Julia, the One Programming Language to Rule Them All - <AUTHOR> http://www.wired.com/wiredenterprise/2014/02/julia <comment><USER3> I'm dismayed that this article portrays Julia so much as _my_ creation and downplays the roles of Jeff and Viral – if anyone deserves the lion's share of the credit for the language, it's Jeff. I'm guessing this happened because I had a publication-quality photo available for use and told a relatable narrative in the interview we did, whereas Jeff stuck somewhat more to technical matters.

Oh, and Julia 1.0 hasn't been released yet. We're currently working on 0.3, which should be out in about a month.

<comment><USER4> The "One Programming Language to Rule Them All" headline was pretty horrible too. I don't hold it against you though, – Julia is an exciting language and I really hope you guys do well.

<comment><USER5> I think it was a poor interpretation of: a single language that is good for prototyping and also good for writing performant code.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> The main dynamic this article basically fails to describe clearly is that the status quo for scientific computing is that you do your nice, high level modeling in MATLAB or R, and then when you get good results, you port it over to C/C++/Java for production. It's usually a write-only process since the code you end up with in Java for example completely obfuscates the clean algorithm you designed in MATLAB. Julia's core value proposition (if I understand it correctly) is that you can build your models and algorithms in a MATLAB-like environment (with macros!) and then, lo and behold, you can actually just tune and deploy this code right where it is, without having to do a port.

<comment><USER7> (Note: I haven't tried Julia yet)

This would save so many man hours... At my shop, for every MATLAB engineer (mostly older guys) you need a C++ guru (mostly younger guys) to translate his stuff into something that will run fast.

On the other hand having seen the code the MATLAB folks write... I'd be worried. It's possible to write MATLAB in a way that is clean and makes the core algorithm presentable but that's rarely a priority. The real advantage of MATLAB is the quick development cycle. With the right packages you can make C++ look comparable... sorta.

Fundamentally the problem with MATLAB engineers is that they don't understand how to optimize code b/c they don't understand what's going on under the hood and they don't understand how to organize code b/c they don't have a concept of object oriented development, writing to interfaces, design patterns etc. etc.

EDIT: Just to clarify, I don't mean to denigrate MATLAB engineers. I'm just saying that in the current system you have two groups that specialize in different things. One focuses on algorithm development, and one on programming. I'm just speculating that maybe there is a good reason for it, and it may be unreasonable to ask one person to do both.

<comment><USER3> This is why one of the design goals of Julia is to have a fairly transparent performance model. In particular, if you write C-like code, you get C-like performance. A lot of the most twisted and impenetrable Matlab code exists because Matlab forces you to vectorize _everything_ to get acceptable performance. Generic programming and design are also very important in Julia. It takes a while to get the hang of it, but people do seem to after a little bit.

<comment><USER8> Fortran 90 and later versions of Fortran have array operations, as in Matlab, but you can also write loops and have the compiler optimize the code. There already is a high-level language for scientific computing with C-like performance.

<comment><USER9> People often sneer at Fortran, but there's a lot that can be done with it in scientific computing, including very performant GPGPU computing. That being said, the dream of having a matlab like prototyping environment directly result in production level HPC code is probably never going to be realised in Fortran - maybe Julia will get there? All I can say is that the tooling needs to be top notch for that to happen and the performance can't just be in the order of magnitude of Fortran/C - it needs to be within 20% or so. Once you run software on clusters that cost millions, programmer time becomes rather cheap, especially in academic settings.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Sounds like a fluff piece. It first tells us that this language is the "One Programming Language to Rule Them All", but then it adds:

> "That said, it isn't for everyone. Bezanson says it's not exactly ideal for > building desktop applications or operating systems, and though you can use > it for web programming, it's better suited to technical computing.".

So what is it? Is this the supposed "One true language", or is it just another language with a narrow scientific focus?

<comment><USER11> I'd agree about it being a fluff piece, although I think the binary options you present aren't fair.

I'm not a core developer on Julia, just a user and package creator. It is geared towards technical/scientific computing, and excels in that task - <USER2> has replaced the combination of Python and C++ I used previously. I think what Jeff Bezanson is saying is that there is nothing intrinsically unsuited about Julia for doing web programming or desktop applications. It benefits from a fresh start in this respect, and also by using best-of-breed libraries from OpenBLAS to libuv. This is in contrast to other languages for technical computing like MATLAB or R which I wouldn't consider to be practical choices for making, for example, a math-as-a-service application (although R is getting into this territory with things like shiny).

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> After all the Julia hype on HN I thought I'd try it out.

I was surprised to discover how slow it actually is to use. Here's a quick demo of booting up the Julia repl with two libraries loaded and then immediately exiting:

        $ time julia -e 'using Distributions; using Gadfly; exit()'
        real	0m22.778s

With behavior like that it's not going to replace R as my go-to tool for graphically exploring data.

I'm sure they'll improve this eventually. Much like with Rust, my hopes are high. But also much like with Rust, I wish the hype came after the promises were met.

PS: this article claims that Julia 1.0 was released in 2012, but as best as I can tell the most recent code you can get calls itself 0.3. The above was with Version 0.3.0-prerelease+1174 (2014-01-23 16:58 UTC).

<comment><USER3> You literally picked the single package that loads the most other packages. Clearly this needs work, but just running vanilla julia without loading packages is not bad at all these days:

        $ time julia -e 'println("Hello, world.")'
        Hello, world.

        real    0m0.209s
        user    0m0.299s
        sys     0m0.104s

Julia now pre-compiles the jitted code for it's base system, and the plan is to allow the same thing for packages. As others have noted, starting up Matlab is extremely slow and starting up a full R environment isn't all that fast either, nor is starting a JVM all that speedy. Startup time alone doesn't prevent a system from being useful.

<comment><USER12> Thanks for replying! I didn't anticipate that my comment would generate so much controversy. :( I was only relating my own experience in trying out the tool, and comparing it to the tool I currently use frequently despite not liking its semantics very much: R.

When I had encountered the slowness I was complaining about above, I poked around online and saw that you all were certainly aware of it and had plans to improve it. I think I even downloaded a 0.2 binary and then tried out trunk to see if it had already improved. All I had meant to say was (like Rust) that I anticipate I'll need to wait for a more complete version.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> 1) "Ruby and Python are good general purpose languages, beloved by web developers because they make coding faster and easier. But they don't run as quickly as languages like C and Java." \--- sorry to spoil the party but NumPy is quite a bit faster than Julia in real-world applications. Something as trivial as summing elements of an array runs much slower in Julia (unless they fixed it, last I checked was about 4 months ago). I'm not even gonna get started on pypy / llvmpy / numba / cython. R, albeit being a horrendous language, can be hardly beaten by anything at the moment due to its epic plotting tools like ggplot2 and the sheer amount of statistical packages created by scientists from all over the world; it's like github for many of the stats guys. Except unlike github, most of the packages are not open-source and hence can't be directly ported to python/julia/whatever..

2) Lack of existing infrastructure for scientists and general purpose stuff like various SQL adapters and bindings. Take any data-oriented/scientific field, there's gonna be a python library or a c++ library with python bindings for it. Data munging? pandas. Plotting? matplotlib. Machine learning? scikit- learn. MC Monte-Carlo? PyMC or PySTAN. Optimization? scipy. That's just to name a few... those are all huge libraries with many thousands commits in their repos and many thousands human hours behind them -- it will be pretty hard for anyone to catch up fast. /* it's worth mentioning here though that many libraries in scientific Python stack were developed by aggravated R / Matlab users who loved the tools but hated the language => matplotlib/pyplot was initially a direct port of Matlab's plotting tools, pandas was initially a direct port of R's data.frame, etc _/

3) 1-based indexing. Seriously, wtf? /_ insert an arbitrary Dijkstra joke here */

Not trying to bash Julia deliberately but I'd say by publishing a fluff piece like this Wired in fact discredits the Julia community who are nice and enthusiastic folks.

<comment><USER14> 1) is probably still true at the moment as long as you really need that large array, but the performance gap is likely to disappear once we have better garbage collection and SIMD support, which are both open pull requests. On the other hand, if your algorithm can be expressed in a loop that touches less memory, in my experience, devectorized code in Julia beats vectorized code in NumPy or MATLAB, and absolutely destroys devectorized code in those languages. This is vitally important in my work, since the data sets I work with are so large that expressing the algorithm in terms of vector operations would require more memory than my computer actually has (and it has 64 GB of memory).

Numba and especially cython are bolted on hacks to deal with the poor performance of the interpreter. They are not conducive to the kind of modularity you can get with Julia or plain Python, and they have their own set of rules for achieving high performance. Their main upside is that, as you say below, people already have a lot of Python code, but if you were starting from scratch you would probably not design them into the language. NumPyPy still doesn't implement all of NumPy, although I think it's been under development for roughly as long as Julia.

2) would be a problem for any new language, but it is partially mitigated by the PyCall package, which makes it easy to call almost any Python code from Julia. There are even Julia wrappers on top of pandas and matplotlib that allow you to use them while following standard Julia programming conventions. I've played around with calling PySTAN from Julia, and it's not substantially harder than calling PySTAN from Python.

<comment><USER15> > __once we have better garbage collection __

IMO the importance of the garbage collector needs to be underscored.

My experience with Julia was that if I pre-allocated arrays and wrote in a low level like (C-like) way, then it would be fairly fast (also, need to avoid closures but that's another issue).

If, however, I generated any new values inside loops (and using proper abstractions, this is hard to avoid), then garbage collection would often massively slow down computations and make performance hard to predict.

