Show HN: Mapping the Militarization of Law Enforcement in the United States - <AUTHOR> http://colenso.org/

<comment><USER2> The problem with using a per-capita dollar figure as a metric of police militarization is that, when you look at the list of the actual items provided, you discover that most of it is pretty innocuous stuff: flashlights, first-aid kits, tool kits, hazmat suits, canteens, etc. The kind of stuff that's available in any army/navy store in the country.

A lot of the counties that appear to receive a high dollar value of military equipment are getting entirely this sort of stuff. Conversely, some of the comparatively low-dollar-value counties have items like grenade launchers, APCs, full-auto machine guns, etc. in their lists. This is the worrying stuff, and the map doesn't offer a good way to distinguish it from the harmless equipment.

<comment><AUTHOR> I think that's a great point, and I agree that it's not the ideal metric for illuminating the issue. However, I'd argue that, to a limited degree, even the "harmless equipment" acquired by Law Enforcement agencies from the Department of Defense serve to "Militarize" the police forces in a way that reinforces conflict rather than cooperation.

If you let the cops dress up like soldiers, train like soldiers, and equip them like soldiers to the extent that we currently do in the US, eventually they start to believe they are in a war.

But yes, I do agree that the ratio of seemingly mundane items to the big ticket MRAP's and APC's is skewed toward stuff you can get at REI or OfficeMax, which sort of muffles the message. There's interestingness and insight buried in this 1033 program data, I believe. This probably isn't quite it, yet.

Thanks for the feedback. I really appreciate it.

<comment><USER2> Sure, if they're wearing BDUs, army-style helmets, etc., it can be reinforcing a culture that isn't appropriate to civic policing. Maybe some of that stuff is part of this program, but even that's still buried among the flashlights and first-aid kits.

Perhaps you could add to the dataset tags that identify whether an item is e.g. "weaponry/armor", "military regalia", "general equipment", etc. and make these available as map filters. Or, even more basically, a simple indication of whether the item is also available for civilian purchase.

Some stuff might be a bit ambiguous too. For example, the entire acquisition for the county I live in consisted of four "utility trucks". Are those MRAPs, or are they just cheap vans that might as easily be used by the animal control department as by the police?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Cool stuff here! I started up a similar site at [https://policedemilitarization.com](https://policedemilitarization.com) \-- perhaps we should collaborate or consolidate some of our efforts?

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! The source is on GitHub if you want to have a go at anything in there... [https://github.com/michaelcolenso/1033-Program- Map](https://github.com/michaelcolenso/1033-Program-Map)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> +1 for a normalized choropleth

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! Considering I probably couldn't even spell choropleth a month or 2 ago, I'm pretty grateful for Mike Bostock and his proclivity for documentation (for D3 and mapping concepts in general) by creating working examples. [http://bl.ocks.org/mbostock](http://bl.ocks.org/mbostock) is my favorite thing on the internets.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: What to Learn First JavaScript or React? - <AUTHOR> I have no programming experience as I am switching career to web dev. Should I start with JavaScript or React?<p>Please suggest me a few good starting resources. <comment><USER2> React _requires_ that you know Javascript. The better you know Javascript first, the better you'll understand React as you learn that.</comment>


Keeping Your Car Safe from Electronic Thieves - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/16/style/keeping-your-car-safe-from-electronic-thieves.html <comment><USER2> The article is unfortunately something that's been happening in Europe for some time. It's just now that the tooling and toys is starting to become prevalent in the US. Europe has the "advantage" of being able to simply drive a car to its ultimate destination in Africa or Russia, and getting cars out of England doesn't require much more effort.

"How much worse could it be in Europe?"

 _Last month, Range Rovers in posh areas of London were being stolen so often that police were instructed to pull over any Range Rover in the vicinity to confirm it was being driven by its owner, the paper reported—which seems to be an extraordinary measure._

It's problematic enough that Scotland Yard has published bulletins on it, and has a website about the kinds of thefts and how to prevent it: [http://content.met.police.uk/Site/keylessvehicletheft](http://content.met.police.uk/Site/keylessvehicletheft)

For those a bit more interested on the topic, The Sunday Times did a neat overview: [http://www.driving.co.uk/car-clinic/six-ways-thieves-can- bre...](http://www.driving.co.uk/car-clinic/six-ways-thieves-can-break-into-a- car-and-how-to-prevent-it/)

<comment><USER3> In London, insurance companies stopped insuring Range Rovers if they are kept on the street overnight. They will only insure it if it's kept in a locked garage. That's how bad it is.

