Checkedthreads: bug-free shared memory parallelism - <AUTHOR> http://www.yosefk.com/blog/checkedthreads-bug-free-shared-memory-parallelism.html

<comment><USER2> >In a fork/join program, you need just two orders: run all loops from 0 to N. run them all backwards, from N to 0.

Does this hold for the following code:

for (j = 0; j < 3; j++) a = j % 2;

In both forward (0, 1, 2) and backward (2, 1, 0) order, the final value of a is 0. But with the j==1 loop running last, a becomes 1 instead.

<comment><USER3> Depending on how you look at it :)

* It does work in the sense of reordering every pair of instructions that could ever run in parallel.

* It doesn't work in the sense that results aren't changed; this is true for a lot of more likely programs - for instance, a+=arr[j], and many others.

Reordering every pair of independent instructions doesn't guarantee that you'll find all the races; that's why checkedthreads has the Valgrind tool. It does find a whole lot of bugs very quickly, and it's also needed for the Valgrind tool to actually cover all the races - but it's not sufficient by itself.

To find all the bugs using just event reordering, you'd need to try something closer to _all possible way to interleave independent instructions_ and that's a boatload of orders...

<comment><USER2> More generally the issue seems to be that if two different loop counter values j1 and j2 write the same thing to shared memory, then all the writes made by values between j1 and j2 are masked from this kind of testing. This seems like a potentially common case, especially with long loops and / or few possible values to write (e.g. booleans).

<comment><USER3> Well, yeah. The reason such reordering is worth mentioning is because it's necessary for instrumentation to do its thing, and because in practice, we've found that this finds a load of bugs by itself; which is good because instrumentation is slow. (A compiler pass could be better than runtime instrumentation perhaps, but then you'd have problems with bugs involving compiled libraries.)

You can, of course, run with more schedules (checkedthreads lets you do this using env CT_SCHED=shuffle CT_RAND_SEED=654 or some other number) and then more bugs would be found, but you quickly reach diminishing returns compared to just running instrumentation (especially because a lot of bugs are not found by such coarse-grain reordering at all, for example, anything involving accumulators, counters, thread-unsafe allocators, the settings of bits in bit masks, etc.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Great writeup and it looks like an excellent tool. We'll definitely give it a try. Parallelization is really hard to get right and any tools that can help are much appreciated.

<comment><USER3> Glad to hear that - and do contact me (firstname.lastname@example.com) if anything goes wrong, or if you need a feature.

It's working very smoothly for us, to the point where nobody is worried about parallelism bugs any more - but while it's basically the same approach, the code itself is new, so I could have new bugs in there as well.

<comment><USER5> Would you mind adding a license to the code (e.g., Apache 2.0)? GitHub's TOS says that without one, code is considered "all rights reserved" -- putting any users on shaky legal ground.

Very cool (and practical!) project though.

<comment><USER3> My README.md says the code is "free" as in "do whatever you want with it" - isn't it good enough? As in, does the license have to be in some specially- named file or what-not?

<comment><USER5> Unfortunately, I don't think "do whatever you want with it" is specific enough for the lawyers of the world ;)

The license doesn't need to be a specially-named file, though most people use something sensible like 'license.txt' or 'LICENSE'. For example, here's one of my in-progress hobby projects:

<https://github.com/jack-pappas/fsharp-tools>

The Apache 2.0 license is a "do whatever you want with it" license (i.e., a permissive license).

<comment><USER3> OK; I kind of thought WTFPL was a good enough license and mine was pretty much similar except for the F part.

Since I got 3 different people asking for a license, I might as well find one. I'd like something _really_ permissive that also lets you strip the thing and doesn't have to be at the top of every file and doesn't require to give credit... Something that lets you do whatever you want to.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Do you have any proofs of correctness for this at all? You claim to be able to detect almost all data race conditions, but I don't see much evidence for that in the blog post.

Is all of the necessary work being offloaded to Valgrind?

<comment><USER3> Well, no formal proof, but give me one counter-example and maybe we can work from there :)

The post does have an informal kind of "proof" (there are various degrees of "formality"...) where I cover the various cases.

What's "all of the necessary work"? You mean is there an overhead due to checking? I think very little - maybe you could count as overhead the fact that you can swap schedulers at run time, the cost here is a call through a function pointer. (I could have done it as a compile time option of course, I just don't think the tiny overhead is worth the rather large trouble to the user.)

<comment><USER6> By necessary work I meant "Valgrind has associated proofs of correctness so transforming parallelisations into things valgrind can more easily diagnose".

(Disclaimer: my research is on safer parallel programming)

<comment><USER3> I'd be glad to discuss this over email if you like; the upshot is that I don't think there's anything formally proven anywhere along the way, but it might be interesting to discuss if it theoretically could be (that is, given a hypothetical imperative language, is fork/join code possible to fully verify as I believe or not.)</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Blockchain, with Santa Claus, in shameless MS Paint - <AUTHOR> https://spiceprogram.org/blockchain/ <comment><USER2> Sorry but this comic is neither simple nor accurate.

Firstly, recording the account of sahti is the only function of the ledger, which supposedly is a subset of a record of everyone's deeds' including the elves. Secondly then, fee analysis has shown that blockchains are a poor store of data and should not be used as a database since other mechanisms are far more efficient and cheaper.

</comment><comment><USER3> For anyone that's curious, the first set of runes is Futhark, and transliterate to:

>"That is not dead which can eternal lie. And with strange aeons even death may die"

The second and third are Enochian and transliterate to:

>"There is no sanity clause" and "Madness is the emergency exit"

respectively.

</comment><comment><USER4> I guess the purpose is satirical, but it's an awfully complicated explanation. I guess it can be understood only by people who already know how a blockchain works.

<comment><USER5> In another comment in this thread I mentioned my boss asking our team if 'blockhains would be a good idea to add security' in our web application because a customer mentioned them. If I were to send this MS Pain visualisation to my boss he'd still not understand anything about it. The subject is quite complex and the metaphor used is far to abstract for people who already struggle with describing the simplest requirements in a clear way.

Note that I don't pretend to know how bitcoins work 100%; I have read up on bitcoins a while back, with this previous knowledge I still picked some things up, but I did not grasp the complete explanation from this MS Paint cartoon.

Maybe someone could shine some light on a few things that I am left wondering after reading this cartoon?:

[1]: What would be actually 'written on the pages' in the case of bitcoins? The transactions? [2]: What mechanism determines what 'finding' or 'mining' bitcoins means? At one point it says that there are rules regarding how many 'pages' there are per day. Is there a parallel for this in Bitcoins? It says that there is randomness involved in mining. I thought you had to find certain key pairs that were hard to calculate and that those key pairs were then used to grant people bitcoins again. Are the reward-bitcoins simple written in a new block? How does mining work? [3]: 'Sahti' seems to refer to money. Are we talking bitcoins or external currencies?

<comment><USER6> The subject could be seen as very complex but for most use-cases there is a simple litmus test. Do you need censorship-resistant transactions or a neutral/decentralized timestamping server? If not, then you don't need a blockchain. That's really it.

In the case of a vendor, accepting _bitcoin_ has own security advantages, and bitcoin comes with its own blockchain built-in. As a vendor you probably wouldn't really need to worry about the blockchain as much as you would need to worry about avoiding exchange rate fees.

<comment><USER5> I will keep your answer in mind when I get asked this question again. Thank you.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> If you struggled with this explanation then I can try another a bit more IT related.

A blockchain is...

A distributed fault tolerant public database that no one owns and everyone can update.

Has this been done before?

Kind of, distributed database are not new. What is new is solving the problem of multiple updates changing the same data at the same time.

So for example let's say the following happens to our distributed database.

User 1 send the following SQL to the network.

      Update customer set balance = 1000 where name = 'Customer1'

and User 2 at the exact same time tries

      Update customer set balance = 2000 where name = 'Customer1'

A blockchain database will have both statements in a block and execute them on every node in the same order. Other distributed databases would run into race conditions.

So when you hear the statement

 _Blockchain startup X is going to disrupt industry Y._

You can reorganize the statement into something like.

 _Startup X is going to disrupt industry Y with a new type of distributed database._

<comment><USER8> Your example might benefit from some revision. Simply rewriting those statements as adjustments to the existing balance ("SET balance = balance + 1000" et al.), as would be used in reality, alleviates the race. This doesn't really help your example show blockchain's value.

<comment><USER9> Which doesn't work once the operation is not commutative.

Serializing parallel operation is hard!

<comment><USER8> Very true. If nothing else, perhaps it's worth choosing an example with which a pedant like me can't quite so trivially quibble!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I'm curious why Santa is an "it" rather than a "he".

<comment><USER11> In the comic both Santa and the elves are depicted as something non-human, are they not? "Its eternal kin would never forget."

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> We build a web application for companies to keep track of their CO2 Emissions and some other key performance indicators and assessments. Yesterday our boss called one of my colleagues and said:

"A customer of ours suggested that we use blockchains to improve the security of our application. What do you guys think?"

It is probably the equivalent of saying you use scrum and are oh so very agile. "We use blockchains for added security". What this would look like is then left up to the imagination of the person confronted with this phrase.

[1]: [http://www.csoonline.com/article/3050557/security/is-the- blo...](http://www.csoonline.com/article/3050557/security/is-the-blockchain- good-for-security.html)

</comment><comment><USER12> I could be wrong, but I'm pretty sure this wasn't made in MS Paint. All the edges of the shapes look way too anti-aliasied.