Unfortunately, I think having a truly high performance garbage collector is a massive undertaking. I hope I'm wrong about that.

<comment><USER14> See [https://github.com/JuliaLang/julia/pull/5227](https://github.com/JuliaLang/julia/pull/5227) for the open PR. The benchmark there suggests 2-3x improvement. There is a decent amount of low-hanging fruit, although "truly high performance garbage collection" means different things for different applications and LLVM is apparently not a good platform for generational GC.

There are further possible improvements that are not strictly related to GC. We could determine that an array of the same size is being created on every iteration of the loop and allocate that memory only once. Ideally we'd automatically devectorize code to remove temporaries, but that is quite hard.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> > "What we need, Karpinski realized after struggling to build his network > simulation tool, is a single language that does everything well."

and later:

> "Bezanson says it's not exactly ideal for building desktop applications or > operating systems, and though you can use it for web programming, it's > better suited to technical computing."

So, Julia is not what we need? ;)

Besides this contradiction I'm not entirely convinced that we need one language to rule them all. I'm not even sure I want multi-paradigm languages (C++ anyone?).

Aren't the problems explained in the introduction of this article not caused by the tools instead of the programming languages? I don't see how using multiple languages complicates patching (unless the article is talking about monkey patching which I doubt), but I would understand how going through 4 different debuggers could drive you crazy.

Disclaimer: I'm not familiar with Julia and I will not judge it based on a Wired article.

<comment><USER17> > _What we need, Karpinski realized after struggling to build his network > simulation tool, is a single language that does everything well._

That wasn't quoted in the article, so I'm assuming it was the author's words, not Karpinski's. The Julia devs seem to be more interested in solving the (prototype) -> (translate to low level language) -> (optimize for production) inefficiency rather than making one language to solve every conceivable problem.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Me reading the Julia documentation: "Interesting... hmm, don't quite understand that, but moving on... oh that's neat... wait, arrays are 1-indexed, not 0-indexed? ABORT!"

EDIT: and I consider this to be all the proof I ever need: [http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/transcriptions/EWD08xx/EW...](http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/transcriptions/EWD08xx/EWD831.html)

<comment><USER19> You might want to read this, then: [http://exple.tive.org/blarg/2013/10/22/citation- needed/](http://exple.tive.org/blarg/2013/10/22/citation-needed/)

<comment><USER20> And, once again,

" _And that's the most coherent argument I can find; there are dozens of other arguments for zero-indexing involving 'natural numbers' or 'elegance'[2] or some other unresearched hippie voodoo nonsense that are either wrong or too dumb to rise to the level of wrong._"

I still believe this is the only time EWD's work has ever been referred to as "unresearched hippie voodoo nonsense".

Is this the same Mike Hoye who hacks Zelda?[potato]

[potato] [http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/11/16/mike-hoye-hacks- zel...](http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/11/16/mike-hoye-hacks-zelda- vid_n_2140509.html)

[2] [http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/transcriptions/EWD08xx/EW...](http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/transcriptions/EWD08xx/EWD831.html)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Julia seems nice, but the fact that the developers don't care about TCO is annoying and vaguely reminiscent of Python. If this were added, not only would many algorithms become more natural to express, but it'd go to the top of my list as a recommended first language (instead of Scheme or Lua).

</comment><comment><USER22> Wasn't one of Bjarne Stroustrup's reasons for building c++ to make the network simulations he was working on more tractable?

</comment><comment> vezzy-fnord More clickbait and erroneous reporting from Wired. Typically, I stay away from most of their articles, besides the _Threat Level_ column, which actually hosts engaging pieces of journalism.

</comment><comment><USER23> I keep seeing Julia promoted as the grand new language but honestly, I am incredibly sceptical. Working in the scientific programming community, I am keenly aware at how slow things move. In only the last few years have I seen a push towards even using Python as a viable scientific tool. The problem is that science moves slow and, for the most part, scientists aren't interested in the programming aspect too much, but getting the results. They have one system that works and they stick with it.

One problem, that I don't see mentioned, is that verification of correctness. There is a reason people use decades old packages and code: they know that the tool is reliable and correct. My supervisor's code is based off his supervisor's code, which has been around since the 80s. At least 50+ papers have been published based off this specific code so we know that it is correct. The amount of time it would take to re-write and test the code written in a new language would be a very large times-sync that no one wants to do because they could spend that time doing research. I think this is part of the reason why things change slowly in the scientific computing community as whole. There have been tens of thousands of papers published that use Fortran/C/C++/Matlab and this new kid Julia comes along and how many scientific papers have been published using Julia code? I would imagine barely even a fraction. To scientists, this is reason to be sceptical. I'm not saying I agree with this but it is how scientific computing does think.

Also, on a personal note, the marketing needs to change. Since of the creators is reading this, if you want get the scientists, drop the grandiose claims of "one language to rule them all", although that's probably not your fault. To me, I immediately smell bullshit a mile away when I hear that. Too many times in the history of scientific programming languages have people made similar types of claims only to see it crash and burn. This is why many the older folks won't bother.

Reading Julia's homepage, I would be unconvinced about why I should choose Julia over Matlab. Heck, why not use Python? Python is open source and has been around a lot longer and people have certainly of that.

Also your speed tests, well fix them. For example Matlab vs Julia. Calculating the Fibonacci numbers? Honestly who cares. Plus why are you even computing them recursively, that's a silly way to do it. I understand it demonstrates recursion, but it's a pretty useless thing in my opinion. I only ever see the Fibonacci numbers come up in programming contest problems. I can honestly say I've never seen them used in real applications that scientists do. And if they were you would never implement them this way. Also the implementation of quicksort, why did you write your own? Use the built-in one for a more fair comparison. No one writes their own sorting algorithm but uses the built-in languages ones. Do that here. It is disingenuous to Matlab to not use the built-in functions.

The real tests that I would care about would be the random matrix multiplication. That's something that is way more common than calculating Fibonacci numbers. And here Julia is a little faster than Matlab but not too much. I'd be sceptical of why I should switch. Similarly a single number tells me nothing. Just because it says Julia is faster, well that's one test. How well does Julia scale? Is it true that Julia is faster than Matlab for multiplying NxN random matrices? How well does this scale? A single test tells me nothing. I'm obviously bias towards matrix tests since my research used a lot of matrix operations, but if you read papers about various codes they almost always include scale tests. This is what my colleagues would care about more than anything since they have massive datasets so scalability is critical. Remember you are trying to sell this to scientists who are, obviously, scientists, so having good quality data to show them is critical. I discussed Julia with my colleagues and this was one of the things we immediately mentioned. The tests shown didn't convince us at all that it was even worth considering.

Plus, I'll be honest, I feel the homepage is marketed more towards computer scientists than numerical scientists. The first feature is "Multiple dispatch: providing ability to define function behavior across many combinations of argument types". The hell is that? Why do I care? Remember who your audience is! To give you an example, I will tell you about my office mate. He is a PhD student working on turbulence and uses Matlab for all his data processing afterwards. His code comes from simulations written in Fortran that run on the local supercomputing cluster. They are stored in the NetCDF format. After the simulations are done, he opens up Matlab, reads in the NetCDF file and runs a bunch of data-processing functions to compute various quantities from the raw data. He then plots these things. On the Julia homepage I don't even know if Julia can even do graphics. Can it? If it can, the homepage doesn't mention any plotting libraries. So, I repeat, what exactly does multiple dispatch mean and why is it so important? If you want him to be using Julia, then you need to explain to him why he should be using it over Matlab. Look at the numpy homepage. It is short and to the point. Plus it has a nice link to "NumPy for Matlab users" which is something I would want to know immediately. Julia, as far as I can tell, you have to go to docs, Julia manual, Noteworthy differences from other languages (which is at the bottom of the screen!!).

I could probably come up with more criticisms and suggestions but I don't want to write a book. I should say, I completely and fully support what Julia is trying to achieve. I find that Python is just too awkward to be a good Matlab replacement. To me, Python is a very general tool that also has the ability to do similar things to Matlab. However since Matlab is designed to do numerical computing, and Python isn't, I find Python to be awkward for some things. But, at least it can run on the computing clusters. Matlab is stupid with licensing and trying to get it to run on the supercomputing clusters is near impossible. Definitely in the future I am going to try Julia as a data-processing step since it is free and open-source and not subject to any of that licensing crap. Plus the parallel aspect interests me although I have no idea how good it is since I don't see any graphs showing what sorts of advantages I might get. Plus the documentation page is rather dense text-wise and not that appealing to read right now.

But, I think the tl;dr is that remember who you are marketing to. Remember that scientific computing moves slow. I know colleagues who have just discovered version control and think it's amazing.

<comment><USER24> Why not use Python? Do you mean Python 2.7 or Python 3.x?

Multiple dispatch lets the user define several functions with the same name and have the compiler pick the right one based on the arguments. For example, you could have three versions of the foo() function, one for reals, another for complex, and a third for matrices. You could define your own types and write additional versions of foo()—the compiler will pick the right one based on the underlying types. Julia's type system makes a lot of sense once you've gotten the hang of it.

I'd suggest fiddling with Julia if you have some time, as I think it rolls together some good ideas. But it still has a way to go IMHO. Redefining functions with dependencies in the interactive toplevel doesn't work quite right, and you can't delete entries from the symbol table. It concerns me that these things don't work. I figure that I'll give it another look as a tool for serious work when 1.0 gets released.

I'll stick with R in the mean time—less change of unpleasant surprises. But I could see Julia replacing R for me in a few years if it's done right.