[http://www.autoexpress.co.uk/land-rover/range- rover/89183/ra...](http://www.autoexpress.co.uk/land-rover/range- rover/89183/range-rover-owners-refused-insurance-due-to-theft-risk)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> For those of you not in the loop, these "keyless" systems let you walk up to your car and open your door without getting your key out of your pocket. There is a proximity sensor under the door handle (similar to proximity sensor on your smartphone). When the proximity sensor is triggered, it searches for a nearby key fob and then instantly unlocks. You can also usually start the car (with a push-button start) without getting out the key. And you can lock the doors (from outside the car) by pressing a button on or near the door handle with the fob in proximity. Basically, you never have to get your keys out for any reason.

Anyway, fortunately, I can never find street parking near my apartment for my Prius anyway. But I'm still going to find a small faraday cage I can leave by my bed to put my keys in before I go to sleep...

<comment><USER5> How does this work if you are around town, lets say eating lunch?

<comment><USER6> You could get an RFID-blocking wallet (should anyway, really) and put the key in that.

I have one from [http://difrwear.com/;](http://difrwear.com/;) I've tested it and it's never leaked any signal from cards inside; should work fine with keys too.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I'm not quite satisfied with the explanation in the article -- maybe someone with radio signal experience can help me out?

Assuming that the unlock is accomplished over 2-way communication (car calls to key, key responds), I can understand how an amplifier could boost the car signal to a key that was far away, but how does it boost the key's response to accomplish the second half of the process?

<comment><USER8> The general theory is the amplification works both ways. The device listens for any signal on a certain band and re-transmits it at a higher power. Signals from the car to the keyfob are amplified as are signals from the keyfob to the car. Noise canceling circuitry prevents it from getting into a feedback loop. This sort of thing exists for garage door openers[1].

In practice, I have found the keyfobs tend to transmit with enough power that 50ft isn't a problem, provided they get an activation ping from the car.

[1] [http://www.ebay.com/itm/Signal-Repeater-Enhance-wireless- ran...](http://www.ebay.com/itm/Signal-Repeater-Enhance-wireless- range-300-1000m-315Mhz-/250785246549?rmvSB=true)

<comment><USER9> Exactly: It's not simply an amplifier, it's a repeater. It's similar to two- way radio repeaters used by amateur radio and emergency communications, with the major difference being that this sounds like a full duplex device on one frequency, whereas radio communication repeaters generally use two sets of frequencies in a half-duplex configuration.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> A different type of problem with electronic keys, mainly for motorcyclists, is if you have the key laying nearby in, say, a garage, hop on and ride off (there are some bikes with keyless start), you just stranded yourself wherever you end up shutting the ignition off.

Harder to do with a car unless you forgot your keys and someone playing a joke on you had an amplifier near your car.

<comment><USER11> I spoke to a Tesla owner who had spoken to _another_ Tesla owner who locked his keys in his car. Normally this wouldn't be possible, except he apparently happened upon a dead spot in the interior of the car where it couldn't sense the key. The car automatically locked when he walked away, and that was that.

With Tesla you have a backup, in that you can unlock the car with your phone, as long as both the car and the phone have a signal. Of course this fellow locked his phone in the car too....

<comment><USER12> This used to happen regularly before central locking systems. When I was a kid, buying a used car meant you didn't have central locking. I was probably 17 before my family had our first car with central locking.

Anyway, what happens there is you usually lock all doors before closing them. Then when you close them, if the key is inside, oops.

This is mitigated in slightly moderner cars by the fact that driver-side doors don't lock when they're open.

So I guess we had this beautiful period of the last 15 or 20 years where we locked our cars by pressing a button on the key. Makes it impossible to lock your keys into the car.

I wonder if we're going to decide that was better than keyless before keyless becomes widespread.

<comment><USER11> Personally, I love keyless systems. I also habitually lock my car (happens automatically now, yay!) and never take the key out of my pocket, so leaving it in the car by accident isn't an issue. Old habits die hard, though.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> This is a case when I'd literally like an SSH2 key for my car. With time- proven code, perfect forward security, proof against replay attacks, and so on.

Could be a small but lucrative business!

<comment><USER14> Did you read the article? It wouldn't be effective against this attack unless you are required to take some action to open the door.