Looks more like something made with paint.NET.

(I have never used the MS paint version that comes with win10, so maybe they improved it a lot)

</comment><comment><USER13> I'm not convinced by this format. I think the whole information would have been easier to digest, if it was presented in a clear and concise format, without any unnecessary detours and metaphors.

</comment><comment><USER14> Strangely these images become easier to see if you reduce your browser size. Did they get their media queries backwards?

</comment><comment><USER15> I need to point out the obvious because it disappointed me after reading the title: that was not made in MS Paint

</comment><comment><USER16> This MS Paint stuff needs to become a thing to explain complex concepts like this

<comment><USER5> Isn't it already? You posted your comment on a post that links to a page that uses 'This MS Paint stuff' to explain concepts like 'this', where the first 'This' refers to this specific incarnation of 'MS Paint stuff' and the second 'this' refers to blockchains.

This is all very meta.

<comment><USER17> At least you are not an AI struggling to understand human communication.</comment></comment></comment>


'MormonWikileaks' website launched, seeking transparency in LDS Church - <AUTHOR> http://fox13now.com/2016/12/19/mormonwikileaks-website-launched-seeking-transparency-in-lds-church/ <comment><USER2> The beliefs are batshit crazy, but in my personal experience, Mormons are consistently the nicest most welcoming people you'd ever meet. It makes me sad that the church leadership doesn't reflect that. :(

<comment><USER3> "Meekness" is encouraged among the faithful corpus.

I would agree that I have met many kind and decent members of the LDS church, but I have also seen how the Church urges families to threaten or enact shunning of their relatives who choose to leave the Church, and their forays into political activism are inhumane.

<comment><USER4> I come at this as an active Mormon, but I see a consistent effort on the part of the leadership to make it clear that shunning shouldn't happen. I definitely see individuals with issues on this, but I haven't seen it as institutional, even though I've had a number of family members leave the church.

<comment><USER5> Well, as long as you don't count BYU...

<comment><USER6> All universities have codes of conduct and expel students who violate them. Everyone who enrolls at BYU knows that BYU students are expected to behave in accordance with the Church's values while they're students. No one has a right to go to a specific university, much less a private one like BYU. Getting kicked out of BYU for breaking rules you'd explicitly and knowingly agreed to is not the same thing as shunning. I'm not seeing a problem here?

<comment><USER7> It's a tad more difficult when one realizes they don't believe in the church when they've already gone through most of BYU. Or break the Honor Code by coming out as gay or transgendered (and expressing themselves).

These individuals are not far enough to get a degree, but far enough so that they'd lose years of effort if they were to be kicked out. Depending on the situation, BYU doesn't allow you to keep your transcript for transference to another university, which is difficult enough as it is. Maybe they believed in the church when they joined. Maybe they didn't and they were simply pressured in by family or friends (all of your Mormon friends are going to BYU, so why shouldn't you?) I've seen the "kicked out and can't transfer" happen on two separate occasions, one of which was a good friend, from these policies and for differing reasons.

I'm aware that's simply how the rules work. I'm saying the rules suck. To these people, it seems like they're saying "You decided to be who you are and stop lying to everyone that you believe? Well good luck with life, because we're going to make it as difficult for you as possible." Whereas, if they continued lying and went to church every week, and told the bishop "Yeah, I've paid full tithing. Yeah, I still believe in the Church.", they'd not have any of these problems. Dishonesty is being rewarded. It's not just the going to church. It's the requirement of belief, which can change over time and can screw people over that none of these other universities' codes of conducts would otherwise do (barring extreme circumstances).

Apparently there have been some recent changes, though, for people who leave the church while at BYU:

[http://www.deseretnews.com/article/865660524/BYU-adjusts- hon...](http://www.deseretnews.com/article/865660524/BYU-adjusts-honor-code- policies-for-students-who-leave-LDS-Church.html)

So that's better. Not great, but better.

<comment><USER6> In Mormon doctrine it's not a sin to come out and be honest about your experiences with sexuality and gender identity. It is sinful to _engage_ in homosexual behavior. One does not risk Church discipline (including expulsion from BYU) merely by discussing his or her feelings/"being honest".

You also don't have to be a believing Mormon to go to BYU. Non-members do have to pay a different rate for tuition and you do have to have a valid ecclesiastical endorsement from a bishop and stake president and be willing to adhere to the Honor Code, but otherwise it shouldn't be a problem to admit that you no longer believe (and IMO it's much healthier for everyone if people are honest about this). Resignation from the Church is a different matter than lost belief.

Whether one continues to believe or not, he/she should be willing and able to see through the contractual commitment made to the university when his/her beliefs were different. Commitments are not worth anything if you can just say "my beliefs changed; ergo, I am exempt."

We all have to put up with things that we've agreed to and no longer feel are beneficial to us, at least until the term of the agreement expires. I'd say a college student experiencing this is a good opportunity for character development that will serve the student well after graduation.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> They've released 4 rather minor documents so far. It's a fine start.

However, they don't seem to even link to the documents from their website! You have to go to Facebook / Twitter and scroll until you find links...and the documents those links go to aren't self-hosted, making it easier for them to be removed by LDS complaints... Maybe not such a good start.

I wish them well in their goal of more transparency for the LDS church.

</comment><comment><USER9> There were a significant number of leaks recently posted to the "ex mormon" subreddit [https://www.reddit.com/r/exmormon/](https://www.reddit.com/r/exmormon/)

[1] [https://www.reddit.com/r/exmormon/comments/545v5n/leaks_mega...](https://www.reddit.com/r/exmormon/comments/545v5n/leaks_megathread/?ref=search_posts)

[2] [https://www.reddit.com/r/exmormon/comments/552yzo/update_on_...](https://www.reddit.com/r/exmormon/comments/552yzo/update_on_the_leak/)

</comment><comment><USER10> @henrikschroder - Would you mind giving a citation that links Utah's issue of depression with Mormonism? After all, there are a lot of non-Mormons living there too.

The last I read, scientists believed that the mountain states suffered from depression due to altitude and thin air ([http://www.livescience.com/50813-low-oxygen-increase- depress...](http://www.livescience.com/50813-low-oxygen-increase- depression.html))

Also, I couldn't find any statistics on just teen suicides, but according to CBSNews, Utah ranks 15th in suicide rates in the U.S. Alaska is #1 ([http://www.cbsnews.com/pictures/suicide-20-states-with- highe...](http://www.cbsnews.com/pictures/suicide-20-states-with-highest- rates/)). If you have better citations, could you please provide them?

Finally, I have several extended family members who are gay, and two of my best friends are gay (and active Mormons). My wife is Japanese. Several of my cousins are black, and I have two cousins who were adopted from India. I also have other relatives who are hispanic. In spite of all this non-white, non- straight, and non-male stuff going on in my life, I've never witnessed this "terrible environment" that you're talking about. Could you offer citations for that as well?

<comment><USER11> Ask the fine people here: [https://www.reddit.com/r/exmormon/](https://www.reddit.com/r/exmormon/)

You'll get a lot of answers.

<comment><USER10> Perhaps you could help me understand how a bunch of anonymous rancor on Reddit acts as a citation that proves your previous commentary. I'm looking for a scholarly citation. Not opinion and blither.

<comment><USER11> It's funny, you just see anonymous rancor, but I see people finally breaking free from their shackles and stepping out into the light. It's truly beautiful.

<comment><USER12> Please keep religious flamewars off HN.

<comment><USER10> OK.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Why not just use wikileaks.org? Is there something here that the regular wikileaks.org won't cover for some reason?

<comment><USER14> wikileaks.org is now a propaganda arm of the Russian government

<comment><USER15> They definitely had an agenda in the last election, but that's a huge stretch.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> As a Mormon, I have a hard time imagining this site being very interesting. Between fairmormon.org, lds.org, all the anti-Mormon sites, and the missionary duos, just waiting to knock on a door near you, I think the world already has a pretty clear view into the workings of the Mormon church, their history, and their beliefs.

Sure, the Mormon church "hides" things, but most of that stuff has to do with disciplinary councils, excommunications, when people were baptized, etc. I can't imagine knowing that Edgar Jones was baptized in 1953, or Deloris Canflap cheated on her husband, is going to make for a compelling web experience; but who knows?

<comment><USER16> I've often seen people get worked up over the for-profit businesses linked to the Church. Carefully structured leaks can make such businesses look shady, and inspire knee jerk reactions of people claiming tithing is used to build malls, and that somehow tax exempt status is magically extending to the businesses.

<comment><USER10> Yeah, that happens. People like to have their boogiemen to blame for everything in life that doesn't suit them. I do it too. Personally, I blame everything on Orrin Hatch.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Wow cool. I hope the future is more wikileaks sites forcing transparency.

<comment><USER18> Hmm. You sure? Leaks are a funny thing. Someone could "leak" your last year of emails and forge a few incriminating messages about your coke and hookers habit. The damage would be done before you get a chance to prove the forgery.

<comment><USER17> That is a good point. I didnt think about bad actors.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Of course they are nice, every salesman is nice to future prospects. They want you to join their cult.

In reality, the people of Utah consume the most anti-depressants in the US, teen suicide rates are among the highest in the country, and if you're not a straight, white, male, mormonism is a terrible environment.

<comment><USER12> You've posted more than one religious flamewar comment in this thread. We ban accounts that do this, so please don't do this on HN. Literal religious flamewars are the last thing this site needs.

