go.

You can use Woothemes with Wordpress so it takes very little customization. It's got everything and a pretty comprehensive framework and you don't have to download any Wordpress plugins to get a full site going!</comment>


Matrix: open standard for interoperable, decentralised, real-time communication - o- https://matrix.org <comment><AUTHOR> Always good to see Matrix on here.</comment>


Candy in my pocket - <AUTHOR> https://nedbatchelder.com/blog/201711/candy_in_my_pocket.html <comment><USER2> I like this observation. I like technology. But I _love_ not using electronics sometimes. So many people forget to unplug.

Sometimes people get annoyed when I don't answer immediately. "But I called you and you didn't answer" Correct. I was busy or I was offline.</comment>


Subscription in the app. How much to ask for money? - <AUTHOR> Hello! I am a developer and created my app. The app is free without ads. There are premium features. How to calculate the cost of a subscription so that everyone is happy?
I set $0.99/month. However, there are people who like the application, but complain that the subscription is expensive.
p.s. If you are interested in what the conversation is about: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=link.dothis <comment><USER2> At the beginning, gain an audience. Then set a price that will be profitable.

</comment><comment><USER3> Your app = your price )</comment>


Can a toy car bring robotics out of the research lab and into the living room? - <AUTHOR> http://pandodaily.com/2013/10/16/anki-drive-can-a-toy-car-bring-robotics-out-of-the-research-lab-and-into-the-living-room/ <comment><USER2> [http://mindstorms.lego.com](http://mindstorms.lego.com)</comment>


Apple Employees Are Sending Out Resumes Like Never Before - <AUTHOR> http://www.businessinsider.com/apple-executives-are-suddenly-more-willing-to-quit-the-company-to-work-at-startups-2013-4 <comment><USER2> "Two Anonymous 'Venture Capitalists' We Talked to Say They've Noticed More Apple Resumes Than They Noticed Earlier"

Come back when you have some actual numbers, you terrible, terrible journalist.

<comment><USER3> I wouldn't mind if Business Insider links were blocked from HN.

<comment><USER4> Sounds like a good reason to flag the article.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> It really doesn't surprise me. When I was hiring folks from Apple I was always surprised to learn 1) just how poorly paid rank and file employees are there for a bigco, and 2) how poorly almost all of these stars were treated there. Almost 100% of them talked about being screamed at, jerked around, or otherwise abused in some way or another by management.

I think the poor pay and beat down management are coming home to roost.

<comment><USER6> Why would they put up with being screamed at? Is the glamor of working at Apple worth it?

<comment><USER7> Being screamed at isn't so bad. Lets say you are working on the moon landing in 1968, it's a year to go and the management are screaming at you to fix the floating point processor so they can actually hit the right spot on the surface. Would you just go work for TI on a new calculator or just get on with it?

Personally, I'm not bothered by things like passionate management. I'm happy enough when they understand what I'm doing well enough to care about screaming.

<comment><USER5> If they understand the, and they are right, and they are thinking about the company's best long term interests, then why do they need to scream?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8>
      | Gruber says: "The consensus among the people I've spoken to
      | is that this is in no way a "rats leaving a sinking ship"
      | scenario, but rather the inevitable churn of talented
      | people capitalizing on the success of the company."

I guess the issue is whether or not the people that he's spoken to are biased against wanting to believe that the ship is sinking.

Also, if this is the 'inevitable churn,' then why is it even worth talking about? Why is Gruber stating that it's, "the single biggest problem that Apple faces?"

<comment><USER9> > I guess the issue is whether or not the people that he's spoken to are > biased against wanting to believe that the ship is sinking.

And whether Gruber himself is biased against wanting to believe that the ship is sinking.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I can say from personal experience that Apple started losing people the moment they released the App Store but refused to allow employees to participate. They created an incredibly exciting platform for development and then locked their best people out of it. No wonder some of them left.

The problem is now magnified because today there is much more uncertainty in regards to Apple's future. Jobs is gone, Forstall is being moved out with no obvious successor, Google/Android is taking the lead, the stock price is stagnating, iOS is losing its edge, PC sales (including Apple's) are slowing ... it looks like it could be the beginning of another "beleaguered" era soon. Who would want to stick around for that?

<comment><USER11> That's a fair point. If Apple allowed their employees to publish on the App Store, do you think it would be fair to other developers that the same people working on the technology they use to make Apps have this exclusive insight to the direction and future of the technology?

<comment><USER10> That's a valid concern, however departing employees have been telling Apple this is an issue in their exit interviews pretty much since the day the App Store went live. After all this time they should have been able to come up with _some_ level of compromise solution.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> > _Gruber says: "The consensus among the people I've spoken to is that this is > in no way a "rats leaving a sinking ship" scenario, but rather the > inevitable churn of talented people capitalizing on the success of the > company."_

In other words, no news here?