<comment><USER13> Oh, yes, it's a different kind of attack! (What I thought about is recording your key's transmission and replaying it later.)

For this, I'd opt for a button on the key; it's still better than not forgetting to put the key to a Faraday cage. Cutting the power circuit and adding a button that restores it must be much simpler that refitting the entire car's locking system.

<comment><USER15> There's already a button on the fob to unlock the doors. The proximity unlock is a separate feature. The whole point of the proximity function is to remove the need to push a button on the fob. Your idea makes no sense, unless you're proposing deletion of the proximity unlock feature.

<comment><USER13> Yes, I'd like to remove or severely limit this feature. When it's always on, and it does not properly check for proximity of the key, it's broken by design.

I'd rather have a button that allows for proximity unlock during 1-2 minutes after pressing, much like Bluetooth public visibility.

If I had an existing key with this proximity misfeature, I'd like to modify it as I described: having press a button to unlock my car is for me preferable to a risk to have it stolen.

<comment><USER15> So you'd like to take the fob out of your pocket, push a button to enable proximity unlock for a brief interval, place the fob back in your pocket, and then have the door unlock when you approach the car?

I'm clearly missing something.

<comment><USER16> It makes sense. Normally I don't keep my car key in my pocket when I'm at home. It's on the desk, or on a hook, etc. So his model is that he hits the button as he grabs the key to stick it in his pocket, then when he approaches his car a few minutes later, the proximity unlock works.

You could add some security to the process without requiring the button press by disabling the proximity unlock unless an accelerometer in the fob detects that the fob is moving.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Does the freezer really act like a Faraday cage?

Quick Google search suggests it isn't really effective:

[http://mentalfloss.com/article/51597/does-refrigerator- make-...](http://mentalfloss.com/article/51597/does-refrigerator-make-good- faraday-cage)

<comment><USER4> Your microwave oven is likely a better choice, since its faraday cage-like behavior is required for both safety and regulatory reasons.

<comment><USER18> And your key battery will thank you... Freezer would kill the battery in a few days of such treatment.

<comment><USER4> Killing the battery isn't a bad idea either, actually :)

(Usually there's a recessed traditional key in the fob that you can use as a backup)

<comment><USER19> Wow, I didn't think of it until I read your comment, but it would be super easy to add a switch to my fob!

With little more than a cap, you can throw on a button that enables the feature on for a period of time then disables it again.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Fixing this issue would probably only happen in newer models of vehicles... the keys for existing cars don't often change, and I'm not sure a recall would ever be issued for something like this.

Here's another article from four years back; the tactic is likely older than that: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2079289](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2079289)

<comment><USER21> For older vehicles you can turn off the Auto Unlock / Lock feature.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> I am not a hardware dev but I think this attack could be defeated by having the car measure the amount of time the key takes to respond to the call outs. If it takes more time than it should for the signal to travel a few feet, then it shouldn't unlock. If they embraced this method then existing cars could be protected with a software update instead of new hardware.

<comment><USER23> The signal travels 10 feet or 3m in 10^-8 seconds. I don't think the sampling circuit has that kind of resolution.

<comment><USER24> I think it could. For example, the Leica Disto2 laser rangefinder has a minimum measuring distance of 5cm. I don't see why an RF-based system couldn't do adequately for this use case.

[http://www.leica-geosystems.us/en/Leica-DISTO-D2_69656.htm](http://www.leica- geosystems.us/en/Leica-DISTO-D2_69656.htm)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> So only cars that "self unlock" are affected right?

If you have remote but no self-unlock it should be okay, for now.

Toyota has a way to turn on and off certain features from the lock system by reprogramming using a pattern of opening and closing the driver door and inserting/removing the key. Same way you add/remove fobs.

So it might be possible to turn off self-unlock. You'd have to find the dealer manual though.

added, or google it: [http://thepoch.com/2013/automatic-door-locking-and- unlocking...](http://thepoch.com/2013/automatic-door-locking-and-unlocking-on- toyota.html)

[http://www.toyota.com/t3Portal/document/om/OM33856U/pdf/sec_...](http://www.toyota.com/t3Portal/document/om/OM33856U/pdf/sec_01-02.pdf)

<comment><USER26> The article specifies there are brute-forcing radios out there that can open bmw's so no, everyone is in danger.

<comment><USER25> Well, I know you can remove all fobs from a system with that same method listed above, so then only the physical key will open it.