We detached this subthread from [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13224646](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13224646) and marked it off-topic.</comment></comment>


I want to own the database that my apps use - <AUTHOR> https://orndorffgrant.com/own-your-data-idea/ <comment><USER2> Great post! I've been thinking about it myself for some time. My main concern is that once you let the user to hold the data, you might introduce a security issue as it is very unlikely the end user will protect its data as well as you would as a service provider, especially as you would be subject to prosecution if you did something "wrong" with the data (read "leaking" or "selling" it).

I guess you are right about APIs, they eventually won't provide what you need. I'd love to see Solid starting to be used for the apps I use, but honestly I don't feel like it will happen. I don't understand much about Urbit, but from what I read that sounds like another world.

That said, I think there's some startups doing some work with regards to data privacy and security (and it seems like it caught a lot of attention!). As for getting access to the data itself, I think a sort of "open-source" and "reverse engineering" approach would help here, meaning that if you have a proxy between you and the app's server, and supposing you can add plugins to this proxy, you could hijack the data, make sense of it and store somewhere else for your own usage.

Obviously, any external processing of the data would have to be granted by the app itself, but I have a feeling this is what their APIs would contribute with.

I'd be more than happy to talk more about this and even spend some time implementing a PoC, let me know if there's anyone else interested here and we can exchange ideas and/or code/docs/etc.

</comment><comment><USER3> It would be simpler to have something like a google drive / dropbox where you allow access to store things on there to specific apps. Then you allow the data to be retrieved by another app. If the storing app does an export (say in csv format) each time you make changes then the data will always be available for another app to use. I think requiring an app to use a specific external database probably wont work because app developers have specific needs for each app, perhaps xml or key-value pairs etc. The app is then relying on a third party to provide the performance / latency they need. If a universal database could be chosen I would choose sqlite since that is available on phones.

<comment><USER2> Yeap, but storing data in things like dropbox/drive/s3 would require the app to have some sort of indexing in place (I'm thinking about ElasticSearch), as querying on these storages would perform really bad I think.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Urbit.</comment>


Searches should be private. We make sure they are - mike-cardwell https://www.privado.com/ <comment><AUTHOR> As far as I can tell, this uses the same search engine as Microsoft's Bing. In the small print, they acknowledge that their search engine "partner" is Microsoft, and that their partner will keep your IP address for 96 hours.

The concept is good, but I wish I knew more about the company behind this. Otherwise, all I can do is take their promises on faith.

</comment><comment><USER2> I searched for "world" and the second result was [https://office.live.com/start/Word.aspx](https://office.live.com/start/Word.aspx)</comment>


Raganwald: (unlikely to Be) the Last Word on Interviewing for a JavaScript Job - <AUTHOR> http://raganwald.com/2015/02/23/the-last-word-on-interviewing.html?repost

<comment><AUTHOR> Resubmission as the last submission tripped the vote ring detector. Don't link this one on social media people!</comment>


Ask HN: Is Hacker News no longer a great place to "Show HN"? - <AUTHOR>

Used to be that HN felt like a great place to show what you'd done with a "Show HN" post.
A while back they changed it, moving "Show HN" posts to https://news.ycombinator.com/show and moving new "Show HN" posts two steps away so you have to go to https://news.ycombinator.com/show then to https://news.ycombinator.com/shownew if you want to see them.
Your post has to go through some sort of judgment even to get to https://news.ycombinator.com/show, let alone onto the front page.
This is entirely subjective but it just feels like the whole "Show HN" thing has sort of lost its magic.
Maybe entrepreneurs and developers have moved their "show and tell" to ProductHunt and Reddit. <comment><USER2> I think it's the other way around. The "Show HN" are treated as the usual post, they appear in the \newest page and with enough votes they appear in the front page. They are not hidden.

The \show and \shownew pages are only there to promote the "Show HN" post, so if one of them don't get enough votes to reach the front page and falls from the \newest pages it's easier to find it.

If I have to complain, I think that previously the "Show HN" was like a secret code, and only the true user used it. Now there are a lot of false "Show HN" posts that don't follow the guidelines and hide the true "Show HN" posts.

<comment><USER3> > If I have to complain, I think that previously the "Show HN" was like a > secret code, and only the true user used it. Now there are a lot of false > "Show HN" posts that don't follow the guidelines and hide the true "Show HN" > posts.

As a lurker, this is what I have noticed. I have become less and less interested in anything of this sort.

<comment><USER4> We've noticed it too, and I'm not sure what to do about it. We take "Show HN" out of the titles when we see posts using it inappropriately (like for email signups or blog posts). But there are too many submissions for us to scrutinize them all.

Any suggestions?

<comment><USER5> > Any suggestions?

Paste this into the console on [https://news.ycombinator.com/submit](https://news.ycombinator.com/submit) and try submitting a Show HN. Some code is odd in order to make it browser- pasteable. Obviously rules can be changed to what you think are most important.

      var title=document.querySelector('[name="title"]'),submit=document.querySelector('[type="submit"]'),alreadyShow=!1;window.accept=function(){var e=document.querySelectorAll(".show-rule:checked").length;3!==e?(submit.disabled=!0,submit.style.opacity=.5):(submit.disabled=!1,submit.style.opacity=1)},title.addEventListener("input",function(e){if("show hn"!==e.target.value.substr(0,7).toLowerCase()){submit.disabled=!1,alreadyShow=!1;var t=document.querySelector(".show-guidelines");return void(t&&t.parentNode.removeChild(t))}if(!alreadyShow){alreadyShow=!0;var o=document.createElement("div");o.className="show-guidelines",o.style.height="80px",o.innerHTML='
 Please ensure your post follows the Show HN Guidelines. In short:
 <input class="show-rule" type="checkbox" onclick="window.accept()"> I made this new thing.
 <input class="show-rule" type="checkbox" onclick="window.accept()"> People can play with it.
 <input class="show-rule" type="checkbox" onclick="window.accept()"> I\'m happy to receive feedback.
 ';var i=document.querySelector("form tbody tr:nth-of-type(7)");i.parentNode.insertBefore(o,i),accept()}},!1);

<comment><USER5> Slight revision, forgot to reset the submit button's opacity after canceling the Show HN prefix:

      var title=document.querySelector('[name="title"]'),submit=document.querySelector('[type="submit"]'),alreadyShow=!1;window.accept=function(){var e=document.querySelectorAll(".show-rule:checked").length;3!==e?(submit.disabled=!0,submit.style.opacity=.5):(submit.disabled=!1,submit.style.opacity=1)},title.addEventListener("input",function(e){if("show hn"!==e.target.value.substr(0,7).toLowerCase()){submit.disabled=!1,submit.style.opacity=1,alreadyShow=!1;var t=document.querySelector(".show-guidelines");return void(t&&t.parentNode.removeChild(t))}if(!alreadyShow){alreadyShow=!0;var o=document.createElement("div");o.className="show-guidelines",o.style.height="80px",o.innerHTML='
 Please ensure your post follows the Show HN Guidelines. In short:
 <input class="show-rule" type="checkbox" onclick="window.accept()"> I made this new thing.
 <input class="show-rule" type="checkbox" onclick="window.accept()"> People can play with it.
 <input class="show-rule" type="checkbox" onclick="window.accept()"> I\'m happy to receive feedback.
 ';var i=document.querySelector("form tbody tr:nth-of-type(7)");i.parentNode.insertBefore(o,i),accept()}},!1);

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I semi-recently posted a Show HN that attracted very little attention, received no upvotes or comments, and yet I don't think the system is broken.

The volume of Show HN's is just so high now, thus "standing out" is more difficult. The shownew page has tons of projects and one in every handful receives interest. It seems to be that the audience is there, but they have naturally become more selective.

Of course there remains a huge timing and luck element. Are the people in your demographic browsing shownew at the time you post? Are they even on HN? These things are out of your control.

<comment><USER7> Have you found that there is a specific time/day that is better than others? Have you found that products that have a specific landing page for HackerNews people they convert better?

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Nothing changed about how Show HNs are ranked on the main page. All we did was add two new pages so if you want to you can see more of them.

</comment><comment><USER8> I've definitely noticed a dropoff in my interest in Show HN. I used to look forward to seeing Show HNs on the front page, and even posted one that was moderately successful, but now it seems like very few posts ever make it.

Meanwhile, going to Show HN directly feels very cumbersome to me. I can't explain it, maybe due to all the techy nomenclature mashed into one page, it's just very off-putting.

On the other hand, Ask HN has been my favorite source of HN content lately by far.

</comment><comment><USER9> 𝐒𝐡𝐨𝐰 some comments, 𝐇𝐍.</comment>


For 21 Years, No-One in Britain Knew How Long an Inch Was - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mmh819Lfgfs <comment><AUTHOR> Tom is not pleased with himself for the scaffolding in the background, but I find it to be a delightful bit of flavor that accents the history.</comment>


Ask HN: What technology/products do you use for home automation? - <AUTHOR> I am very new to home automation and would like to implement the home automation for controlling: Lighting (Indoor/Outdoor), Home Security & Thermostat
Finding a lot of material related to home automation on the internet and I am not sure which one to use: Home automation protocols : Z-Wave, ZigBee, Insteon ; Home Automation Hubs: SmartThings, Wink, Vera
Also very interested to know if someone has worked on open hardware for home automation using Raspberry Pi/Arduino. Are there any good websites/blogs to learn more about all this? <comment><USER2> I have z-wave door locks (Schlage), a ton of zigbee light bulbs (GE and Cree), two wifi garage door openers (Chamberlain), the Nest thermostat and the Nest Protect CO/smoke detector. I used to have some sensors and other security stuff, but it was unreliable compared to a hardwired system, and wasn't worth the effort for me to build my own security system. I sold them off on Amazon Marketplace.