<comment><USER13> Welcome to the magical world of link bait, where "yeah it happens" and two mysterious sources who are probably totally legit, 4rz honestly totes legit are enough for DEATH OF APPLE-NETCRAFT CONFIRMS IT headlines to start circulating.

If it bleeds, it leads.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> This is the type of "journalism" that instills fear into the market to manipulate Apple's stock price.

</comment><comment><USER14> Already going the way of Microsoft...</comment>


Ask HN: Google Play allows to call female founders "useless woman" - <AUTHOR> Hi everyone! Last week I've got the personal hater, who wrote me couple messages via social network from the fake account and started to blame me. I tried to answer politely, but he(she) can't calm and promised to write about me bad reviews everywhere. Next step was 1-star review on Google Play. OK, maybe he(she) doesn't like my app, but review started with the statement, that I'm "useless woman". Other review statements were about our conversation in another social network but not in my app. I connected Play Market support via Developer Console, but they refused to delete it. Is that normal nowadays to allow personal humiliation of dignity in reviews of the app? What else can I do to protect myself? <comment><USER2> Have you tried flagging the review as inappropriate? It's highly unlikely that Google would refuse to delete a review that was against their rules,* although it could have been because you ignored the protocol they have in place for getting rid of inappropriate reviews: flagging them, which would mean that the support representatives you were talking to might not have the _ability_ to delete the review.

*Found Here: [https://support.google.com/contributionpolicy/answer/7400114](https://support.google.com/contributionpolicy/answer/7400114)

<comment><AUTHOR> yes, but only via Developer Console. Should I ask all mark it as inappropriate in Play Market? Sometimes Play Market upvoted some review, which have only dislikes and put them above positive comments. I fear to make things worse

<comment><USER2> That's the intended purpose, yeah. Anything not related to the product should be flagged, and if what you're describing is accurate, these aren't related to the product. Google should remove them a week or so after being flagged.

<comment><AUTHOR> Even if my request in Developer Console now with the status "rejected"? I can't send such request again in Developer Console. Tried to write them on email, but that's general support, not the review team. Even if they by default believe in anything written (terrible app, terrible support, everything is bad), why offend founder is OK? Still can't believe

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> I had something like this happen to me a few years back. It was unexpected and pretty eye opening to realize that there are people out there who feel the need to take out their rage out on indie entrepreneurs.

You might want to post responses like "Sorry to hear you didn't enjoy it!" to try to mitigate the damage of their review but the overall best advice would be to just ignore the person. Hopefully they will eventually fade away.

<comment><AUTHOR> There are people out there = in Review Team or personal haters in the world?

If I switch developer account from personal to corporate, will things get better or worse (the firm may pay more to keep good rating)?

I've answered about who and why wrote such things, but now Play Market hid it! Other people can't see my answer. I can't understand why I can't defence my personal name? Why every potential user should read bad words about me?

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> I connected Developer Support several times and suddenly it have helped. I wish good luck and to be brave for everybody with the same situation!</comment>


Hey HN, help two Latin American entrepreneurs attend to Startup Weekend NYC - <AUTHOR> http://igg.me/p/227149?a=817312 Recently Quotidian Ventures announced the sponsorship of ten tickets for the startup weekend NYC (http://bit.ly/RyuNSj). And guess what? We both apply and got selected, though we still need some money to make it from Colombia to NYC. <comment><USER2> It's not clear to me why you're different from any other wannabe entrepreneur trying to go to SW. You should probably describe yourselves more fully.

Good luck.

<comment><USER3> Thanks for your comment ;)

We just won two sponsored tickets from quotidianventures, so this could be considered as "special".

Also we founded CoffeeGrid (<http://coffeegrid.org>, <http://coffeegrid.org/dev/med/>) The entrepreneurship and technology community from Medellin/Colombia and our intents going to NYC are to learn and share with the local community. So you are kind of sponsoring the whole Medellin community with this ;)

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Recently Quotidian Ventures announced the sponsorship of ten tickets for the startup weekend NYC (<http://bit.ly/RyuNSj>). And guess what? We both apply and got selected, though we still need some money to make it from Colombia to NYC.

Please help us <http://bit.ly/mdetonyc>!

</comment><comment><USER4> Good luck guys. What will you be presenting on the SW NYC?

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> $900 we are almost there!</comment>


Steam Machines and the Risk-Free Bet of Valve - <AUTHOR> http://boilingsteam.com/steam-machines-and-the-risk-free-bet-of-valve/

<comment><USER2> " GPU: ATI Radeon™ R7 250X 1GB GDDR5

Oh. Right. You better not talk about gaming anything on SteamOS with a AMD GPU onboard – that can only end with sore disappointment."