But that sucks there are so few codes they can all be scanned.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Oh if only they had read wikipedia...

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distance- bounding_protocol](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distance-bounding_protocol)

Apparently a solution was available in 2010.

<comment><USER8> Most of these keyfobs are running ~16MHz processors.

<comment><USER28> Distance verification would be implemented in the car though. The keyfob would implement some secret function using analog circuitry as described in the linked article.

<comment><USER8> I'm not sure you have taken this thought to its logical conclusion.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Free version: [https://archive.today/WyCdu](https://archive.today/WyCdu)

This is why I despair at all these new keyless cars. I would _pay money_ to have a normal key over one of those, because it's more secure.

Also, one huge reason I would never want a keyless car: I can't check if it's locked before I walk off; I just have to trust that it will lock once I'm far enough away and before someone else jumps into it and drives off.

</comment><comment><USER29> Convenience and radio waves will be the death of us all. Why do car companies not have expert security and RF guys on staff? This is so predictable.

<comment><USER6> Same as the "internet of things" \- they are with security where Microsoft was in the 1990s. Security by obscurity is their watchword.

Always remember: "Internet Of Things is also called IOT, because you'd have to be an IDIOT to believe they're secure".

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> I always check my car doors are locked before walking away, even though I have a more conventional remote central locking system. For the last few years in South Africa, crooks have been using things like garage door openers to block the signals of remotes. Once the driver walks away from the car they steal its contents.

<comment><USER31> I press the lock on my fob twice and it chirps. That way I know it heard the "lock yourself" command. I did it because I found my car unlocked a few times and it must have either been that I forgot to lock it or the first keypress didn't take.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> And this is why I'll get myself a VW T4 again once I have the cash. Unlike T5, easily repairable by yourself and not much electronic bullshit that is vulnerable to hacking or just general wear (I'm looking at you, Renault).

Only thing I'm gonna add is a Raspberry Pi for general monitoring, webcam and a 3G uplink with GPS.

</comment><comment><USER33> Cocktail shaker would be a good alternative to a freezer.

[http://thelede.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/06/25/why-snowdens- vis...](http://thelede.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/06/25/why-snowdens-visitors-put- their-phones-in-the-fridge/)

<comment><USER34> Nope. I just happened to have one handy and tried it. A cocktail shaker does not a Faraday cage make.

[http://cl.ly/0X0K280n1Z06](http://cl.ly/0X0K280n1Z06)

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> The one about the BMWs was a flaw where you could access the Obc port and get the car to program itself a new key. In the 1 series there is an alarm dead spot where the Obc port is. So the thieves would cut the glass, insert a cable, program a blank key and then open the door and drive away.

</comment><comment><USER26> I find it very funny that for such expensive cars there are no security considerations.

I hope to god those contactless credit cards can't be just cloned with a long range rfid reader or else this is gonna be a very funny few years

<comment><USER36> A Mazda3 and a Prius are _such expensive cars_?

<comment><USER26> Depends on where you live. 20k for a car where I live is very expensive. I honestly would not risk even a 5k car on this broken system, is it that hard to put a key in a hole?

<comment> mkr-hn Most cars I see on the road and in parking lots are 5-20 years old. Anything newer is a low-end model. Expensive cars stand out.

<comment><USER37> OTOH, by definition, most cars are going to be 5-20 years old.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> I wonder how many combinations they use. For old school keys there was always a small chance the key would work in a different car. Would be a pain if you shared a combo with a nearby neighbor.

<comment><USER39> Back in the late eighties and early nineties it wasn't difficult if you had a Ford product. My escort key would unlock another same color Escort in the parking lot. My Aunt was able to take the Mercury to the mall but was locked out as she had her husband's keys to his Ford (I forget the model)

However now with the new chipped keys that is far less likely. Yet at the same time we introduce new means to communicate with cars its likely without some sort of industry standards there will be holes as manufacturers will not be inclined to pass on lessons learned to others

<comment><USER40> It happened to a family member recently, for her mid-2000s Ford Expedition. She unlocked and entered a similar looking Expedition before realizing all the stuff in the console wasn't hers.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> There's one place already selling "military spec" faraday cages for this exact purpose: [http://www.carkeycage.com](http://www.carkeycage.com)

</comment><comment><USER42> I remember someone around 2001 describing vulnerabilities in keyless entry to me. It sounded technically feasible, but I was surprised that I never read about it or heard about it happening to anyone. I guess I wasn't reading Jalopnik, but you'd think that this would have gotten more attention earlier.