I used to use a Vera hub. It has an ugly, difficult to use UI but exposes an API, and doesn't require going through the internet, which is nice. Once I got tired of tinkering and building my own dashboards (e.g. [http://www.dangrossman.info/wp- content/uploads/home2-1024x51...](http://www.dangrossman.info/wp- content/uploads/home2-1024x517.png)), I just bought a Wink which ties together all of the wifi/zigbee/zwave products in a very nice mobile app that everyone in my home is happy to use. Sold the Vera.

I have a cheap Android tablet mounted on a wall that has it open. My Amazon Echo also connects to Wink, so lights and switches can be voice controlled. IFTTT also has Wink channels.

</comment><comment><USER3> I have a Raspi and have been researching how to control my sprinklers with it. The old sprinkler control box is flaky, failing, and inflexible, so I'd like to replace it, and it seems like a good excuse for a Raspi project. I have 13 lines, each controlled by a 24 VAC solenoid. The Raspi GPIO pins put out 3.3 VDC. So I need to convert 13 GPIO signals from 3.3 VDC to 24 VAC. If it were one line I'd buy a relay and be done, but I don't want to buy 13 relays. I _think_ a couple of these will do the trick:

[http://www.ti.com/product/uln2003a](http://www.ti.com/product/uln2003a)

[http://www.ti.com/lit/ds/symlink/uln2003a.pdf](http://www.ti.com/lit/ds/symlink/uln2003a.pdf)

But I'm pretty fuzzy on electronics stuff.

If anyone wants to confirm that I'm on the right track that would be nice. :-)

</comment><comment><USER4> If you're looking to program this stuff yourself, node-red (nodered.org) is a good place to start. You can run it on raspberry pi or beaglebone, in addition to any desktop platform. Its a browser based programming environment that allows you to interface pretty much anything to anything. There are all sorts of built in nodes for all of the big names in IoT, like Hue, Wemo, Insteon, etc. There's also a ton of networking protocols built in. Additionally, you can access the shell, which means you can have it run any program/script/whatever you have local to your machine.

The end result is that it's every simple to do stuff like make make GPIO changes trigger SMS/email/Push/HTTP etc, as well as the inverse, have network traffic change the state of GPIO.

Best of all, its all javascript, so it should be very easy for most HNers to get started.

</comment><comment><USER5> I made a self-watering plant container a couple of years ago: a moisture sensor senses the moisture level in the soil. When it gets below the treshold it sends a signal to a small pump, which extracts the water from a little container in the pot. I had plans to make a water level sensor so that I would get a SMS when it was time to fill the container, but I never got around it. Arduinos rule, BTW!

<comment><USER6> Hook it up to a water line and you never need to worry about refilling your container.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I wrote a post on wirelessly controlling power outlets. This works great for lamps. [http://timleland.com/wireless-power- outlets/](http://timleland.com/wireless-power-outlets/)

<comment><USER8> That's a nice and easy setup. Is there a similar product for wall switches/plates?

<comment><USER9> I recently came across [https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/dobots/crownstone](https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/dobots/crownstone). Looks very good to me, but will not be on the market for a year, and the marketing may not 100% reflect reality.

I also haven't found how much power such a switch uses. It shouldn't be much, but for such devices, I think it should be tiny, way below 1W, and that is kind of hard to achieve (the electronics isn't the problem, but doing AC to DC conversion and transformed nog down may)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> My wife does most of it for me...</comment>


Show HN: Image Jar – mobile first, fast image hosting - <AUTHOR> http://imgjar.com

<comment><AUTHOR> I made this as a spinoff form DropJar ([http://dropjar.com](http://dropjar.com)) to allow users to easily share galleries of photos, What's different from current image hosting sites ?

imgjar gives a near native experience on mobiles and touch pads as it automatically downloads the photos at the resolution which is compatible with the device used and it allows touch and swipe user controls. It also replicates the user photos to 3 different servers at least (more usually) and works on blazing fast SSD servers. Technologies used on the backend , Nodejs, Aerospike, redis, swift storage, graphicsmagick.</comment>


Environmentally friendly oleophobic coating for your clothes - <AUTHOR> http://www.tribonet.org/environmentally-friendly-oleophobic-coating-for-your-clothes/ <comment><USER2> OK, it's basically plastic. I'd like to ask these chemists what happens to it at the end of the life cycle. Does it end up in the oceanic gyres with all the soda bottles and supermarket bags? Does it degrade to genuinely harmless components fairly quickly?

<comment><USER3> Also during washing/drying usually fibers are set free into the environment

<comment><USER4> If you had oleophobic and hydrophobic coatings you probably wouldn't need to send it through the wash. At least you wouldn't need to wash it the same way.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Uh, this looks like shitty science reporting: "That resistance, however, comes at a price. The coating that makes textiles oil resistant is fluorine-based and breaks down into chlorofluorocarbon gas, a greenhouse gas harmful to the environment."

Maybe if you burn it. Fluoro-polymers are pretty stable.

<comment><USER6> Guess what burns easily? Most textiles. Maybe that's what they were hinting at?

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Cool!!!</comment>


No Windows. One Exit. Free Drinks: Casino-Driven Design for Crowdsourcing - <AUTHOR> http://www.propublica.org/nerds/item/casino-driven-design

<comment><USER2> Certainly keeping users focused and not adding junk to a process or a design or an app increases conversions/actions. There is a fine line I suppose where you force users down such a rabbit hole that you create/enforce bad behavior or allow for unethical design.</comment>


Hackers Make a Fake Hand to Beat Vein Authentication - <AUTHOR> https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/59v8dk/hackers-fake-hand-vein-authentication-biometrics-chaos-communication-congress <comment><USER2> Why are we still trying to do biometric security?

\- Biometrics are public, unlike passwords. Biometric data can usually be gathered from a person, often discreetly, by cameras or whatever other sensors are used for authentication, and replayed with sufficient effort to fool the same sensors.

\- Biometrics are not revokable, unlike passwords. If you give your biometric data to someone and they mishandle it, it's compromised for life.

\- Biometrics cannot be uniquified for different authenticators, which is like using the same password for every service-- terribly insecure.

\- Biometrics pose secondary privacy concerns, because they inherently destroy anonymity.

Why is this still a thing?

<comment><USER3> Because in most people's threat models, it's still a win.

Biometrics do three things:

\- It greatly reduces the friction of "showing" who you are.

\- It moves the mechanism into an "off-main-CPU" chip, while the main CPU just sees limited APIs, and strong crypto which _can_ be rekeyed. You can't rekey your bio-signature, but this architecture is better in a number of ways.

\- It creates a non-digital interaction as part of the auth flow.

I personally subscribe to somewhere between "not a wrench" and "not Mossad" security: most things I'll tell anyone who will hit me with a $20 wrench, and I'm definitely not in the business of trying to stop Mossad reading my papers.

From that perspective, my security doesn't need to be better than biometric on almost anything, because that's good enough to make a wrench (or a warrant) a cheaper option — so I don't care there are exotic attacks like copying my vein pattern, printing a fake hand, and touching things.

It also stops my main concern from the government: warrantless mass- surveillance. There's a scaling limit on using fake vein prints to break into things. And the non-digital step forces an actual interaction.

Frequent, low-friction requests also allows for minimizing credential caching and for non-digital requests for confirmation before proceeding. This helps a lot against malware and escalation attacks.

Note: every power cycle and few days, as well as "major" actions, I have to use an actual password — I mind this less precisely because I don't have to use it as often. So the biometrics are also only a low credential auth when the device is already authenticated through a better mechanism. Is this perfect? No. But again, it's a numbers game.

So in most people's usage, biometrics are a huge solution to a tricky set of trade offs, while even in the really secure setting that you're worried about fake hands, it remains a useful part of multi-factor because fake hands are complicated to make and deploy.

<comment><USER4> > It creates a non-digital interaction as part of the auth flow.

Well, that's not correct. You may have an analogical sensor somewhere to collect the data, but all the data, communication and storage is still digital. You can always bypass the data collection.

<comment><USER3> You can't digitally do so, no.

You would have to physically interact with the device to change how the circuit operated, or else the only way for the CPU to access the cryptographic data is by allowing a different specialized circuit to unlock a value based on analog input.

You can't meaningfully "bypass" that digitally, unless you already know the secret. So if the auth flow depends on that secret, it can't bypass the analog sensor feeding in the values to unlock it.

The bypasses we see are where you can, eg, attach a debug cable to feed in values without going through the sensor (which is a non-digital interaction). Or bugs in correctly implementing the logic, eg, the crypto chip accidentally exposes information.

It's much the same protection a yubikey left in the side of your laptop provides: someone physically at the device pushed a button, with a cryptographic witness that's hard to fake.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> While biometric authentication is overall less secure and can be circumvented, I still think there are situations where it's preferable to the alternatives, in particular on smartphones:

All Android versions I used don't support setting an encryption passphrase that's separate from the unlock pin/password. As a result one has to choose between a very long unlock password one has to enter all the time or a convenient short one making encryption basically useless. Given this trade- off, I think using a proper, long passphrase for encryption with a fingerprint for normal unlocks is preferable to the alternatives. It's particularly irritating that this restriction is not at all technical; the only justifications I've read were along the lines of "it might confuse users".