Is there an issue with amd gaming on linux? I though nvidia were the ones who wouldnt provide drivers?

<comment><AUTHOR> AMD has very poor drivers for linux: their compliance with latest OpenGL standards is very late compared to nVidia proprietary drivers (already supporting OpenGL 4.5) and performance on higher end cards reaches a bottleneck in framerates for no clear reason while cheaper nVidia GPU outclass them. This being said, you have decent open source drivers for AMD cards, but they can't compete with nVidia on performance yet anyway.</comment></comment>


OVH Glorytun – A VPN intelligently aggregating the bandwidth of multiple links - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/angt/glorytun <comment><USER2> So this uses multiple paths in the same sense as tinc vpn, by determining which paths are live and/or fastest? or it splits a single tcp session across multiple links like mptcp? The title seems a little confusing to me. Or does each tcp connection take a different path, thus load balancing across different links?</comment>


Show HN: $2 incremental pricing logo project - <AUTHOR> http://logodust.com/plus/?show <comment><USER2> Inspired by Logo Pizza, where they increased price with $20 for each logo? (saw this pass by some time ago here on HN)

[http://logo.pizza/](http://logo.pizza/)

<comment><AUTHOR> Totally! We love what they are doing.

<comment><USER3> Awesome idea! Purchased at $164 - look forward to hearing back!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I think you're doing yourself a disservice. I remember coming across your portfolio (and possibly even speaking with your team, I don't recall) when I was looking to get a new logo made for a client. Now, if I'm ever in that situation again, how will you ever convince me to pay market rate for a logo when I know you've been doing them for $2, $4, $6, etc?

In other words, you're lowering the perceived value of your work.

<comment><USER5> Megabus famously offers $1 fares for early bookers. Everyone knows that the true fare value is not $1. Plus, this logo product isn't on par with their regular service, which includes unlimited revisions and goes for $450 - $650.

It's a solid marketing play.

<comment><USER6> Megabus still does something like this! For example, there are $5 tickets from Cincinnati to Chicago right now if you're willing to book about a month out.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Can anyone explain if the game theory behind this is sound? because that sounds like a pretty ridiculous "business model".

Does the price ever stop increasing or go down? Is this meant to be a temporary operation?

<comment><AUTHOR> It's meant as a temporary experiment. But we're thinking of having a handful of random days during the year where the price resets.

<comment><USER8> How about a pressure system? Each purchase increases the price by $2, but each day that passes without a purchase lowers it by $2. Eventually it would reach some sort of equilibrium of how much people are willing to pay for a simple logo service, right? Cool idea though.

<comment><USER9> for low demand/supply markets this sounds like a great way to set your price point generally as a buisness!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> The website looks terrible on Ultra Widescreen monitors. Maybe try it on two monitors and span the browser window over both? I think you got something wrong on styling.

<comment><USER11> Agreed, this is what it looks like on my screen.

[http://i.imgur.com/hoyFicn.jpg](http://i.imgur.com/hoyFicn.jpg)

<comment><USER12> Same here in chrome on a big screen. In firefox it just stays black...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I like this idea -- it allows the seller to find an optimal price through what's basically an auction process. The early buyers get a "good" deal, and when sales level off, they can roll back the pricing a few dollars and know they've found their optimal market position.

</comment><comment><USER14> I like the idea, but this does seem like a clickbait Show HN title.

Logos aren't being sold for anywhere close to $2, which is what a reasonable person would think before clicking.

It's more like "$2 incremental pricing logo project", though I admit it trades terseness for accuracy.

<comment><AUTHOR> You are right. Edited title. Tnx

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> I am testing this at $130. I will follow up with a review on experience and end-result.

</comment><comment><USER16> Making money at O(n^2 + n)

<comment><USER8> Sadly, the top comments are down at the bottom.

Perhaps the scoring algorithm is X=-X.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> I'm not sure about your logo but the website is simply not that good. It takes quite a lot of time for me to load, its possible that its my network ( i live in Australia, we have horrible internet ) but the site should be as fast as possible regardless of where the person is located and many other more heavier websites are loading faster for me so this is an issue with your site.

The scroll bar is also broken, and the loading icon/indicator doesn't load for quite a bit of time so i never know whether the site is even loading, and if i should wait.

I would suggest taking a look at this issue just so its more available.

</comment><comment><USER18> Do you the offer service aswell for logo design being made in both iOS and Android icon styles?

I would be tempted to hit it at this price, but want something I can get out into iOS and Android icon easily.

<comment><AUTHOR> Absolutely. In the design brief you simply share some style examples and we'll get it done.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> I'm curious here, how long do you typically spend on one of these logos?