Who knows, maybe I'm just not paying attention.

<comment><USER43> KeeLoq was widely used back then. Careless users make it theoretically vulnerable to replay attacks, but it's rarely exploited.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KeeLoq](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KeeLoq)

<comment><USER42> Thanks! I could never remember the reference.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> Ok so this allows them to unlock the car, maybe start it, though the article doesn't really get into that, but then what? After they drive beyond the range of the amplified key transceiver?

<comment><USER45> I imagine for safety reasons the car won't shut off just because it's out of range. If it did it'd certainly solve this problem.

In any case, they'd just drive it to the chop shop.

<comment><USER46> I can confirm that it doesn't shut off. At least in my case, it beeps for a while saying "KEY NOT DETECTED", but it doesn't seem to actually do anything about it.

When my key battery was low this would occasionally happen and it wouldn't actually do anything until you need to actually start the car again after stopping it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER47> So this is basically a MITM attack. When is TLS comming to car keys?

<comment><USER48> This is not really a MITM attack. TLS would not have mitigated it.

The attackers are just extending the range over which the key and the car can hear each other. The attackers don't need to decrypt or modify any of the traffic.

</comment></comment><comment><USER49> I can see the high frequency signal being boosted but how is the low frequency response from the key being boosted back to the car as it can usually only go a few inches

</comment><comment><USER50> I know people that has rewired some fundamental part of the car like the fuel pump or something like that. There is a combination of the car buttons that must be pressed to start the car, if not you may start it but the engine will stop after some minutes. It must be done by someone that knows electronics, but doesn't seem that dificult to implement(although probably expensive), and it's very hard to detect and avoid by thieves if done properly.

</comment><comment><USER51> this opens a new era in the car-sharing business!

</comment><comment><USER52> I wonder if the Apple Pay system is vulnerable to a similar attack?

<comment><USER53> Apple Pay requires a thumb press or other confirmation to proceed with the transaction.

<comment><USER52> On the watch is it vulnerable? I thought it only required waving your wrist at the pay point?</comment></comment></comment>


Wanted: Software Engineers. Reward: $12,000 - <AUTHOR> http://www.seomoz.org/blog/wanted-software-engineers-reward-12000

<comment><AUTHOR> Dear Rand, if you get a software engineer from this submission, I expect a check for $12k at my doorstep. Your friend, Ross.

Seriously, though, good luck. The SEO (and hopefully Hacker News) community wishes you success in this recruitment.

<comment><USER2> If you made the link from the <http://www.seomoz.org/refer-an-engineer> page using your email address, we actually would track it back to you (cool feature of Jobvite - you can set it up to tweet/FB share/email links w/ your tracking code).

But, of course, much appreciated. :-)

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I love that they list participation in 4chan as a plus, under "participation in the social web" ([http://hire.jobvite.com/CompanyJobs/Careers.aspx?c=qw49Vfwo&...](http://hire.jobvite.com/CompanyJobs/Careers.aspx?c=qw49Vfwo&page=Job%20Description&j=oBXDVfwQ)).

</comment><comment><USER4> This is a smart idea. A lot of the best startups are using recruiters (who can get $30k or more per hire). The noise level will be a LOT higher than a recruiter, but it might be worth it. Hopefully Rand will write a post-mortem on this.

<comment><USER2> I can definitely do that. As of 2 hours after the post, we've had a good number of referrals and 3 applicants. Jobvite's system does a good job of storing lots of interesting data, so hopefully I can share metrics in a follow-up.

That might go on our dev blog (rather than the main blog) - <http://devblog.seomoz.org/>

<comment><USER5> Wow, didn't know you guys had a dev blog. Awesome!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Pretty tempting offer even for the happily employed. Can I refer myself to the job and get both sides?

<comment><USER7> From the post, it looks like the candidate gets $12k too.

<comment><USER8> I think they're talking about ways to get both $12k amounts (for the referral and the candidate).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I will never refer a friend to an SEO company. Not even for $12,000.