<comment><USER23> I'll admit that is an interesting feature honestly the first thing on the list? It's certainly a cool and interesting idea, but I'll admit it's not a super important feature in my view. Thinking back on all the research I've done I can't think of a single time where I would need such a feature. I never use any data strucures beyond matrices, which Matlab handles by default. Since 1x1 matrices are just numbers, every function that works for matrices, works for single numbers.

I do use Python, but it came into it late on my project. Future projects will definitely use Python since it's good enough for data processing stuff. Hard core numerics will still be done in Fortran/C.

I definitely do see Julia being the better version of Matlab but it certainly has a ways to go.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Working for a small company that does a lot of parallel combustion CFD modeling and simulation, I'd love to see our engineers try out Julia and see how it much easier it could be on them.

But, from my experience trying to establish rules for using version control, I also realize that they're unlikely to ever rewrite (or even modularlize) their codebase to take advantage of any other language.

</comment><comment><USER26> FTA: "Julia is also designed parallelism." Did the author even proofread the article?

</comment><comment><USER27> I'm guessing the best predictor of whether Julia will be the "one language to rule them all", is the difficulty of writing macros in it. If they somehow figured out a way to make writing lisp-like macros in a language with infix notation easy, Julia will easily become the next big thing. Otherwise I would have to say that the trade offs between syntax and macros would make lisp a better choice (see pg's argument for lisp macros[1]).

For someone who has used both Julia and lisp macros, how do they compare?

[1] [http://www.paulgraham.com/avg.html](http://www.paulgraham.com/avg.html)

</comment><comment><USER28> Way back in the heyday of Byte magazine, I recall ads for the pending release of The Last One, a programming language to end all programming languages. Once released, it disappeared. (Anyone remember it?)

</comment><comment><USER29> Is it easy to create non-blocking TLS socket connections with Julia? How about making an HTTPS request? If Julia has async operations, are they inline, promises, events or callbacks?

<comment><USER30> Yes, actually, this is quite easy. Basically the I/O model uses cooperative coroutines. For TLS, you'll want to look at [https://github.com/loladiro/GnuTLS.jl](https://github.com/loladiro/GnuTLS.jl). Then, after setting up the stream with the underlying socket, protocol information, etc. (see the README for how to specify this), you can just use it as any other IO stream...

        # Set up stream `sock` here
        @async begin
            println(sock,"Hello World")
            line = readline(sock)
            println(sock,"You typed ",line)
        end

Basically the encryption happens on the fly and the stream can be used just like any other socket. For example, in the http client code here: [https://github.com/loladiro/Requests.jl/blob/master/src/Requ...](https://github.com/loladiro/Requests.jl/blob/master/src/Requests.jl#L197-L204), the only difference between HTTP and HTTPS is how the socket is set up, the actual reading and writing is the same. Hope that helps!

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> I got to play with Julia at the UChicago workshop. Good stuff, especially if you want to move away from MATLAB.

</comment><comment><USER32> _The one programming language to rule them all that isn 't for everyone._

I had to laugh at the irony of the juxtaposition of the title and the final sentiment! I like languages so I'll definitely be checking out Julia.

</comment><comment><USER33> [http://xkcd.com/927/](http://xkcd.com/927/)

</comment><comment><USER34> The article contradicts itself resulting in nothing more than a silly, uninformed rant.

If:

"Together they fashioned a general purpose programming language that was also suited to advanced mathematics and statistics and could run at speeds rivaling C, the granddaddy of the programming world."

Then:

"That said, it isn't for everyone. Bezanson says it's not exactly ideal for building desktop applications or operating systems, and though you can use it for web programming, it's better suited to technical computing."

does not follow based on the definition of "general purpose."</comment>


Sitting for too long can kill you, even if you exercise - <AUTHOR> http://www.cbc.ca/news/business/sitting-for-too-long-can-kill-you-even-if-you-exercise-study-1.2918678 <comment><USER2> This is an observational study, and therefore has the usual "correlation does not imply causation" shortcoming. Maybe people with poor heart function or prediabetes don't enjoy standing as much, and tend to do it less (i.e. reverse causality from what the article suggests). Or maybe impoverished people don't have jobs that allow them to stand or move at regular intervals, and also don't have easy access to nutritious foods, causing poor health (i.e. a lurking variable).

<comment><USER3> Any further reading recommendations for concept of "correlation does not imply causation"? I always look for a concise way to describe this (there are just too many reports concluded in this way, I hope I could let others understand this point sooner to avoid being trapped in the details for too long if not forever) but have not been successful. Your words seems the best I can find.

<comment><USER4> Every time I bring this concept up on HN, I get massive numbers of downvotes....I'm shocked that the parent comment is currently the top comment. Maybe it's me. Anyway, here's one of my favorite applications of the concept:

[http://www.investopedia.com/terms/s/superbowlindicator.asp](http://www.investopedia.com/terms/s/superbowlindicator.asp)

<comment><USER5> Hm, this and some of the other comments being mentioned are the much less interesting instances of "correlation != causation". Specifically, these examples (including the Superbowl indicator) are assumed to be cases of coincidence (with enough data, certain slices of noise will look like signal).

By contrast, the much more interesting and relevant examples are things like hidden variables: a third factor that has causal relationships (in whatever direction) with both of the correlated variables being described, even though the two correlated variables have no such causal relationship.

For an extremely trivial example, the data likely supports the conclusion that you're more likely to get into car accidents when you have an umbrella with you. This obviously doesn't imply that having an umbrella in your car causes more car accidents: but rather that the hidden variable of rainy weather causes both "people have umbrellas with them" and "people get into more car accidents". Controlling for rainy weather (i.e. examining the correlation during sunny days only or rainy days only), you'd likely find that the correlation vanishes.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I've read quite a bit on standing desks and I'm curious if there is any study/research that shows, experimentally, that it's actually [standing] that leads to some of the proposed benefits. I only ask because I wonder if simply exercising while sitting [1] or in general [2] lead to the same benefits or if the very sedentary nature of the circumstances surrounding sitting that lead to these poor outcomes (which then are solved by standing).

[1] [http://www.amazon.com/FitDesk-v2-0-Desk-Exercise- Massage/dp/...](http://www.amazon.com/FitDesk-v2-0-Desk-Exercise- Massage/dp/B00CM9CBZY/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1421725283&sr=8-1&keywords=fit+desk)

[2] [http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00B1VDNQA/ref=psdc_3407781_t3_B00C...](http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00B1VDNQA/ref=psdc_3407781_t3_B00CM9CBZY)

EDIT: Forgot to mention, when I say exercising, I mean during the same time where you would be sitting (e.g. during work, continuously)

<comment><USER7> I waste a lot less time at my desk when I'm standing. I've also experienced a reduction of neck and upper body issues.

But I definitely have to wear more comfortable shoes.

<comment><USER8> Get a standing mat off of Amazon. You will thank me.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> So what are good measures for people that need to work in front of a computer, like to read a lot, etc. to avoid/minimize that risks?

So far I know of:

\- Getting a standing desk (which is no alternative suitable for everyone)

\- Walking around/exercise every ~30 minutes for a short while

<comment><USER10> When I was in an office, I made a habit of constantly drinking water, from a fairly small cup. Every time I needed to ponder something I'd reflexively wander off to get more water, then stare out the window a bit (apparently focusing on something far away once per hour or so reduces eye strain).

Having just started working at home, after a few months I'm feeling the loss of this habit.

<comment><USER11> Ahh... the good old staring out the window with a drink in hand. My father invented that.

<comment><USER10> Thank heavens he didn't patent it.

....did he?

<comment><USER11> Don't worry.... the patent's expired.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Source article is behind a paywall [0]

Sedentary Time and Its Association With Risk for Disease Incidence, Mortality, and Hospitalization in Adults: A Systematic Review and Meta-analysis

Conclusion: Prolonged sedentary time was independently associated with deleterious health outcomes regardless of physical activity.

[0] [http://annals.org/article.aspx?articleid=2091327](http://annals.org/article.aspx?articleid=2091327)

</comment><comment><USER12> Some past items on this topic for consideration:

Sitting Time and All-Cause Mortality Risk in 222 497 Australian Adult [1]

Curb sitting time to protect aging DNA and possibly extend lifespan [2]

Television Viewing and Time Spent Sedentary in Relation to Cancer Risk: A Meta-Analysis [3]

Take a stand and be active to reduce chronic disease, make aging easier, research finds [4]

[1]: [http://archinte.jamanetwork.com/article.aspx?articleid=11088...](http://archinte.jamanetwork.com/article.aspx?articleid=1108810)

[2]: [http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2014-09/bmj- cst090114...](http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2014-09/bmj- cst090114.php)

[3]: [http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/jnci/dju098](http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/jnci/dju098)

[4]: [http://www.k-state.edu/media/newsreleases/jan14/rosenkranz11...](http://www.k-state.edu/media/newsreleases/jan14/rosenkranz11514.html)

</comment><comment><USER13> Nowadays, the science news are more and more becoming this: [http://www.phdcomics.com/comics.php?n=1174](http://www.phdcomics.com/comics.php?n=1174) or maybe this [http://xkcd.com/882/](http://xkcd.com/882/) :P

</comment><comment><USER14> Whatever doesn't make you immortal literally can kill you, even if you do other things.

</comment><comment><USER15> I would like to see a study done that factors in the type of exercise. "Moderate to rigorous exercise" is a very broad definition. That could be anything from pumping iron for an hour to running six miles.

Standing is a weight bearing activity which has a great effect on bone density and muscle mass. These in turn effect one's long term health. Weightlifting can do more to compensate for the loss of lean body mass due to sedentary living compared to cardio. I'd be curious to see whether weightlifting is more effective than cardio in offsetting the effects of sitting most of the work day.