My partner spent several years working as a freelance designer and typically a logo was a fairly lengthy process for a lot of businesses, and the bills would run up over $600-800 pretty quick + more $$ for assigning the copyright.

</comment><comment><USER20> Unable to find the link, but this "type" of offer has been posted to HN before and to me is just starting to feel like spam.

EDIT: Here's the link: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12488149](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12488149)

<comment><USER21> different organisation, same business model. That's just like saying that anybody who sells ads on their website is spamming HN because others have posted products that make money with ads.

<comment><USER20> In my opinion, the first time it was novel. HN is not a place to advertise business services, regardless of if they might be of use, a deal, etc.

This was, as noted by the poster, inspired by the post I linked to.

Stand by my position this is spam.

<comment><USER8> I suppose it's a good job that opinions are just that then.

I personally enjoyed this link.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Out of curiosity. For your premium service, do you offer any discounts to open source projects?

<comment><AUTHOR> Contact us via email. We love open source :)

<comment><USER22> It's not urgent so I won't be emailing yet, but I might in the future. Thanks :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Inspired? it's a copy of logo.pizza! this article isn't really relevant. It seems like logodust's "open source logos" just stopped being released over time, and instead they are focusing on pure commercial activities.

<comment><USER24> it's not a copy. logo.pizza offered premade logos. here you have a briefing after purchase and you get a custom made one.

however, i dislike this kind of "services". it does not reflect the real value and work behind a logo. therefor future customer will have a distoreted idea on what a logo is worth.</comment></comment>


How to drop 10M packets per second - <AUTHOR> https://blog.cloudflare.com/how-to-drop-10-million-packets/ <comment><USER2> I recently heard about VPP for the first time; VPP is one of those user-space networking frameworks. Apparently it's the fastest thing currently around by a large margin ("10 mpps per core? Too slow for me!"); it's alluded that Cisco's ASR9000 routers use the same core tech to do all routing in software.

<comment><USER3> Important note, DPDK and VPP are not faster by the virtue of being based in userspace. It is best to say that they just provide fastest way in between interrupt handler, and the piece of userspace code. The application will then have to reimplement most of the network stack functions that run in kernel in itself. The speedup is there because the application author can freely slim down the network stack to minimal. Secondly to that DPDK took some deliberation on better driver buffer management, ensuring zero copy path, interrupt and syscall efficiency.

<comment><USER4> AFAIK, you don't even run interrupts off the NIC if you're doing DPDK; the overhead is too high. You poll instead, and just dedicate a core.

<comment><USER3> I'm unsure. What I'm imagining is that NICs for which DPDK is made have option to do interrupts like "hey, we have just run out of 50% of buffer! Driver, go offload packets to RAM in bulk now"

<comment><USER5> DPDK's drivers are (as far as I know?) all poll-mode: [https://doc.dpdk.org/guides/prog_guide/poll_mode_drv.html](https://doc.dpdk.org/guides/prog_guide/poll_mode_drv.html)

<comment><USER6> Correct

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> "With XDP we can drop 10 million packets per second on a single CPU." is not really correct, the packets are being dropped on the network card which has its own processor. The packets never get transferred to the main CPU.

<comment><USER8> That's not true. While there are NICS that can drop packets in hardware (e.g. Chelsio) that is not what XDP does. XDP runs eBPF programs in a driver- implemented recieve callback. The recieve callback happens at the lowest level of the Linux network stack, when an interrupt is delivered to a processor and a packet descriptor is queued by the NIC, but before the generic packet handling metadata (SKB) is allocated. So XDP operates on the packet in place, but the code runs on the host CPU.

<comment><USER9> When you say "in place" you mean the data is still on the NIC? Or is the data 'elsewhere in RAM'?

I'm curious because this would be the difference between "scale with more cores" or "scale with more NICs".

<comment><USER10> If I read that correctly the data is still on the NIC. The CPU receives an interrupt - notifying it of a new packet, which it then decides to drop? Thus the CPU is the one dropping packets, but the data (most of it at least) is still on the NIC.

Please correct me if I'm wrong.

<comment><USER11> This all happens after the packet is transferred over PCIe to the CPU/memory (even the interrupt happens after DMA transfer). Otherwise the XDP code wouldn't have access to the packet to filter it; the example doesn't just drop all packets, it drops all packets matching a /24 subnet which happens to be all packets here ;)

<comment><USER10> Ah ok! I was kinda confused by that xD

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> now find a way for me to enter an unknown/untrusted website that is using your "ddos protection" without having to allow inline javascript to execute

because as you clearly know/demonstrate, the web can't be trusted by default

</comment><comment><USER13> I'm an electrician. I can help you drop packets really quick. Available for hire.</comment>