</comment><comment><USER10> Here at Atlassian, we have a refer-a-mate scheme. If you refer someone, you get a free flight to Sydney, Amsterdam or San Fransisco (or $2000):

<http://www.atlassian.com/about/careers/refer-a-mate.jsp>

You can also refer someone for a graduate position for $750:

<http://www.atlassian.com/about/careers/refer-a-grad.jsp>

</comment><comment><USER11> Here's a link to the actual posting: [http://hire.jobvite.com/CompanyJobs/Careers.aspx?c=qw49Vfwo&...](http://hire.jobvite.com/CompanyJobs/Careers.aspx?c=qw49Vfwo&page=Job%20Description&j=oBXDVfwQ)

And on a related note, their job requirements are refreshing. They tell you what they're using, and that they want some related experience, but don't make a huge deal of 'AT LEAST 5 years in our language and framework combination'.

</comment><comment><USER12> Good luck with this. I am especially interested in the noise ratio. Reminds me of a great "about hiring" article from Joel Spolsky: [http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/FindingGreatDeveloper...](http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/FindingGreatDevelopers.html)

</comment><comment><USER13> No H1-Bs?

<comment><USER8> They do say "One more note: Candidates must be eligible to work in the US (citizenship, green card, visa, etc)"

"visa" does seem to suggest some possibility.

<comment><USER13> I don't know if that means they are open to H1B sponsorship or they mean you somehow already have a visa that makes you eligible to work without them sponsoring it. (I don't what that could be). That's why I asked, may be they would like to respond.

<comment><USER14> With all the treats they surely have enough money to sponsor a lawyer for it. The problem could be the time, as H1-B's often take several months to get through (mine took about 3 and required lots of documentation).

The post looks like they are looking for someone _now_.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I think I'm going to fund my next startup on seomoz referrals!</comment>


Robot blamed in death of maintenance technician at Michigan Factory - <AUTHOR> https://qz.com/931304/a-robot-is-blamed-in-death-of-a-maintenance-technician-at-ventra-ionia-main-in-michigan <comment><USER2> Factory robots have been killing people for decades now. This particular incident seems to have resulted from a failure to lock out the robots in the adjacent work cells, which should have been SOP but apparently wasn't. If you're in the work envelope of an industrial robot, it should be completely powered off. This is one of those basic safety procedures like "assume all glassware is hot" and "don't unkink a hydraulic hose".</comment>


Why don't identical twins have identical fingerprints? - <AUTHOR> http://qi.epfl.ch/en/sondage/show/257/ <comment><USER2> The article doesn't answer the question in any satisfying way. A layman would probably believe that the environment in the uterus is the same for both twins, too. The "satisfying" answer is still quite boring: as with everything else, there are stochastic processes in play during embryonic development. For one, cytoplasm is divided asymmetrically, so the two embryos don't begin their separate journeys with a perfectly equal share of their progenitor's resources.

Also, this is a rather silly sentence:

 _Although very similar, the fingerprints of identical twins are nevertheless unique because they are not completely determined by genetics: they are an example of phenotype, which refers to the physical characteristics of an individual that are determined by the interaction of genes and the environment._

By this reasoning, the only thing _completely_ determined by genetics is genes, since every manifestation of genotype could be called a phenotype.

<comment><USER3> > By this reasoning, the only thing completely determined by genetics is > genes, since every manifestation of genotype could be called a phenotype.

But this is absolutely correct, so the fact that the sentence leads to this correct conclusion doesn't make it silly. Genotype is just genes. The manifestations are all determined by the interaction of genes with the environment and the manifestations of observable traits together make up the phenotype.

Some aspects of this are practically tightly controlled by genes because the environments which allow an organism to develop at all tend to also be ones in which the genes involved are expressed in certain ways, and some are less tightly controlled by genes, because there is more practical variation in interaction with the environment. But these are differences of degree.

<comment><USER2> There's no substantive point of difference between my post and yours. I'm simply suggesting that perhaps the "big reveal" for this question is a bit trivial, even for the general public. Everyone knows that no matter a boy's genome, he isn't going to grow as tall as Yao Ming if he only gets 1200 calories per day in his diet.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I still love how people simply assume fingerprints are unique even though there has never actually been any studies with a large enough sample size to make that determination

Fingerprinting, at least for the purposes of criminal investigations is pseudo-science at best, akin to the now debunked microscopic hair analysis.

DNA is always given as a probabilistic statement "there is a 1:1,000,000 chance this DNA belongs to someone else"

However with fingerprints, like microscopic hair analysis, it was simply match/no match... a binary state that is given far far far more weight than it should. The perceptions of the examiner weigh heavily on the outcome.