</comment><comment><USER16> How about lying down, or even sleeping? The article mentions "sedentary time" and not just sitting in an upright position - presumably that includes sleeping too...

<comment><USER17> Moderation in all things including moderation excluding ricin, botulinum, radioactive polonium and militant extremism.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> If you can't remember to get up from coding, there are timer apps that you can get to remind you to walk around. Besides, it is good for creativity and debugging to get away from the screen and go somewhere else, even if it is only to another part of the office or to stare out a window. In fact, staring out the window also relaxes the eye muscles which helps prevent vision problems and/or migraines.

</comment><comment><USER19> While there is definite correlation with sitting and not being super healthy, going to other extreme, using standing desk all the time would also give you varicose veins.

Some healthy balance of being active and also being knowledge worker and smart Alec would definitely be best.

</comment><comment><USER20> Dangit I need my drawing table back. Loved being able to stand or sit at my desk as needed.

</comment><comment><USER21> relative risk increase != absolute risk increase, and I hate when news articles say "20% higher chance of X" without saying the absolute risk.

</comment><comment><USER22> Correlation doesn't imply causation

</comment><comment><USER23> I should be dead

</comment><comment><USER24> "a higher risk of ... death"

is there really a higher risk of death? i think my chances of dying are already pretty close to 100%.

<comment><USER25> yup, and skydiving without a parachute doesn't change your risk of death either since it is 100% anyway!

"higher risk of death" means on average people who engage in the behavior die _faster_.

<comment><USER26> Actually not 100%: [http://www.greenharbor.com/fffolder/ffallers.html](http://www.greenharbor.com/fffolder/ffallers.html)

<comment><USER27> I understand that the use of aircrafts in WW2 was incredibly high, but I would have thought maybe 1 person survived a free fall and lived, not 6(recorded on that site). Thanks for sharing that.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


This company says electrical grounding will improve your sleep and health - <AUTHOR> http://www.agroundedlife.com/index.htm

<comment><USER2> I know this is just spam but _what a marvelously bad idea_!

Its just as useless as magnets and crystals but with the added benefit of helping that faulty wire in your alarm clock to kill you! Don't get me started on the people who will combine this with their electric blanket on that cold winter morning.

Up next, sticking nails in your nose while you jog helps to prevent iron deficiencies...

<comment><AUTHOR> Actually this is not spam, I have nothing to do with the company and genuinely wanted the opinion of people on HN about it. I'll agree that it really sounds like snake oil, but I thought the idea was interesting nonetheless.

Regarding safety concerns, the products are not directly connected to the ground.

EDIT: spelling

<comment><USER2> _Regarding safety concerns, the products are not directly connected to the ground._

Ahh. Then I find the claims that this product makes completely ungrounded.

<comment><AUTHOR> They have links (as always) to a few supposedly scientific studies on the matter, one of them suggesting an effect against oxidation. I don't really understand how grounding would help against that, I would even think that it would make things worse if anything.

It does make some sense though that we might have adapted through evolution to being grounded, with our ancestors walking barefoot and everything...

EDIT : one of the studies : <http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15650465></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Paul Krugman, the Nobel prize winner who threatens the world - <AUTHOR> http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/comment/jeremy-warner/7483177/Paul-Krugman-the-Nobel-prize-winner-who-threatens-the-world.html <comment><USER2> This article is like the tail wagging the dog.

 _Krugman made a name for himself challenging the very assumption that free trade always leads to mutually beneficial outcomes_. If you want to take him on with regard to trade theory, you can't simply respond with the original orthodoxy that protectionism is bad and free trade is good. You'd have to address his specific arguments about economies of scale and the possibility of being "locked-into" a bad trade situation (at a local maximum).

There's a little bit about it here: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Krugman#New_trade_theory>

</comment><comment><USER3> It is _not_ in the US best interest for China to release the yuan. If that were to happen, the buying power of chinese holders of the yuan will increase to the point that their demand for goods will compete with the U.S. demand for goods. As the dollar declines, American buying power will also decline, as will american "quality" of life.

More expensive chinese goods will not lead to more american manufacturing. Instead, it will lead to more Indian. Pakistani, Bangladeshi manufacturing. A more valuable yuan will be a short term fix -- if it is a fix -- which I don't believe it is.

If the yuan is released, the dollar will cease to be the world reserve currency in an economic blink of an eye. While it is fixed, there's no reason to switch from dollars to yuan, but as the yuan begins to climb, fewer and fewer banks or even individuals will want to hold the dollar and our savings will dwindle due to the massive inflationary effects.

The U.S. consumer of goods -- all goods -- not just "cheap chinese crap," buys most of their stuff from overseas. Many asian countries and south america are huge suppliers of electronics, textiles and _food_. 1.5 Billion people in china also need to eat and when they can pay 150% in the exporters' local currency relative to what american retailers can pay, why would they bother shipping those goods across an ocean? Why wouldn't south america send their ships to asia instead of Los Angeles?

The _only_ solution to this problem is for America to stop needing the plastic fix. They need to start saving their money, investing their money, and producing goods the rest of the world wants to buy. There is no other solution in a global economy.

Protectionism won't work. Complaining won't work. Badgering China to deflate the yuan won't work.

<comment><USER4> "While it is fixed, there's no reason to switch from dollars to yuan, but as the yuan begins to climb fewer and fewer banks or even individuals will want to hold the dollar and our savings will dwindle due to the massive inflationary effects. "

Actually, this speaks to me personally. The yuan is not really fixed to the dollar permanently - it's been climbing gradually over the past several years. As an American in China, I have done just as you have said - I've gradually moved as much of my cash to RMB as possible and enjoyed each time the gov't raised my purchasing power back home. As I now operate a business here and am paid in RMB, I personally look forward to it happening again in the near future.

Also, I think, at least in the short term, you are right. Increasing the value of the yuan will noticeably damage the average Joe's quality of life back home. All those little 'made-in-China' things that you buy without even noticing will suddenly become more expensive. Which means you will get less of them. Which means you will have less of the stuff that you are accustomed to having.

In the long term, I think a floating Yuan is probably healthy for all parties involved - for the US, because _some_ of the imported Chinese goods will be produced back on home soil and for the Chinese because it will foster more domestic, service-oriented consumption (i.e., a modern economy).

<comment><USER5> I thought it was hard to get money out of China, and assumed that it would be correspondingly hard to change Yuan to Dollars. Is that not the case?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> John Mauldin made a much better analysis of this. If we charge a tariff on China, will it really improve our trade deficit so much that our goods will be from Vietnam, Indonesia or [other country here]?

I suggest that anyone skeptical of this should go to their local mall and stop by a few clothing stores, like the Gap, Old Navy, AE, Banana Republic, etc. What you'll find is interesting. At the lower end shops (like the Gap and Old Navy), a lot of the merchandise is no longer made in China. But in higher end shops (like the Banana Republic), it still is.

I thought this was fascinating for different reasons than my mother (who discovered it), because you can see quite clearly, right there in the mall, that the economics is working, and China isn't some magical demon that can somehow keep on producing the cheapest. It's already cheaper to produce in El Salvador and Vietnam than it is in China.

Moreover, if you impose a tariff, then we'll just be buying crap from those other countries, which isn't going to help our trade deficit and our economy, and will likely start a trade war, which will in likelihood hurt our economy. Think about China pressuring everyone in their neighborhood to buy Airbus instead of Boeing.

<comment><USER7> _Think about China pressuring everyone in their neighborhood to buy Airbus instead of Boeing._

Bad example: 51% of the sub-assemblies in the Airbus 380 super-jumbo are made in the USA. Meanwhile, around 51% of the sub-assemblies in the Boeing 787 are made ... guess where?

(The Boeing/Airbus cross-subsidy cat-fight in front of the WTO has been going on for about two decades now, and both sides are (a) firmly entrenched and (b) have been working for years on "poison pill" policies to deter both the USA and the EU from slapping an embargo on the rival manufacturer.)

One of the side-effects of the current free trade regime (and, importantly, our vastly improved global communication infrastructure) is that it becomes much harder for countries to haul up the trade barriers because complex fabrications come from non-obvious places. (Another random example: the best- selling Japanese SUV in the UK, the Nissan Qashqai, was designed in, and is largely manufactured in ... England.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> > Unlike Britain, America doesn't really do free-traders

Seriously? America effectively invented modern neo-liberalism, and exported it abroad via international agreements (WTO, NAFTA, IMF loan agreements...)

> China makes an easy scapegoat for America's ills, but it is not the cause

The author makes this point but provides nothing to back it up. I could totally understand the argument that China helped induce the recession through cheap loans. I could also buy the argument that it didn't given a well- reasoned argument. Give me something to chew.

I'm not the biggest Krugman fan, but this article is all bark and no bite.

<comment><USER9> Free Trade is Free Trade. If you need NAFTA etc it's not free trade.

<comment><USER3> you can never have free trade without a free flow of _human beings_. As long as we have passports and border guards, we will _never_ have free trade.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> _The US is still a largely internalised, self-reliant economy for which trade with the outside world is relatively unimportant._

Unfortunately, the article seems to omit the extraordinary evidence to support this extraordinary claim, seeing as there's likely more than enough evidence to the contrary sitting on the author's desk, inside it, under it, scattered about his office, and on his very person if he would check the country-of- origin tags.

</comment><comment><USER11> Fantastic mad-evil-genius photograph they found of him. A red glow coming from his eyes would be the only improvement.