Less importantly, for my phone, a shoulder-surfing attack seems much more likely to me than someone specifically copying my fingerprint.

<comment><USER6> On the flip side, anyone who obtains the physical device likely has access to the key (your fingerprints are all over it)

<comment><USER5> That's true, though at this point against a sophisticated attacker, it might be game over anyway, since they could read out the encryption key from RAM directly if it's still turned on. If the device is off, the fingerprints won't help and the data is protected by the long passphrase.

Of course all this assumes a particular attacker model and for a lazy attacker that doesn't know how to use the fingerprints to fool the sensor, everything is fine.

Another downside is being possibly forced to unlock my phone at airports, since as far as I'm aware, passwords are protected by the fifth amendment whereas fingerprints are not. In this case it might be smarter to turn off one's phone entirely when crossing borders into countries where one can be compelled in this way. This doesn't even go into all the other kinds of pressure they might apply to make me unlock my phone anyway though, so there's not much protection here aside from leaving my good phone at home.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> > "Biometrics is always an arm race," Krissler said.

No kidding. They might have to fake an entire arm soon!

</comment><comment><USER8> My thinking has always been that unsupervised biometrics are just a weird form of "something you know." Only when you put a human there to make sure there is no funny business during data entry doors it become "something you are."

</comment><comment><USER9> Actual talk for anyone interested:

[https://media.ccc.de/v/35c3-9545-venenerkennung_hacken](https://media.ccc.de/v/35c3-9545-venenerkennung_hacken)

Talk is in german, but if you click the cog on the bottom right there's an english translation.

</comment><comment><USER10> Once again proving that biometric authentication is not a replacement for public/private key cryptography. Biometrics are in fact worse than just passwords, because you can't change the authenticating credential.

</comment><comment><USER11> Really cool demonstration but I don't think it should really surprise anyone. You couldn't really fool a human checking fingerprints because a human has the ability to validate that they're checking the finger of an actual human.

So forget all the fancy ways of encoding our biology into unique patterns. Unless the system can detect that it's reading the arm of an actual human being we're always going to be vulnerable to this kind of attack.

<comment><USER12> How do you address identity theft when biometrics becomes the norm? Thus far you can always say your ID credentials were stolen/duplicated.

But in future, good luck trying to convince law enforcement that your fingerprints, your iris patterns, your physiognomy and your DNA were stolen too.

<comment><USER13> That's the major appeal of biometrics, the user is considered an attacker, either by knowingly transmitting his credentials or getting dupped into it.

Biometrics restore the illusion of control to the designer, they now have the luxury of no longer caring about user behaviour, it is just a body moving through the system. Except biometrics doesn't work.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I believe only in behavioural "biometrics" which combines knowledge and inference together with zero knowledge proof to locally authenticate users on their personal and probably secure devices. Any other attempts in using biometrics are futile.

</comment><comment><USER15> Something something, Goodhart's Law.

</comment><comment><USER16> 2500 pics required for now.

</comment><comment><USER17> Is there a fake/robotic hand I can buy to swipe right on every profile on Tinder and okCupid?

This way I dont do any work nor know those i swiped right on didnt swipe back. I only learn of all those who swiped right then I filter through and start conversations.

<comment><USER18> I think Tinder has some sort of algorithm in place to punish you for swiping right on everyone. Probably not a good idea if you want to get matches

<comment><USER19> I think it's based on elo scores.

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elo_rating_system](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elo_rating_system)</comment></comment></comment>


Ten CSS One-Liners to Replace Native Apps - <AUTHOR> http://www.reddit.com/r/webdev/comments/2bhw50/ten_css_oneliners_to_replace_native_apps/

<comment><USER2> Seriously? You submitted your reddit submission of the article?</comment>


The First Draft of Anything Is Shit - <AUTHOR> http://www.craigsefton.com/programming/fictional-programming-perfection/ <comment><USER2> Actually, the first draft is food, then it gets digested.</comment>


Meet the man who walks people for a living (2016) - <AUTHOR> https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/sep/14/los-angeles-people-walker-chuck-mccarthy <comment><USER2> I once paid a guy to walk around the city with me to teach me Spanish. We would meet for a coffee and from that moment the conversation was entirely in Spanish, and he would grade the complexity of the lesson according to my ability. As we walked around I could point at things and ask what they were and he would explain. I remembered much better than in class because I had associated the words with the walk.</comment>


Question about Corona Virus Mutations - <AUTHOR> If the virus mutates into something more deadly, would it be better to get an earlier version of the virus so that antibodies might protect against deadlier version? <comment><USER2> No. You would still get infected from the other strain</comment>


Show HN: Humaans – the first HR app that won't make you tear your hair out - <AUTHOR> https://humaans.io/ <comment><AUTHOR> OP here. Humaans is a smart employee database, aka an "HR app". We're building it with the goal of making it a joy to use for both the People Ops teams and all of the employees within a company. HR tools from our experience are generally lacking the polish we expect from many modern tools we use day to day.

We're focusing on making it beautiful, as straightforward and as efficient as possible, really fast, remote and distributed team friendly and useful in all sorts of small ways. For example, you can see the local time of your remote colleagues in the directory or their profile. Hovering over your time off balance shows you the breakdown of how it's calculated - days accrued, booked upcoming days, booked past days, carry over - so you know exactly what's going on. The "filter by anything" search lets you find an individual or people from some team or city quickly, and so on.

It's built using Node.js/Postgres and React.js as the key tech. The API and UI are fully realtime since the backend is powered by Feathers.js ([https://feathersjs.com/](https://feathersjs.com/)).

Feel free to try it out – it takes only 2 minutes to sign up. Feedback is welcome. Also interested in what you'd like to see in a tool like this. The HR space is quite broad with a lot of interesting tools popping up and we're still exploring the ways we could have the most impact to help businesses be more efficient.

</comment><comment><USER2> I'm not an HR person but it looks pretty look. I wonder why you came across that pricing model?

It does seem complicated, unless that's something you've researched? Have you tested with the usual "small/medium/large" company offering?

<comment> giovanni-lup The idea is to have a flat product approach to keep things simple. No up-sell. No hidden costs. All companies (S/M/L) get all benefits and features. So the pricing strategy is supposed to reflect that.

I assume your points around "complicated" is related to the "priced per 25" instead of a "per seat model". The reason is because this is not a product with high frequency of use (like Slack), so we believe that based on the type of capabilities that we offer, but pricing "per 25" we can keep the cost lower therefor more attractive for businesses.

We have re-evaluate this in the future thought.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> wow! This product is a game changer!</comment>


Ask HN: What are some good resources to learn about Crypto/Altcoins? - <AUTHOR> How do you develop your knowledge or keep your self upto date on Cryptos/Altcoins? Please suggest books/blogs/websites/person to follow. <comment><USER2> I recommend the Princeton course on Bitcoin and Cryptocurrency Technologies, available free on Coursera:

[https://www.coursera.org/learn/cryptocurrency](https://www.coursera.org/learn/cryptocurrency)

I took this last year and found it very informative

<comment><USER3> The Princeton bitcoin textbook is also excellent (see [https://citp.princeton.edu/the-princeton-bitcoin-textbook- is...](https://citp.princeton.edu/the-princeton-bitcoin-textbook-is-now- freely-available/) \- it is easy to find PDFs online)

<comment><USER4> I confirm, the course on Coursera is excellent!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Realistically, almost all of the real-time discussion happens on Reddit, Twitter, and in various private chat groups (Telegram, etc). But you have to be savvy about sorting the shilling and nonsense from actual useful information.

<comment><USER6> If you are interested in looking at what reddit is saying about any coins you are researching you can try [http://bitreddit.com](http://bitreddit.com). Disclosure: this is a side project I am working on to learn react.

<comment><USER7> That is a nice website. Congrats on shipping it!

<comment><USER6> Thanks for trying! It's not quite finished yet, but when it is I'll do a Show HN.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> From an investment or technical perspective? I'll assume investment.

I do it the hard way as the summaries often leave out a lot or bias facts. Especially mass media.

Start with the coin official site. If you like the pitch, skim the white paper. Abstract and conclusion tells you a lot.

You can learn a surprising amount from just the tone of the founders.

Next, check out the community. Usually Reddit or Slack. Read both sides, e.g. for ETH and ETC. As a general rule, don't invest in something until you know its downsides. If there are no downsides, then you don't understand enough about it.

</comment><comment><USER9> Stanford CS always has great resources.

[https://crypto.stanford.edu/cs251/](https://crypto.stanford.edu/cs251/)

</comment><comment><USER10> If you're starting from scratch, I'd recommend this Khan academy course (it's short and sweet): [https://www.khanacademy.org/economics-finance-domain/core- fi...](https://www.khanacademy.org/economics-finance-domain/core- finance/money-and-banking/bitcoin/v/bitcoin-what-is-it)

There's a lot more advanced stuff out there (as you can see in the other comments) that I would touch on once I have a rough overview.

A lot changes in the crypto world month-to-month, and so forums like Reddit and Twitter are usually the best to stay up to date. Unfortunately, there's a lot of useless chunder on these forums you'll have to learn to filter to get access to the quality stuff.

Personally, I avoid the fanboys/girls and like following people who are more critical of the space. Because of this, I've discontinued following r/Bitcoin on Reddit (I'm sure there're smart people out there—there was just too much I didn't agree with and decided to leave).