Finger print examining is an art form, not a scientific discipline

<comment><USER5> How could they be anything other than unique? A fingerprint is a 'function' of a unique individual. You might as well claim that human faces aren't unique.

Bear in mind, of course: the degree of uniqueness between two samples is determined by the metrics used to distinguish between them. I don't know the state-of-the-art with fingerprint analysis, but with a purely physical measure, how can fingerprints _not_ be unique?

<comment><USER6> Many people have problem telling identical twins apart, so under that metric it's true that human faces aren't globally unique. There's even a project to find "twin strangers", which has had some success (see the images at the bottom of [https://twinstrangers.net/](https://twinstrangers.net/) , though they also had the same makeup applied, which makes them look even closer).

> how can fingerprints not be unique?

How can the hash of two different strings be the same? It's all part of the Birthday Paradox, combined with that it means two identify two physical objects as the same thing.

Now, at some point no two human-scale objects are the same. Even with two mass-produced objects, there are slight variations in production because of non-zero tolerances. For example, two sequential $1 bills differ of course by the serial number, but also contain minute differences in the paper.

So as you say, we need to distinguish between how fingerprint analysis is done, vs. the most detailed possible analysis. And we know of several cases where fingerprint identification has been incorrect. One is Brandon Mayfield, a US attorney who the FBI believe, on the basis of a fingerprint match, to have been one of the Madrid bombers.

As a result of that case, and similar ones, people have started to ask the police and others for data which shows that "all fingerprints are unique" is really true. This myth started over 100 years ago, but was based on a small sample size. There's never been the analysis needed to figure out the actual error rate, especially if there are, say, 100 million entries in the system.

See also [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fingerprint#Validity](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fingerprint#Validity) . And notice how that Wikipedia page also includes "No two fingerprints have ever been found identical in many billions of human and automated computer comparisons. _[citation needed]_ ". Where is that citation?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> It's not just the fingerprints. Entire organs may grow according to the elegant mathematics of reaction diffusion systems. Not to mention metal alloys, igneous rocks, suns, galaxies, and so on...

A mathematical theory proposed by Alan Turing in 1952 can explain the formation of fingers

[http://phys.org/news/2014-07-mathematical-theory-alan- turing...](http://phys.org/news/2014-07-mathematical-theory-alan-turing- formation.html)

</comment><comment><USER8> Plants can be cloned easily, but the leaf and stem patterns don't match exactly. Those are generated by a statistical process and can be simulated with an L-system.

The human genome is only about 3.2GB. All the fine detail can't be in there.

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L-system](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L-system)

</comment><comment><USER9> > What purpose do fingerprints serve? Apart from improving our grip on > objects...

This has been partially debunked[1][2]: _The area of skin in contact...was always 33% less than if the fingerpads were completely smooth. This confirmed that fingerprints do not improve our grip, because they actually reduce our skin 's contact with the objects that we hold._

I say "partially debunked" because it might improve grip on wet surfaces: _They may allow water trapped between our finger pads and the surface to drain away and improve surface contact in wet conditions._

It seems similar to the situation with tire treads. If you ask most people why tires have ridges and valleys, they'll say that it improves grip on the road. But if the road is dry, you'll get bigger contact area and therefore better grip with completely smooth tires. In fact race cars use completely smooth tires for better grip (when the racetrack is dry). Tire treads exist to conduct away water when the road is wet, and they improve grip only in that situation.

In an interview with the co-author of the friction study, he made some interesting speculation about the purpose of fingerprints: _My preferred theory is that they allow the skin to deform and thus stop blistering. That is why we get blisters on the smooth parts of our hands and feet and not the ridged areas: our fingerpads, palms and soles._ [3]

[1] [http://newsvote.bbc.co.uk/mpapps/pagetools/print/news.bbc.co...](http://newsvote.bbc.co.uk/mpapps/pagetools/print/news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/8093134.stm?ad=1)

[2] [http://jeb.biologists.org/content/212/13/2016](http://jeb.biologists.org/content/212/13/2016) (actual paper)

[3] [http://www.manchester.ac.uk/discover/news/article/?id=4715](http://www.manchester.ac.uk/discover/news/article/?id=4715)

<comment><USER10> Well, they should test _actual_ grip, instead of percentage of skin contact. So what if it is 33% less? What if it somehow grips better having the prints (as might be the case on wet surfaces)? Also, don't go testing in some material that was never touched upon by early humans.