</comment><comment><USER12> Since markets hate uncertainty, then why not say, "in one year if the valuation of the Chinese currency isn't fixed, we will impose a surcharge.". There is no reason why this would have to be a sudden move. This would let manufacturers figure out a backup plan, and still put plenty of pressure on Beijing.

</comment><comment><USER13> a) The Telegraph is a tabloid, why not link to a better news source? b) There is precedent for this sort of move, as Krugman's original article said it was done in the 70s with Germany and Japan until they raised their currency values.

Is it a good idea? It's probably a bit risky but it's got to be better than letting China continue to manipulate currency and be a drag on the rest of the world's economy. I imagine a tariff that large would probably get them to float the renminbi fairly quickly.

// Edit: I take back the tabloid comment, I was thinking of the Aussie Telegraph which is absolutely a tabloid. My point still stands, that what China is doing needs to be dealt with and that it's hardly the end of the world to put tariffs on them.

<comment><USER14> Sorry, I accidentally upmodded your pointless _ad hominem_ comment. I hate how you can't undo that.

<comment><USER13> Whatever. I made a point based on the quality of the newspaper itself; then I followed up by refuting the argument it made.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Jeremy Warner simply doesn't understand the issues at the depth Krugman does. Doing nothing threatens the world much more than a surcharge to offset the renminbi.

</comment><comment><USER16> BTW: There is no such thing as "Nobel Prize in Economics"

<comment><USER17> [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nobel_Memorial_Prize_in_Economi...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nobel_Memorial_Prize_in_Economics)

<comment><USER16> What about actually reading what you are linking to? At least the first paragraph?

<comment><USER17> Kindly direct your eyes to the first sixteen words of that entry...

 _The Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences, commonly referred to as the Nobel Prize in Economics..._

...and tell me how this supports the assertion that there is "no such thing". When I read further in the entry, I see that, while it wasn't established by Alfred's will and is known more formally by a longer name, there is in fact such a thing and that the recipients are selected by the same royal swedish academy of sciences, and "in accordance with the rules governing the award of the Nobel Prizes instituted through his [Alfred Nobel's] will".

Maybe you meant to make a different point, like whether or not the most recent laureate was deserving of the recognition? Or maybe you're just engaging in obscene acts of silly pedantry over the commonly accepted shorthand name?

Either way, I was tossing you a link so you could take your existential claim to the denizens of wikipedia and get the entry removed. I'm sure they would love to hear from you.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: What do I need to know to get started with TensorFlow? - <AUTHOR> As a complete novice in Machine Learning, what do I need to know to be able to get started with Tensor Flow and understand what it is all about?<p>Are there good tutorials or explanations for newbies? Can you tell me a general roadmap on how to go about learning this stuff? <comment><USER2> To install [http://tensorflow.org/get_started/os_setup.md](http://tensorflow.org/get_started/os_setup.md)

They have some general walkthrough tutorials [http://tensorflow.org/tutorials/mnist/beginners/index.md](http://tensorflow.org/tutorials/mnist/beginners/index.md)

and a nice overview on machine learning. you will need to setup an account. It is free and very informative. [https://www.coursera.org/learn/machine- learning/home/week/1](https://www.coursera.org/learn/machine- learning/home/week/1)

hundreds of resources for machine learning can be found here [http://www.machinelearningsalon.org/assets/the-machine- learn...](http://www.machinelearningsalon.org/assets/the-machine-learning- salon-starter-kit-28-07-2015.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER3> checkout udacity, they have a bunch of machine learning courses and also give general skills and prerequisites: [https://www.udacity.com/me#!/](https://www.udacity.com/me#!/)</comment>


Improve your blog visibility: SEO tricks I use - <AUTHOR> http://blog.penso.info/2015/03/21/improve-blog-visibility/

<comment><USER2> Increase Your Blog Visibility With Social Sharing.

</comment><comment><USER3> Here are mine:

How to Promote Your Business on the Internet [http://www.warplife.com/tips/webmaster/website- promotion.htm...](http://www.warplife.com/tips/webmaster/website- promotion.html)

White Hat Search Engine Optimization [http://www.warplife.com/tips/webmaster/search-engine- optimiz...](http://www.warplife.com/tips/webmaster/search-engine- optimization/)

</comment><comment><USER4> How to make sure your content isn't read: "Do you want to give me your email address?" overlays with white-on-light-grey close buttons.</comment>


Micron now has a 11TB SSD - <AUTHOR> https://www.micron.com/parts/solid-state-storage/ssd/mtfdhal11tatcw-1ar1zab?pc={407C8554-7C81-43AF-8055-717A23E71B02} <comment><USER2> 3.35 GB/sec sequential reads and 2.4 GB/sec writes. You can see their product brief for the 9200 NVMe series here: [https://enterprisestorage.micron.com/~/media/documents/produ...](https://enterprisestorage.micron.com/~/media/documents/products/product- flyer/9200_ssd_product_brief.pdf)

This 11TB one is actually aimed for read-intensive workloads, might want to look at the 9200 MAX series for something with more endurance, ideal I guess for a caching solution that's quite cheap compared to RAM, and which won't require an expensive server for such a high capacity.

<comment><USER3> Those writes are pretty good. And you can game endurance by overprovisioning.

<comment><USER4> Did they post the write endurance dwpd for this drive?

<comment><USER5> 16.1 PB total writes guaranteed. About 0.8 DWPD from my calculation.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> ...and if you actually want to buy one,

[https://www.digikey.com/product-detail/en/micron- technology-...](https://www.digikey.com/product-detail/en/micron-technology- inc/MTFDHAL11TATCW-1AR1ZABYY/MTFDHAL11TATCW-1AR1ZABYY-ND/7598107)

But it's TLC flash (more correctly known as 3-bit-per-cell), which has exponentially lower endurance and retention than 2-bit(MLC) or 1-bit(SLC) despite only multiplicatively higher capacity. This particular model has an endurance of <1500 cycles, and that's probably even after a considerable number of blocks have been remapped. The odd capacity of 11TB is another giveaway, since TLC NAND raw capacity is usually in multiples of 3.

No mention of retention either in the datasheet, which is a bit worrying.

<comment><USER7> Honestly, you can write ~15,000+TB and writes are limited to 2.5GB / s. Don't forget you get as many reads as you want so that seems like a non issue for the most part.

PS: Another way of looking at this is if you write logs that you keep for 48 hours that's 6 years assuming you fill it up every time.

<comment><USER8> You don't actually get as many reads as you want. Reads disturb the cells and you eventually have to rewrite them based on reads as well.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> When I was shopping for a fast SSD back in April 2016, I found the Samsung 950 PRO M.2 512GB was one of the fastest available (quite a lot faster than all the others, and not much more expensive), for 310 EUR. I've used them for desktops and laptops, and they work wonderfully.

I'm thinking of getting another, but time has passed and I haven't kept up with the market. Which big M.2 SSDs are hitting the sweet spots of price and performance these days? Any suggestions or warnings, please?

<comment><USER9> Not challenging the downvote, but just curious why, please (since it was unaccompanied by a comment explaining why)?

Thanks to the informative replies, I googled around and found some articles comparing of the 950 and 960. Apparently it's significantly faster, and doesn't throttle from overheating as soon.

Now this may be off-topic, but this one article really struck me as bizarrely sexist, an archetypical example of how the computer industry and press are casually hostile towards women.

What the fuck is up with this site Custom PC Guide and their "tradition" in "every article about Samsung SSD"? Is this stuff coming from Samsung, too? Did part of what I paid for my 950 Pro go to paying for that beach photo session, or to Custom PC Guide through some advertising or affiliates program or free hardware samples somehow?

[https://www.custompcguide.net/review-and-comparison- samsung-...](https://www.custompcguide.net/review-and-comparison- samsung-960-pro-evo-versus-950-pro-and-850-series/)

>But first and most importantly, let's address the tradition that started two years ago [2014][2015] and appeared strong in every article about Samsung SSD on here ever since then. It's been one of the reasons why you guys keep reading, it's certainly no different this year now: hot girl photo.

>Let us bring forth the cute kpop band Girls' Generation who landed a gig to represent Samsung and the brand recently. They are promoting Samsung laser printer in this photo but I don't think that'll matter to most gentlemen. Also at this point, it's safe to say that the performance of Samsung SSDs increases in parallel to the beauty level of their female reps.

Once you get past the girlie picture, search for "piss":

>They piss on and kill each other to show dominance or they get on fire. Nah, just literally kidding. But heat will be an issue here at some point, especially how the packages are stacked on top of each other like this in both the 960 Pro and Evo.

>The NVMe interface alone is still just a toddler in the PC hardware world. Who knows if some day in the future it's learning to walk and just falls flat on its face like my son when I accidentally tripped him. Using the Force.

>The Samsung 960 EVO is truly as fast as the Samsung 950 Pro, faster even in many benchmarks. That is insane, for a TLC-NAND solid state drive to be honest. It's like Samsung decided to send the 850 EVO to Shaun-T's bootcamp to work its ass off under the 90-day Insanity training then straight to Sagi's bodybeast without taking a break; At the end of the program, now we have this super athlete, super fit and super hot female rep who also makes the 960 EVO goes faster every night.

<comment><USER10> Downvote may have been that your comment concerns itself with consumer SSDs, but the topic link is to a super-high end SSD for specific server applications.

And yeah, that's some terrible sexism and shouldn't be tolerated.

<comment><USER11> Samsung is the one being sexist here. The article is just using Samsung's pictures, and calling them out I would say.

<comment><USER12> How's Samsung being sexist?

<comment><USER11> Samsung is the one selling SSD with images of half naked girls. What exactly is the link between a bunch of pretty girls and an SSD?