Some of my favorites today are:

\- patio11 on Twitter

\- prestonbyrne.com website and Twitter

\- buttcoin on Twitter

\- Tim Swanson (ofnumbers on Twitter)

\- Bitfinexd on Twitter

\- [http://thereformedbroker.com/2017/11/27/it-just-got- real/](http://thereformedbroker.com/2017/11/27/it-just-got-real/)

I know this is more of a crypto pessimist crowd but I tend to agree with their views way more than the rest of the herd. I think they're a lot more rational and highlight some great things to look out for.

I would encourage you to fish for some of the rational optimists as well. If anyone has recommendations, I'm all ears!

<comment><USER11> I would recommend Naval Ravikant (@naval) and Nick Svabo (@NickSvabo4) as the smartest people I know who are heavily engaged in cryptocurrency professionally.

<comment><USER10> Correction: Nick Szabo (@NickSzabo4)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> From a couple of months ago

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15762485](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15762485)

There is a lot of information on Reddit about what is new, but it lacks the same quality filters that HN has so I have not really enjoyed it.

[https://www.reddit.com/r/CryptoCurrency/](https://www.reddit.com/r/CryptoCurrency/) is a place to start

</comment><comment><USER13> [http://www.Bitcointalk.org](http://www.Bitcointalk.org) for the huff & puff + [http://www.coinmarketcap.com](http://www.coinmarketcap.com) for the money talk + [http://www.icodrops.com](http://www.icodrops.com) for entering at the penny stage

</comment><comment><USER14> If you are just getting started, you might wanna check out this page:

[http://cryptocurrencyfacts.com/](http://cryptocurrencyfacts.com/)

I think it is good for an initial overview

</comment><comment><USER15> [https://lopp.net/bitcoin.html](https://lopp.net/bitcoin.html)

Great resource that covers a array of topics on a spectrum of levels for different audiences.

</comment><comment><USER16> The book mastering Bitcoin is available for free on github, it is really well made. I also secong the Princeton course (available on YouTube).

</comment><comment><USER17> [http://cryptopanic.com](http://cryptopanic.com)</comment>


Stleem: Matz' Streem concept implemented in Common Lisp - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/y2q-actionman/stleem

<comment><USER2> This seems conceptually similar to the threading macro "->>" in Clojure, as well as the pipe operator "|>" in elixir.

        (defn divisible? [x y]
          (zero? (rem x y)))

        (defn fizzbuzz [n]
          (cond (divisible? n 15) "Fizzbuzz"
                (divisible? n 3)  "Fizz"
                (divisible? n 5)  "Buzz"
                :else n))

        (->> (range 100)
             (map fizzbuzz)
             (apply println))

<comment><USER3> Here's a direct implementation of the Clojure -> and ->> macros in CL: [https://github.com/nightfly19/cl- arrows/blob/master/arrows.l...](https://github.com/nightfly19/cl- arrows/blob/master/arrows.lisp)

'fogus also points out that the Dylan _compose_ function is similar, and that 'pg provides an implementation of that in his book _ANSI Common Lisp_ : [http://blog.fogus.me/2009/09/04/understanding-the-clojure- ma...](http://blog.fogus.me/2009/09/04/understanding-the-clojure-macro/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> And the whole thing is about 340 lines of code ... Lisp power again.

<comment><USER5> There's not much power here, Streem doesn't even have a semantics yet so I don't know what this repository is implementing. They just picked something easy to write and slapped the Streem label on it and oh yeah, Lisp!!

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Can anyone with any familiarity with japanese expand upon this beyond the title? google translate only takes you so far :)

<comment><USER7> For starters, if you didn't notice, Stleem is pronounced the same as Streem in Japanese, but keeps the l from lisp. Punny.

informal translation<comment>

Matz created this thing... It inspired mattn to create this thing in go. And little 'ol me thought "I want to try this in lisp" so here it is.

\----boring stuff----

Stleem is a thing where you stick one thing in and get one thing out.

In order to create the result, stleem uses something like a filter (see how fizzbuzz filters to print the result)

If (there's no arg/the arg is ignored??) it has generator-like behavior.

When the pipeline is closed, if there's no result, nil is returned.

Otherwise the start up parameter :end-symbol is modified.

Keep in mind that this is only a sample. How to handle multiple args and discarding things, etc, etc, there's a lot of problems.

<comment>end

I don't know lisp and I used rikaichan a lot but I'm pretty sure I got it mostly right.

<comment><USER8> Just to make it clear, the author discloses that beyond the sample it doesn't work, and there's lots of problems he doesn't tackle.

Also, from the tone of it, one should have no expectation of this going further. It seems mostly aimed to be a test of how it would look like in lisp and nothing more.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Panic at EWR after racial profiling - <AUTHOR> https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/amberjamieson/alaska-airlines-newark-chaos <comment><USER2> I would love if the title said "Newark Airport" instead of EWR which I had no idea what it meant.

</comment><comment><USER3> Pretty strange. Why would she be racially profiling Asians as terrorist suspects? Have we had a rash of Chinese guys blowing up planes that I somehow missed?

<comment><USER4> If the person involved is suffering from mental illness, trying to ascribe any kind of rational (or even an irrational, but directional, motive like racism) seems folly. Is there any evidence to show this persons actions were based upon racial profiling and not some form of temporary insanity? IANAP but it seems as likely as not to me that the employee bumping into the person on line was the triggering event.

<comment><USER5> Why would mental illness, temporary or any other temporality, be reason to eliminate any value in categorizing the specifics of the behavior as racist?

If not all racism, maybe some racism could be a symptom of mental illness? [1]

[1] [https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1071634/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1071634/)

<comment><USER4> I never claimed it eliminated any value, but to answer your question more directly, it reduces the value for the same reason it reduces the value of _any_ action taken by an clinically insane person in terms of moral weight vs one who is sane: the insane person is presumed to have lost the ability to reason and act rationally due to factors outside of their free will.

Of course, more to the point, is the fact that based on the article the extent of the evidence that this was racial profiling is that the victim speculated it was such, and the two victims were of similar ethnic origin. That, combined with the fact that it sounds like there is evidence supporting the idea the person may have been having a mental episode, should call into question the journalistic integrity of the author who in the title claims as fact that racism was the cause of the employee's behavior.

At the very least, it seems like there is _some_ chance that this person had some kind of lapse in sanity, and this article now labels that person as being a racist -- if that person's name were included in the article, they'd likely now be the target of an internet mob and persona non grata. Insofar as the allegations about their mental illness are true and have been identified as the cause (unknown) I commend Alaska Airlines for protecting the person's identity.

<comment><USER5> I believe I mistook the use of the word folly in a context that was not relevant.

I would not feel qualified to say for whom it might be of value, but my thinking was perhaps for the individual having their behavior being categorized, or a clinician assisting them. Not super relevant here.

We're talking about the journalist, and perhaps ourselves, and in that light folly makes a lot more sense than it did in how I had initially misinterpreted.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This is as much racial profiling as it would be if the airline employee accused them of being bad at math because they were Asian.

</comment><comment><USER7> > But once police arrived within a minute and started scanning the crowd, Xue > said he felt compelled to come forward and identify himself. "I'm like, So, > 90% chance I have something to do with this and it's escalated way too > fast," said Xue.

This story makes no sense. Why the hell would he volunteer to the police he was involved? Who "racially profiles" Chinese people at an airport?

<comment><USER8> > Who "racially profiles" Chinese people at an airport?

Alaska Airlines employees, apparently.</comment></comment>


How a "this" became "that" - <AUTHOR> https://hn.algolia.com/?query=%22how%20a%22%20became&sort=byDate&prefix=false&dateRange=all&type=story <comment><USER2> Besides the fascinating number of correlations, I've noticed people tend to double-submit things. I'm curious whether this is accidental or intentional (eg, when two posts are a day apart).

</comment><comment><USER3> This seems to be a link to a search for the title text. Is that what's intended?

<comment><USER2> Algolia is a search engine product; [https://hn.algolia.com/](https://hn.algolia.com/) is a "side-service" that indexes the HN firehose API. (It works reasonably well (readonly) as a modernized, alternative HN UI, actually.)

This is indeed a link to a search query on the site; it lists all the times "how <....> became <....>".</comment></comment>


Knowing What Feature to Build Next - <AUTHOR> http://blog.brianlovin.com/knowing-what-to-build-next

<comment><USER2> We're currently using this method on [http://www.marvelapp.com](http://www.marvelapp.com) to find out users who are willing to upgrade to Pro.

As we're still in the process of building Pro accounts, we wanted to get users who would most likely sign-up first.

We placed a 'notify me' button in the UI, working really well. After around 3 weeks we've over 100 users signup.

I was inspired by Buffer's MVP post a while back, great idea.</comment>


Scientists Have Been Underestimating the Pace of Climate Change - <AUTHOR> https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/scientists-have-been-underestimating-the-pace-of-climate-change/ <comment><USER2> It's long been known that the IPCC reports tend to be too conservative.

Nevertheless politicians take the numbers for the least dramatic predictions and turn them into promises that they then don't keep.

I guess that it won't be long before some country or other embarks on a unilateral geoengineering experiment. Perhaps when river basins in India start reaching lethal wet-bulb temperatures regularly. Let's just hope that it won't make things worse.

<comment><USER3> If they were too conservative why did they need to revise down their forecasts?