<comment><USER12> How's that sexist? Is it sexist when Samsung sells TVs with videos of boys [1] with no link to TVs?

[1] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UEI8ZgxnXB8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UEI8ZgxnXB8)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Large read only datasets. Map tiles, logs, security camera video etc. The retention question is unanswered.

<comment><USER14> Security camera video is typically _write only_ , not read only.

<comment><USER15> Write once, read many times.

<comment><USER16> Write constantly. Maybe read at some point.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Any word on the cost? I can't see the price obviously on the specs page.

<comment><USER18> If you follow the DigiKey link in this comment: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15527213](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15527213)

$7700/unit if you buy 4.

<comment><USER19> And WD Gold 12TB goes for about $520 / unit.

It used to be about 10X difference between HDD and SSD per TB pricing. Now the gap has widen quite a bit with NAND price going up.

<comment><USER14> Is the brand new 11 TB offering really representative of SSD $/GB?

As of a year and a half ago you could buy the Samsung PM1633a 15TB for $10k[0], or about 67¢/GB (slightly cheaper than the Micron unit linked, 70¢/GB). It's still available around the same price[1]. So I guess you're right.

The price I see advertised for the WD Gold 12TB is a bit higher[2], or about 5¢/GB. Still, more than 10x better value in terms of raw storage.

[0]: [https://www.anandtech.com/show/10533/samsung-expands-its- pm1...](https://www.anandtech.com/show/10533/samsung-expands-its- pm1633a-lineup-as-1536-tb-ssd-hits-retail-for-10k) [1]: [https://www.cdw.com/shop/products/Samsung- PM1633a-MZILS15THM...](https://www.cdw.com/shop/products/Samsung- PM1633a-MZILS15THMLS-solid-state-drive-15.36-TB-SAS-12Gb-s/4586754.aspx) [2]: [https://www.cdw.com/shop/products/WD-Gold-Enterprise- Class-H...](https://www.cdw.com/shop/products/WD-Gold-Enterprise-Class-Hard- Drive-WD121KRYZ-hard-drive-12-TB- SATA-6/4797281.aspx?enkwrd=wd%20gold%20%2212%20tb%22&pfm=srh)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Will SSDs become cheaper per megabyte than magnetic platters at some point?

<comment><USER21> Magnetic platters keep advancing as well. I loved this article that Ars did covering WD's latest advancements in MAMR: [https://www.anandtech.com/show/11925/western-digital- stuns-s...](https://www.anandtech.com/show/11925/western-digital-stuns- storage-industry-with-mamr-breakthrough-for-nextgen-hdds)

That said, most of the projections there are from WD, so there's automatically a grain of salt needed. Still, they predict to keep the gap for cost per GB fairly large out to 2028 (!).

<comment><USER22> It doesn't help that the flash manufacturers seem to be colluding on price and want to keep the cost of SSDs artificially high. Gotta make those margins! See recent DDR4 pricing issues for an example.

<comment><USER23> I've been complaining that there's no such thing as a low-capacity (32-64GB SSD) for $40 (or whatever) for a couple of years now.

<comment><USER24> Sure there is.

[https://www.amazon.com/Silicon-Power-Endurance-Free- download...](https://www.amazon.com/Silicon-Power-Endurance-Free-download- SP060GBSS3S60S25AE/dp/B01M2UUACN)

[https://www.amazon.com/KingDian-Internal-Solid-Desktop- Lapto...](https://www.amazon.com/KingDian-Internal-Solid-Desktop- Laptop/dp/B018K3AV7A/)

And, if you spend a little more, SanDisk will sell you a 120GB for $64:

[https://www.amazon.com/dp/B01LY5ZZ4P/](https://www.amazon.com/dp/B01LY5ZZ4P/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> someone remind me how big the sci-hub archive is - when do i get _my_ copy of the literature? ;-)</comment>


Facebook shares plunge after Coca-Cola joins ad boycot - <AUTHOR> https://www.businessinsider.com/facebook-mark-zuckerberg-worth-craters-coca-cola-boycott-ads-2020-6 <comment><AUTHOR> Seems to me companies finally feel compelled to do the right thing over the profitable thing... At least for now of course.</comment>


Show HN: Radioman – a (web-)radio recorder - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/niklasfi/radioman <comment><AUTHOR> If you raw wondering, what what the files on your disk give you, there's also the [1] project providing a rss stream you can subscribe to with the podcatcher built into your listening device.

[1] [https://github.com/niklasfi/dirrss](https://github.com/niklasfi/dirrss)</comment>


Ask HN: Is anyone else having significult difficulty posting right now? - <AUTHOR>

I just spent a few minutes trying to submit a comment. After submitting, I would end up on news.ycombinator.com/r with a blank page. I assume there is some post-POST redirect that is failing to be sent, but the comment doesn't even seem to be being submitted. Similarly, I tried to edit the same post, and got sent to news.yc.com/x without updating the post.<p>I've noticed the whole site is a bit slow today. Are there significant server issues occurring?<p>(Sorry for the meta post.) <comment><USER2> I couldn't even see the ask page before---did that have to do with my "activity points"?

Could someone point me to an explanation of the user configuration terms? (e.g. noprocrast, minaway)

</comment><comment><USER3> Not just slow, but down completely at times.

</comment><comment><USER4> yes, seems really slow from my end too.</comment>


Thoughts from Open Stack insider on fragmentation and politics - <AUTHOR> http://stochasticresonance.wordpress.com/2013/11/04/openstack-a-plea/

<comment><AUTHOR> A response [1] by Pete Zaitcev, another insider

[1] [http://zaitcev.livejournal.com/220213.html](http://zaitcev.livejournal.com/220213.html)</comment>


Ok Entrepreneurs, Time to Step Up - <AUTHOR> http://www.feld.com/blog/archives/2008/10/ok_entrepreneur.html <comment><USER2> I think (I hope) this is an excellent time to be competing on price/value. Competing on price and/or value is a difficult thing during the fat times, but when people start feeling the squeeze, I believe it becomes a much easier sell.</comment>


The BackDoor Factory: Patch win86/64 PE and linux86/64 binaries with shellcode - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/secretsquirrel/the-backdoor-factory

<comment><USER2> On Windows this will require stripping a digital signature off the target exe file. Microsoft did a good job conditioning people into _not_ running stuff that is not signed, so BDF'd binaries are really no good for online distribution. Thought I guess this may work with users who run all and everything they download from the Internet.

<comment><USER3> > Microsoft did a good job conditioning people into _not_ running stuff that > is not signed

Maybe this changed with Windows 8, but till Windows 7, Microsoft did a good job conditioning people _to completely ignore_ the signature.

Or at least the status of the signature, whether it is trusted or not. Is there a further escalation if there is no signature at all I'm not aware of?

If not, there was a great article describing how much work was needed to get the small green checkmark by getting a signature as trusted, and how this did not have any benefit at all (because of styling and design of the dialogue, and UAC asking anyway for confirmation). Of course I don't find that now, but I'm pretty sure it was on HN some time ago, maybe you saw it (probably before Windows 8).

<comment><USER4> Windows 8 is much more persistent in warning you when running unsigned binaries. And IE under Windows 8 flat-out refuses to let you run unsigned binaries.

Getting binaries signed isn't that hard either.</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: How has been your experience moving everything to React - <AUTHOR> I work in Rails shop where we have a monolith with most of the frontend written in either;
1. Server rendered haml pages. 2. Client side React.
Currently, there is a debate going on to move all stuff to react.
Curious about people's experiences and thoughts about it. <comment><USER2> If I had the opportunity to go back in time and change one of my decisions, that would be one. And if I really need to move to another framework, I rather go something more simple, like Vue.

React is hard and sometimes fails to deliver value fast enough.

<comment><AUTHOR> That is an interesting take. So in your experience the promise of fast development and a single technology, hence easy to onboard didn't really work?</comment></comment>


Why Women Don't Apply for Jobs Unless They're 100% Qualified (2014) - <AUTHOR> https://hbr.org/2014/08/why-women-dont-apply-for-jobs-unless-theyre-100-qualified <comment><USER2> Anecdotal evidence. I used to feel more strongly of the 100% qualified and I know many other men who have as well.

There was a point in college that I didn't apply for a scholarship because I didn't have the 3.0 GPA requirement at the time, I had like a 2.95

About 7 months later I found out that a student with a 2.2 GPA had received the scholarship because so few people had applied, they were able to give them to everyone who applied, regardless of qualifications. That was the moment I realized that not everything is written in stone and even if you don't stand a chance, you still should make an attempt at pursuing things.

Indirectly, since then I have encouraged all my friends, both men and women to apply for jobs or things that they are interested in, regardless of qualifications. Sometimes interest/passion alone can help get you a job, or perhaps they will create a more junior position just for you; it is not unheard of to do such a thing.

Since I learned the lesson, there has probably been at least 7 different times in my life, that a rule/qualification was bent or changed that benefited me, because I simply tried for it.

<comment><USER3> _Since I learned the lesson, there has probably been at least 7 different times in my life, that a rule /qualification was bent or changed that benefited me, because I simply tried for it._

If you are "the wrong kind of person," the rules are much less likely to bend for you. If you are the wrong skin color, wrong gender, wrong religion, whatever, _going for it_ can get the rules thrown in your face while everyone accuses you of being an asshole who is trying to break the rules while, at the exact same time, they make exceptions for "the right kind of people."

So, maybe consider that is what a lot of women are complaining about when they decry _male privilege._

<comment><USER4> > going for it can get the rules thrown in your face while everyone accuses > you of being an asshole who is trying to break the rules while,

I don't doubt discrimination exists, and if this has been your personal experience, I'm sorry.

It just seems foreign to me that someone would actually do this for a private role.

If you don't match the skill set the algorithm will filter you out before anyone even knows you exist. If you get by it clearly the reviewer saw something they liked anyway.

What recruiter is going to berate someone and call them an asshole for applying to a job they aren't qualified for? And if that was the case, I'd view it as a dodged bullet.

<comment><USER3> I was making a more general statement. I assume no recruiter would actually call you an asshole to your face, but that does not stop them from thinking you are an asshole who is trying to break the rules, while they fail to see that it works just fine that way for (insert whatever category it works for).

I have made other pertinent remarks in this same discussion that support the idea that what keeps women out is not straight up sexism in terms of "No girls allowed in the boys club." But that doesn't change the fact that women do, at times, get excluded due to their gender and it is maddening when people try to act like that simply isn't a thing at all.

The rules do get applied differently for different people. This is not just losers making excuses.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Chief among these requirements is likely the "years of experience" line. I categorically ignore it in every job post i read. Every job post i write leaves it consciously absent.

A candidate's ability should be judged strictly on what are their abilities today and what is their perceived ceiling. While you can argue that years of experience correlates to those details, it certainly does not inform them.

Anecdotally, my most recent developer job post had an exactly 50:50 male to female applicant ratio. Without exception the women applying were juniors. If this article is to be believed, my putting even "1+ years of experience" might have arbitrarily rejected some number of otherwise qualified candidates.

</comment><comment><USER3> This is the take away here:

 _What held them back from applying was not a mistaken perception about themselves, but a mistaken perception about the hiring process.

This is critical, because it suggests that if the HP finding speaks to a larger trend, women don't need to try and find that elusive quality, "confidence," they just need better information about how hiring processes really work._

This fits exactly with my experience in terms of being female seems to have somehow denied me certain kinds of information, skills and experience that are critical to getting things done. If I can somehow access that info, then I start getting stuff done more on par with the guys.

It has nothing to do with suggesting women lack confidence or are filled with anxiety. In fact, the article is basically rebutting that idea.

<comment><USER6> The "old boy network" isn't just literally about knowing the other "old boys" (though that's obviously important), it's about a shared understanding of how things actually work, as opposed to how the publicly-exposed information says things work. So just networking with people isn't enough--you need to know the unspoken reality of how to make further progress.

(This from someone who has painfully learned not to take _any_ rule or process literally in the real world. There's a reason I like computers.)

<comment><USER3> I agree. But in a predominantly heterosexual world, simply being female makes it hard to access that info. Many of the men who have that knowledge only want to talk to me in order to determine if I will sleep with them. (So if they are faithfully married, they may just not want to talk to me.) That's a genuine barrier to gaining that knowledge.

But I have found it helpful to focus on finding a way to get access to the information I need rather than just bellyaching about "sexism."

Thank you for commenting.

<comment><USER6> My comment wasn't directed at you, but at people who seem to feel that simply exposing someone to the literal subject matter of an industry, whatever it might be ("Learn to code!" "Get an MBA!" etc.), is sufficient to bring them in.

In reality the "in" crowd can't just do that, pat itself on the back for being so "inclusive" this week, and continue with business as usual. Overcoming unconscious cultural biases to actually bring people into the "success network" requires a lot more commitment than that.

The good news is, some people are really trying. But there are still plenty of people who are too lazy, don't understand the problem, or don't care.

<comment><USER3> I thought it was a good comment. I think both of your comments here are good. I was just conversing, not rebutting, defending nor arguing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Hate to sound like a strawman, but: why should this my problem? Unfortunately that's the nature of the game. Many software roles are like that. You just have to apply anyway. Other hidden biases women face, OK, got it, but this is a problem that occurs before any dialogue takes place.

Now whether or not that advice gets properly dispensed is another issue.

<comment><USER8> If you want to hire the best person for the job, why wouldn't you want to do what you can to avoid discouraging good candidates from even applying in the first place?

<comment><USER9> If they are so timid as to not even rise to the challenge of applying for a job with some uncertainty, how can you expect them to deal with uncertainty in the field?

<comment><USER10> Because that's a nonsensical strawman; those things aren't even related.

Personally, I see any employer advertising for a position with stricter requirements than what they'll hire as advertising their own dishonesty. It just makes them look bad.

<comment><USER9> It's mildly dishonest, but it does help you as the employer get closer to the ideal fit for the position. Especially one that is likely posted to a public forum.

The fact that candidates that pre-select themselves out of being chosen is not really a big concern. Why should it be? The way around this is knowing exactly who it is you want for the job, but in that case I wouldn't be posting the job in a public forum. It's kind of what recruiters are intended for.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I had to convince female I know to apply for a position she wasn't exactly qualified for. She did and got the job. Women are socialized to not be as aggressive here in the US, which is a shame because there are lots of bad people in jobs just because a better woman never thought to apply.

</comment><comment><USER12> Here's a question: what if I don't want to hire people like that? If you know something about underwater basket weaving I absolutely expect you speak up when we're considering switching to twine from seagrass. I don't want you to keep quiet and let us make a bad decision because you're concerned your knowledge is invalid.

<comment><USER13> Then you're selecting for people who are overconfident blowhards, who don't really know as much as they think they do.

<comment><USER14> but what ng is saying is that if someone is lacks too much confidence they are not useful. His example shows this --- the under confidant but knowledgable person does not contribute their knowledge when needed so they are not useful despite their knowledge.

<comment><USER15> Not useful? That's harsh.

Could it be argued that not enough care is being taken by the team to solicit the thoughts of the less shouty members? If an organisation didn't want to hire or _deal_ with said folk, perhaps it's a good thing for those looked over?

Research seems to suggest that a more diverse workforce (of all varieties) leads to more successful businesses. And my own personal experience leads me to believe that skilled folk come in some weird and wonderful packages. I know which path I would choose.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> This is why job descriptions shouldn't require a hard set of qualifications, but preferences (e.g. strong background in scripting, exposure to database systems, comfort using git, deep understanding of object-oriented development).

Potentially strong employees don't want to get where they are by lying or stretching the truth.

</comment><comment><USER17> > You've probably heard the following statistic: Men apply for a job when they > meet only 60% of the qualifications, but women apply only if they meet 100% > of them.

Ah, I had not. Landing a job I don't know how to do 2/5ths of sounds awful.

<comment><USER18> depending on who's writing up the "qualifications" though, a lot of them are probably bullshit

<comment><USER19> "10+ years of experience writing production systems in Elm" was a nice gem I saw recently.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I mean every single qualification I put on my job reqs. I also know from experience I'm not going to find that person. If I hire you, I'll pay you to learn the rest of the things.

</comment><comment> J-dawg As a man who struggles with low confidence and self-esteem, I hate the way women are given special attention over this stuff.

I frequently don't apply for jobs I see that I could probably do, for all of the reasons listed in the article. A couple of times I have even pulled out after a successful first round interview due to anxiety about continuing.

This is an example of how the "women in tech" movement alienates men who would otherwise be potential allies.

Instead of focussing on women, why not leave gender out of it and focus on "low-confidence candidates" (or whatever you want to call this cohort of people). That way if it's true that women are more likely to be "low- confidence" then you'll end up helping more women anyway, but you'll do it without alienating men.

Ignoring the root cause and jumping straight to helping women is exactly what what makes feminists look like man-haters.

I'm sick of the stereotype that because I'm an oh-so-privileged white male I must have had a ridiculously easy life and be full of confidence.

<comment><USER21> I'm sorry for your situation but articles like these are looking at trends across groups. They're not meant to insinuate that every man is in a better position than every woman. The article talks about surveying 1,000+ men and women. Undoubtedly, some of the men in that sample had less confidence than some of the women. It doesn't make it invalid to analyze statistics across the group overall.

<comment><USER22> why doesn't it make it invalid? there are many situations where considering the mean is so deeply distorting as to make any conclusions drawn from it either unreasonable or outright false.

I think calls for greater clarity and attention to detail when doing data analysis are well-considered and we should be _deeply suspect_ of claims made based on statistical aggregates, and particularly the mean average which is one of the most distorting and lossy aggregates there is.

<comment><USER21> I don't argue that statistical analysis can be distorting, in fact, of course it can be. All data collection of any sort is at best a limited picture of what we think is reality. But that doesn't make aggregates useless because outliers exist. Just because Stanford freshman swimmer Katie Ledecky is faster than some Olympic gold medal-winning mens relay teams [0] doesn't invalidate the observation that the average man is a faster swimmer than the average woman.

In the GP, I don't think he's making a "well-considered" call for "greater clarity." He's using the fact that because he lacks self-confidence, that focusing on women as a group is bullshit, as if the purported problems that women face are only substantial once it can be proven that all women are worse than all men.

[0] [https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/katie-ledecky-is-the- pr...](https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/katie-ledecky-is-the-present-and- the-future-of-swimming/)

<comment> J-dawg > _as if the purported problems that women face are only substantial once it > can be proven that all women are worse than all men._

This is a total misrepresentation of what I'm saying. I'm more than fine with women being helped. What I'm saying is, don't do it in a way that excludes men with the same problem.

<comment><USER21> Where does this article exclude men with the same problem? You're mad because this article focuses on what the author found interesting in her survey of professionals, a survey she conducted because she was initially skeptical of a widely-quoted aphorism from pop best-sellers like _Lean In_?