[https://wattsupwiththat.com/2014/01/01/ipcc-silently- slashes...](https://wattsupwiththat.com/2014/01/01/ipcc-silently-slashes-its- global-warming-predictions-in-the-ar5-final-draft/)

<comment><USER4> Just based on the url. (After having spent years reading it, I'm not touching Wattsupwiththat anymore)

"Silently slashes": So silently that the information is easily available everywhere and is published publicly.

"AR5 Final draft": Yes, it's shocking that drafts change. It's almost like the purpose of drafts is for them to be revised multiple times before they are published.

And finally, it's almost a 100% that the "slashing" happened to get sign offs from political leaders of governments, without which they wouldn't be able to publish the reports. If anything, this only illustrates exactly why the IPCC reports are far too conservative.

<comment><USER5> > "Silently slashes": So silently that the information is easily available > everywhere and is published publicly.

On this particular point; organisations do often 'silently' release to the public. For example, Westminster-styled governments are notorious for important things happening on Friday when the press is winding down or legislation never appearing in the talking points.

It is possible to silently do something in the public sphere. Editing draft predictions does sound quite mundane though, they probably weren't trying to slip that under the radar.

<comment><USER6> "This particular point" is not that it _could_ not be done silently, but that is _was_ not done silently.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> No one wants to pay the cost of tackling this problem.

Especially not the for-profit corporations that are responsible for some of the worst pollution in the world.

Ironically, they own the biggest capital and resources to be able to tackle the problem that they are creating.

<comment><USER8> Why? Are there reasons to believe that the shareholders/board members of these companies would not be negatively affected by climate change? Or are they ignorant?

<comment><USER9> The vast majority of people, at best, think climate channge is something that'll be a problem for their grandchildren or great grandchildren. Many still believe it is a made up thing the news/politicians created.

Many people don't care about long-term stuff either. Look at how many people have no qualms throwing trash out their car window. Look at how many people have no qualms about taking vacations flying all over the place racking up tons of CO2 personally.

Even YC created [http://carbon.ycombinator.com](http://carbon.ycombinator.com) as they acknowledge it's an issue (to some extent anyway) yet they still fly hundreds of people out to the Bay Area for in-person interviews each year to select founders for funding, which could instead be done via video chat and used kilograms of CO2 at worst instead of many tons (on average, a plane produces a little over 53 pounds of CO2 per mile. This can be somewhat higher or lower depending upon the type of aviation fuel).

And then take people that truly realize how much of a problem is like I do.

\- I have to go to work, it is not practical for me to walk to work so I have to drive a car to work.

\- It is not practical for me to not use electricity, living in an apartment I have to use it to cook, to dry my clothes even if I chose to wash them by hand, to run the air conditioning a good chunk of the year to keep the humidity down to prevent mold, to run the heat in the winter because it gets down to -12F/-24C a few days of the year

\- I can't walk around naked and both natural fibers and synthetic fibers rely heavily on oil to manufacture

\- I can't go buy food from my neighbor or grow my own in a garden, so my food is trucked across the country or even shipped from halfway around the world

So people like me go "nothing I do on a personal level is going to make a damn bit of difference, why bother" and you sit there watching Netflix knowing that every gigabyte you stream is probably another 100-300 grams of CO2 into the atmosphere.

And you sit there depressed - knowing you are breathing in microplastics, knowing you are eating and drinking microplastics, knowing those microplastics and other air pollutants are likely increasing your risk of cancer considerably, knowing that 30 something cities with populations over 1 million people have run out of clean water (or water entirely) including India's 6th largest city by population, knowing that it's probably unwise to have children because sooner or later in their life the world is going to become a largely shitty and miserable place when food/water wars start, knowing that global insect biomass has considerably reduced in your short 34 years on earth, knowing because you are barely in the lower middle class you're probably going to be one of the ones to starve at some point because you'll lose your job and have a hard time finding another and a crop failure or three will cause food prices to go up 200%, 300%, 1000% or more in your lifetime and you'll get to experience what life is like for people in North Korea when you're eating whatever you can get your hands on.

The shareholders, the C-level employees, don't care because they aren't feeling the impacts already. They have fancy houses, fancy cars, take fancy vacations, they wear nice clothes and have more money than they need. The bulk of them have never filed bankruptcy or worried regularly how they're going to put food on the table, the majority of them have never known real struggle. They aren't concerned about climate change because they think the money will always be flowing in and they'll always have stuff.

Look at the articles over the past few years about the rich buying land in New Zealand like Peter Thiel did.

<comment><USER10> If it makes you feel better, by almost every metric the vast majority of humanity is living the best they have in all of human history. If you live in the west it's even better because we haven't had any local wars in nearly 80 years. I think a lot of people need to study history a bit more to understand how great things are now for most of the global population.

<comment><USER2> It's always best just before the party is over, right?

<comment><USER10> No?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> One of the memes on [https://reddit.com/r/collapse](https://reddit.com/r/collapse) is "faster than expected," referencing the frequent articles mentioning how climate change's effects are kicking in much sooner than expected.

<comment><USER12> I don't know how to feel about that subreddit. On one hand, they discuss the daunting reality of climate change in a way you don't see in many other corners of the internet (besides HN). On the other hand, reading it is definitely not good for one's mental health and they often don't propose any solutions, and generally the mood is a very "we lost, the game is over" attitude. That's not going to help anyone, even if we are too late to stop a large amount of warming.

<comment><USER13> I stop by that subreddit every few months and it is frustrating that the only places people seem honest with themselves about the real impact of this is also filled with fatalism. Maybe they're right.

Even so, it's still worth _trying_ to fix it, or barring that, to try to save as many billions from a horrible death as possible.

The approach taken by Dark Mountain is a little better I think - they don't focus on false hopes, but a literary response to the catastrophe (apocalypse might be a better word) on the horizon and how to deal with it on a human level.

We're all doomed, after all, by dint of our mortality (or our sun's, barring that). Moments of joy can still be had.

<comment><USER14> It's just place where you can be pessimistic by default. It's forgotten everywhere else it seems.

<comment><USER15> Yeah, it's important for pessimists and pessimistic realists to have a place to talk about these things without the ever-pervasive prescription to hopium that seems to be tacked onto the end of every.single.article.

There can be an acceptance that things are too far gone for most people to impact positively, and that many people have consigned themselves to this. IMO as long as they aren't going out into public and trying to attack environmentalists who are trying to make changes, it's a good and healthy thing for people to have a community of like-minded individuals to talk with.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Not exactly: Scientists have been giving confidence intervals and no one really paid attention to the wurst case scenario.

<comment><USER17> > the wurst case scenario

Please elaborate :)

<comment><USER18> We're cooked.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I think given the current political climate (sic), scientists tends to be overly cautious on these subjects. They know they can be berated for any not fully proven detail or tiny error. All in all I don't think this is a bad thing, forces against real changes are such that incremental actions are the norm anyway.

<comment><USER20> It's curious how the situation can be viewed like this. In my experience it's the exact opposite. Headlines in my country (Germany) are absolutely dominated by the climate doomsday scenarios. Taxpayers spent hundets of millions of euros for "greener" energy, entire industries are ruined. We even killed nuclear because it's somehow not green enough. Heck even fusion energy is too evil. Fridays for future and the green party are dictating what is allowed to be said. Dozens of German cities are literally in a climate state of emergency (no joke). The sky is falling according to everyone.

<comment><USER21> Well, the sky is very likely falling but it is falling so slowly that the older generation won't see any severe effects. In the great scheme it won't matter so much what Germany does if the rest of the world continues to burn the coal. The only direct effect that deindustrializing Germany has is it will kill the German economy _today_.

<comment><USER22> Germany is continuing to burn coal, that is why axing their nuclear was such an unforced error.

<comment><USER23> The unforced error was/is not building out solar/wind/battery storage etc.

Instead they just added a tax for every citizen to pay on electricity and KEEP promoting coal.

Also WHY don't counties/cities own any solar/wind power stations to increase independence and lower long-term cost ?

Instead they sell out to companies or rich investors instead and those get subsidized.

<comment><USER24> Having a powerwall that can feed your local core infrastructure (hospital, water treatment, schools, etc) and then solar to charge the powerwall would mean you could isolate yourself from high spots prices for electricity.

With your own local powerwall, local grid tie will charge local capacity and be ransomed by the utility.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> >"Elsewhere we have documented a pattern we label "erring on the side of least drama." By this we mean that scientists often have a tendency to avoid dramatic findings, because drama is associated with emotion, feelings, irrationality, and even femininity, qualities that have traditionally been viewed as at odds with scientific rationality. We have shown that in several domains related to climate change, scientists' estimates of various threats - CO2 emissions, Arctic Sea ice loss, Sea level rise - have tended to be low relative to actual outcomes. Scientists considered such underestimates to be "conservative" because they are conservative with respect to the question of when to sound an alarm or how loudly to sound it. (It is of course not conservative when viewed in terms of giving people adequate time to prepare.) The history recounted here is consistent with this finding: That WAIS assessments underestimated the threat of rapid ice sheet disintegration, because most of the scientists who participated were more comfortable with an estimate that they viewed as "Conservative" than with one that was not." (Discerning Experts, 2019. Michael Oppenheimer, Naomi Oreskes, Dale Jamieson, Keynyn Brysse, Jessica O'Reilly, Matthew Shindell, and Milena Wazeck)

</comment><comment><USER25> What about the idea of adding particulates to the atmosphere to block a portion of the sun's rays?

<comment><USER22> We could try to simulate a volcanic eruption, which have demonstrably cooled the planet in the past. Also I wonder with cheaper rocket flights, can we put sunlight reflectors over the arctic regions to save their ice?