The article's author decided to challenge that belief with a systematic analysis and she reports that it is _not confidence_ that is the main factor. Yet you choose to interpret the problem as self-confidence because you, yourself, feel a lack of confidence. Furthermore, you accuse the author of excluding men, because you choose to see her efforts as a zero-sum game.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Education Startup Treehouse Raises $4.75 million - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2012/04/18/web-dev-education-startup-treehouse-raises-4-75m-from-chamath-and-greylock/

<comment><USER2> We're so excited to push harder and faster towards our Mission! :)

<comment><USER3> Keep up the awesome work, guys!

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> congrats ryan and team! love the site!</comment>


Adding a "person to blame" to bug reports - <AUTHOR> http://programmers.stackexchange.com/q/154733/46338

<comment><USER2> Previous discussion on HN:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4176658>

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! I forget that I have to check since StackExchange links are unique.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: What's the most likely way to earn a ton of money as a programmer - <AUTHOR> I don't mean it in a get-rich-quick scheme sort of way. I'm interested in steering my programming career in the right direction, long term.
A bit of background: I'm a 27 year old programmer from Sarajevo, Bosnia. Wrote my first line of code when I was 11, and I loved programming ever since.
I've been doing it professionally for the last 7 years; mostly outsourced web stuff.
So, good people of HN, what say you? <comment><USER2> Learn to build what people want, not what they say.

I've met so many programmers who focussed just on implementing whatever was specified. But a great programmer understands the needs of the customer, and comes up with solutions that are even better than whatever the customer actually said they wanted.

</comment><comment><USER3> Find a partner and start a business where the value you create from writing software accrues to you, rather than to the firm who hired you to write code.

<comment><AUTHOR> I really, really like this comment - especially coming from the outsourcing body-shop type of world, where very little revenue derived from the software trickles down to developers.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Probably the conventional way. Work for a good paying company and keep doing it for a few years. Spend very little. Move up or to a different company when you can. This is the safest way probably. I don't work in tech anymore though and make a meager living as a woodworker, so what do I know.

<comment><AUTHOR> Got fed up and quit, or just retired?

Woodworking sounds like a perfect thing to do after retiring.

<comment><USER4> Quit, I'm still under 30 years old. I was a decent programmer but never a good employee. After running the cycle of finding a job, saving up for a year, quitting, running out of money, I ended up quitting for good.

Woodworking is something I don't recommend anyone try to make a living off cold. It gets expensive quick. Woodwork isn't particularly valuable as a skill and almost anything you make can be mass produced.

You'll end up needing more space than you have. You also can't get completely away from the computer either as you'll need to market the things you create.

For anyone even thinking about quitting their job and trying it full time I would recommend having 100k in savings first.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Software development by itself is not a technical profession that gives the best results from this point of view. Having said this, I'm pretty sure that strong and passion-driven skills in a few fields can make a difference: embedded electronics software better than web, high quality and functional safety oriented better than plain software, ML specialist (but with real experience in challenging embedded applications) better than generic algorithms, and so on. Again: the one professional that specialises in designing the architecture and requisites of a functional safety concerned piece of software (think of an automotive code under ISO26262 norm) will easily monetise his skill much more than the ten software developers that realise the same code.

<comment><AUTHOR> So what you're suggesting is picking a field and specializing, no?

<comment><USER5> Yes, with an eye to the quality and consciousness of what you're doing

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Basically there are three career paths in engineering.

A: Start your own company or series of companies. This is fraught with risks especially if you're not living in SF. It's harder to get known, get talent, network, etc.

B: Become a Manager/Executive. Technically it's not programming anymore, but the lifespan of a coder is maybe 25 years perhaps at best.

C: Consulting/Contracting. Large companies are often more willing/able to pay for top talent, more so than startups. The more companies you have experience with, the more you'll learn about what works and what doesn't. This is true for Devops/Architecture/Processes. Once you develop regular clients, it's possible to develop products for common problems and sell them to your clients.

</comment><comment><USER7> I think the most lucrative software career path involves the overlap of 'really new' and 'high in demand', so things like cryptography/encryption, AI (artificial intelligence), ML (machine learning).

<comment><AUTHOR> That sounds like a good point. Are you going in that direction yourself?

<comment><USER7> Not yet, I'm doing web which I really enjoy, but someday I may switch over to encryption or something else to do with user privacy/safety.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> A lot of it has to do with the company you work for-- different corporate compensation strategies will leave you with differing amounts of savable income. So change jobs if you aren't making progress.

Above all: Save regularly and invest in some way that will bring the power of compound interest. Live below your means, never withdraw the money, always add to it. After a reasonable amount of time, you will find yourself relatively 'wealthy', no matter how much or how little you are accustomed to earning.

Good luck!

P.S. Read 'Bogleheads.org'. If you aspire to gain wealth, it will reveal the surest paths.

</comment><comment><USER9> Learn COBOL. Cloud everybody uses and everybody is driving the idea of migrating to cloud. But all the top business applications in the world are still in Mainframe it's very secure and less down time 99.98%, 30year old programs still runs perfectly fine. Only the top companies have the Mainframe and it's not open-source so only people have access to it can become experts eventually.

</comment><comment><USER10> Machine learning / AI is generally better payed than web development, as it needs some statistics and math understanding. Also it's good to learn algorithms and data structures, as it's a very valuable skill for job interviews (and also it doesn't hurt to understand them).

</comment><comment><USER11> I remember reading recently that the best-paid positions in SV were for product, not engineering. Take from that what you will.

Generally, programming ability is considered less rare and impactful than leadership/people skills.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah, that's sounds about right. Wish I was as good at that stuff as I'm at programming.

<comment><USER11> Like programming skills, people skills take research, practice, solicitation of feedback, and time. If you want those skills, you can develop them.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Alongside other good recommendations here, Learn to be proud of your accomplishments; then you will accomplish more and more.

</comment><comment><USER13> What is your definition of "a ton of money"?

<comment><AUTHOR> Eh, not sure - I just don't want to depend on a job/salary for the rest of my life.

<comment><USER14> I'd say that the majority of these comments are fantastic advice for that path, then. The hardest part is actually going to be curbing your expenses, living well below your means, and investing soundly.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Get a full-time position as a software engineer at a mid-sized enterprise company that is hiring in-house developers to build internal software used for their various business processes. They'll give you a great salary & full benefits, not to mention a very professional environment to work in. I work at an insurance company and I love my team, my work, my development stack, and the work is fairly easy and not very stressful at all.</comment>


Google's April Fools' Day joke - <AUTHOR> http://www.google.com/tisp/install.html <comment><AUTHOR> Actually, I think the concept underlying Tisp is a good idea. Not for ISP which seems facile, but for a network alternative to WiFi/Telco and Cable.

I actually think it is futuristic. Those millions of miles of readily available "cables" in every country with plumbing. Actually I am REALLY EXCITED even though the idea flows with sh1t (yuck!).

Have people experimented with bots to crawl the sewers?

Just think of it. Suppose it turns out that the wireless router in my home, and the local cell phone tower is irradiating my DNA and harming it. Then an idea like this coupled with advances in nanotechnology will really take off.

You could even transport food through this pipeline! :D

\- Anil Philip

</comment><comment><USER2> TiSP is obviously a joke, but I thought Gmail Paper (<http://mail.google.com/mail/help/paper/more.html),> also "announced" today, is better, and more like the style of their prior April Fool jokes: it's subtle enough to get some people thinking it _might_ be true.</comment>


Git Pro Tip: How to List Tags that Contain a Commit with Git - <AUTHOR> http://roadfiresoftware.com/2012/06/git-pro-tip-how-to-list-tags-that-contain-a-commit-with-git/

<comment><AUTHOR> I use this all the time to find out what bugs are where - whether they've made it to staging or production yet.</comment>


Providing Code Libraries is Not Enough for Your API - <AUTHOR> http://apievangelist.com/2011/09/17/providing-code-libraries-is-not-enough-for-your-api/ <comment><USER2> This is really a no-brainer. If you are offering API you want to make it as easy as possible to adopt and implement. However, perhaps it is advisable to go even one more step beyond providing "starter projects" and suggest actual use cases. They could be implemented in those starter projects (best case) or simply illustrate the utility / value of the API. Don't just rely on 3rd party developers to figure out what to do with your API - provide guidance of what you might want to see them do with it.

</comment><comment><USER3> Bootstrap is unique because not only does it provide an API (the javascript link is at the very top of the page), but you can view the source of any segment and see very well documented code samples.</comment>


Run Java code on iPhone: Java to iOS Objective-C transpiler by Google - <AUTHOR> http://google-opensource.blogspot.de/2012/09/j2objc-java-to-ios-objective-c.html

<comment><AUTHOR> All non-UI aspects of the Java code can now be translated into Objective-C. I am very happy to see this finally become a reality. Hopefully, we'll soon see this integrated into Cordova (PhoneGap) as well.</comment>


Experiment reveals evidence for a previously unseen behaviour of light - <AUTHOR> https://www.theguardian.com/science/life-and-physics/2017/sep/03/experiment-reveals-evidence-for-a-previously-unseen-behaviour-of-light <comment><AUTHOR> In this article Joe Butterworth (of the University College London's High Energy Physics Group) writes an excellent example of what science journalism should be.

I think he does a very good job in explaining the distinction between inelastic and elastic photon-photon scattering.

(Unfortunately he also refers to photon-proton work he's done in the past, so maybe he's right to revert to light-light scattering later in the article, and perhaps should have done that almost from the beginning as an aid for the casual reader.)

(A précis might be: when looking at a point fixed in space relative to you, a pair of high-momentum photons with well-defined trajectories through that point can interact at or very close to that point with the result that the two photons will have new trajectories but unchanged momenta.)</comment>