<comment><USER24> A couple of strategically detonated nukes on a tradwind path should cool things down. The same super computers that predict the weather can predict exact placement and yield.

<comment><USER26> May I point you to doi 10.1002/2017JD027331 that concluded "This analysis demonstrates that while modest, statistically significant differences occur during the first few years, longer‐term impacts are unlikely, regional in scope, and limited in scale. None of the simulations produced a nuclear winter effect."?

<comment><USER24> I guess that is good and bad news. Hopefully India and Pakistan don't try and refute the findings.

Since you are now my Oracle, how large of a cold spot can we create using a space based sun shade? What would it take to keep arctic methane in the ground?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Dr. Gwynne Dyer gave a talk, "Geopolitics in a Hotter World" – Sept. 2010

> So when the Hadley Centre put these numbers out they were incorporating > (which the IPCC does not) the early impacts of positive feedbacks, as well > as just how much carbon dioxide will we put into the air by 2060. First time > that had been done, but it gives you a really frightening number…and then > they did the map. Which is again, something that's not normally done, and > the consequence is we don't have a lot of time. We're in deep trouble. And > the military know this; the military know this everywhere.

> the rule of thumb is that you lose 10% of global food production for every 1 > degree Celsius higher average global temperature.

> So food becomes the critical issue and the countries most impacted are > tropical and subtropical and this is where the geopolitics comes from.

> "people always raid before they starve."

> There's already a well established pattern: when you're in deep trouble and > you can't feed your family, head north.

> But the dirty secret is that you can only shut a border if you're willing to > kill people.

> No government that cannot feed its population survives.

> We're going to go through the point of no return (and probably a good deal > further) in terms of the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Almost > certain.

> And there is maybe a way to cheat: and that is geoengineering.

> "we've crunched the numbers and we figure we could get one degree Celsius of > cooling average worldwide just by painting all the roads and the roofs > white."

> I talked–actually, the head of the Bangladesh Institute of Strategic Studies > about this (you didn't even know that existed, did you?). Well, there is > one, it's quite serious–run by a General, bright guy. I said, "have you > heard about geoengineering?" and he smiled–seraphically–and he said, "Mmm. > Yes. Your question?"

> And I asked the question, "Do you think that this is something the > Bangladesh government might want to do a little bit, before, let's say, the > US government or the Chinese government?"

> He said, "yes it has crossed our minds."–and then he stopped talking.

...

Talk: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mc_4Z1oiXhY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mc_4Z1oiXhY)

Transcribed: [https://spaswell.wordpress.com/2016/11/18/dr-gwynne-dyer- geo...](https://spaswell.wordpress.com/2016/11/18/dr-gwynne-dyer-geopolitics- in-a-hotter-world-ubc-talk-transcribed-sept-2010/)

</comment><comment><USER28> Doesn't water cool when it changes state? Ice melting should be pulling down temps for the time in that spot? More heat would evaporate more water and thus cool more?

</comment><comment><USER29> Except methane is the cause and intentionally so as it will dissapate in less than a decade but make it appear as if the world is warming more quickly than estimated.

It's a trick and people eat this shit up hook line and ignorant sinker.

<comment><USER30> What a sad account.

<comment><USER29> What a pedestrian response.

<comment><USER31> If that response is 'pedestrian' would it be 'hipster' to join you in your self-deceptions and spews of negativity?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> What if humans collectively decided to not have any new kids anymore and maximize quality of life for the humans that already are living on planet earth?

I would love to see this thought experiment thought out in detail. What decisions would we make? Where would we invest? Would climate control still be an issue?

<comment><USER10> Humanity would die out. Doesn't seem very useful.

<comment><USER33> It would be to the other 99.9999% of species. Maybe E Coli amd Herpes beasties get the shaft.

<comment><USER34> You should watch the anime Parasyte</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Makeflow: make-inspired engine for large workflows on clusters, clouds, and grids - <AUTHOR> http://ccl.cse.nd.edu/software/makeflow/

<comment><USER2> Hmm. I'm not a huge fan of writing regular makefiles. And the problem they solve seems much simpler than what Makeflow is looking to solve.

<comment><USER3> I'm not sure on what basis you're being so dismissive.

Make is actually a pretty good system for setting up parallel computations, if you're doing it on one machine. Are parallel computations with lots of dependencies too simple of a problem? People get excited about things that are even simpler than that, like Map/Reduce, as long as you're doing them to enough data.

I'm not sure which part you're "not a fan" of -- there are some pretty awful, ugly things you can do with Makefiles, which includes basically everything about compiling C, but you don't _have_ to do awful things, and the fundamental idea of "you need this to build this" is implemented very well by Make.

Now, I've recently been converted to using Ninja, in fact by someone on HN, when I asked if there was a Make-like system that understands steps with M inputs and N outputs. It keeps the same fundamental idea while discarding a lot of Make baggage. But if this Makeflow system said "it's like Ninja for clusters" instead of "it's like Make for clusters", nobody would know what they were talking about.

<comment><USER4> Indeed. There is a lot to complain about make, but a dash of make with a sprinkling of xargs and awk can get you a decent parallel workflow. Of course one shouldn't be doing this, there is gnu parallel for that.

<comment><USER3> GNU parallel would be _one step_ in such a build, right? I tend to face problems more difficult than "run exactly the same code in N places". Perhaps I should know more about GNU parallel but it seems like it would actually be kind of hard to fit into a larger build.

This is not to say that there's a problem with GNU parallel, it just seems like it's designed for the "embarrassingly parallel" case with no dependencies between steps, whereas Make and the system under discussion are for the case where you have dependencies between steps.

I've also never found myself needing to use xargs in a Make or Ninja build, incidentally.

<comment><USER4> Correct. I was talking about general parallel workflows, not software builds in particular. In any case I would call these as hacks rather than solid solutions. Xargs us great for chunking up arguments and submitting them to a parallel set of consumers: Poor man's mapreduce if you will

<comment><USER3> I'm not talking about software builds, I'm talking about data. You tell the build system all the steps involved in turning your input data into your output data. You don't need extra commands to run things in parallel because any good build system can already run things in parallel.

This isn't "poor man's MapReduce" anymore than a car is a poor man's space shuttle. A space shuttle is a difficult and expensive way to get around if you don't need to leave the surface of the Earth. A MapReduce framework is a computationally expensive way to get data around if it doesn't need to leave your computer.

Look at Ninja sometime. It's not a hack.

<comment><USER4> We are in agreement. I perhaps did not phrase it well enough.

Although make can be used to parallelize data workflows (guilty as charged), it was not particularly designed for this use. It has lots of other things baked in that specifically target building software which for the purpose of data work flows are extra cruft. Effective ? yes, quirky? yes, recommended ? perhaps not if one is not very familiar with make.

Ninja is lovely its like a library of building blocks to make your own build system. BTW as long as we are trading favorites, may I suggest tup.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This looks really cool - like a more generalized map-reduce.</comment>


Onion farmer dumps millions of onions and explains Covid supply chain fail - <AUTHOR> https://www.linkedin.com/posts/activity-6653315947820052480-zte2
It's about 2 minute video from an onion farmer/packer dumping his produce due to restaurant closure and supply chain breakdown.
We saw millions of lbs of dairy dumped. Millions and millions of lbs of produce will be dumped in America during the covid shut down.
Two things: 1. If it doesn't go to restaurants, it gets dumped because there just isn't enough demand when there is no restaurant industry.
2. The reliance on supply chain throws light on on how there is really no local food supply/production. This has worked very well so far.
Logistics and supply chain in Ag has been stellar and it really really works very well. When it works.
To me, this shines light on food wastage and consumption. Obviously we are all still eating at home. We are eating less when we don't go to restaurants apparently.
Perhaps we will emerge out of this thinner and hungrier. <comment><USER2> Why are they not selling it to those delivered 'box meals' companies?

</comment><comment><USER3> Sadder but wiser, perhaps. Thinner and hungrier? I'm eating like there's no tomorrow.

<comment><AUTHOR> Restaurant food has a lot more fat and salt. Even if it seems healthy. A salad has hidden sugars and more processed foods as condiments than a salad you'd toss at home.

I used to be work in the restaurant kitchen ..ok, granted it was Michelin starred ones which guarantees ungodly amounts of butter and salt...but the underlying philosophy of any restaurant is ..make it tasty and addictive and memorable so the punter keeps returning for more. Restaurants rely on foot traffic from regulars. Especially regular lunch/breakfast joints and casual eateries. That's what keeps them afloat.

The take out culture has made it worse because we don't get to sit down and eat and converse etc. (the French are better at this more than any other). It makes one eat more food and enjoy less.

We have switched to shoveling food in front of television or a quick lunch. It's convenience over taste or health. This certainly ends up with lots of empty calories.

I am only talking about my observations in America. And then there is the ridiculous amount of restaurants competing with each other. So there is really no need to cook at home. Perhaps the silver lining is that people will cook more at home during this covid shut in. And perhaps get healthier eating/food habits.</comment></comment>


When was the last time a robot asked you to meet for drinks? - <AUTHOR> http://usistwo.com/when-was-the-last-time-a-robot-asked-you-to-meet-for-drinks/

<comment><USER2> And yet, at the bottom of this very page, "Why not email me and we'll find a time to talk? I promise it'll be worth it."

How can you personally promise that when it is a fixed message that everyone sees?

<comment><AUTHOR> How did your conversation with him go?</comment></comment>