<comment><USER9> > they should test actual grip

Well, the referenced article says that that's what they did (in addition to further measurements to determine area of contact).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Upvoted for asking a question in the headline and then immediately answering it in the first sentence of the article.

<comment><USER12> EPFL in the top 15 unis in the world almost consistently in any of the sciences. For CS and mathematics, they'll usually rank top 5 with INRIA and Cambridge, perhaps higher at the graduate level. (I was going to go to attend for a graduate degree in Algebraic Topology there or but the opportunity cost and, well, I suppose primarily coming to terms with my own mediocrity made me decide against.) But yeah, they're not really trolling for hits to generate ad revenue ;).

Re: one sentence answers - I'm with you. I took this lovely Python module and pipe most everything that I know [1]will be filler to this [https://github.com/miso-belica/sumy](https://github.com/miso-belica/sumy). I've been doing it for a while now and I don't feel as though I am missing out on anything.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> I don't know if this is as significant as fingerprints or not, but I have a coworker with an identical twin, and her sister has Crohn's disease, and my coworker does not. Chron's is apparently genetic, but there must be some environmental factors as well.

<comment><USER14> or it could reflect a damaged microbiome.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> According the Wikipedia: '...dynamical systems that are highly sensitive to initial conditions...'

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaos_theory](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaos_theory)

</comment><comment><USER16> You might as well ask why two cloned trees don't have the branches and leaves at the exact same positions...

<comment><USER17> Except that in your example, the trees are influencing by environmental factors throughout their life, whereas the first sentence of this article says it's environmental factors in utero that influences fingerprints.

<comment><USER2> It isn't a perfect analogy, but it still works. The only reason the other option, "development is completely random" isn't the right answer is because of the word "completely."

Honestly, the survey question is poorly asked, and doesn't produce a particularly interesting discussion. Maybe something was lost in translation.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Because not every factor is genetic. Most of them are environmental and random.

The best example is with trees. No two trees have the same structure of branches given that they have the same DNA.

The world is mostly stochastic.)

</comment><comment><USER19> Why don't laplacian systems with slightly different initial conditions evolve in the exact same manner?

<comment><USER20> Robustness is drive by homeostatic feedback loops and/or equilibrium states. Some systems will act chaotically and will be more sensitive and unpredictable to changes in initial conditions.

<comment><USER19> Which gives an answer to the question posed by the post.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I'd like to see how much bilateral variation there is compared to phenotypic variation between twins.</comment>


Show HN: pygm.us, the fail-only URL shortener - <AUTHOR> http://pygm.us

<comment><AUTHOR> I wanted a project to get myself familiar with the pyramid framework, so I threw together this little jobby.

As I say on the site, the idea is that if a URL shortener is known to be unreliable, it'll force people to use it only for short-term convenience (the "non-evil" use case) and thus won't cause long-term problems (e.g., what if the site goes away, et cetera).

I realize there are other concerns (operators trying to monetize the links by inserting interstitial ads), so I suppose you'll just have to trust me when I say I promise that pygm.us won't do that. :)

</comment><comment><USER2> The problem of target URL being unknown until you follow the link still applies.

<comment><AUTHOR> Totally true. It seems to me that for most of the legitimate temporary uses (e.g., shortening a google maps URL), that's not a huge issue.

Agreed that there's still, e.g., the problem of people hiding affiliate links behind shorteners and the like.

Note also that you can always append = to the URL to get its status page, which tells you where the link goes. (I realize this is a less than satisfying solution to the general problem.)

<comment><USER2> It's not about affiliate links or advertisements. Target URL should be just there, without contacting random servers to determine it.</comment></comment></comment>


Promised Fix for Health Site Could Squeeze Some Users - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/26/us/politics/general-contractor-named-to-fix-health-web-site.html?hpw

<comment><USER2> > Quality Software Services Inc., a unit of the UnitedHealth Group

Wow. Isn't that a bit of a conflict of interest? The exchanges are supposed to be a neutral ground between individuals and insurers.

How in the world was this company selected to be the crack team to lead the effort?

They appear to be a completely bog-standard .NET/Java gov't contractor, throwing the word "cloud" around a lot. The only obvious thing that makes them stand out is their connection to UnitedHealth Group.

I also wonder if any of this work will be farmed out to offshore offices: [http://www.qssinc.com/newsHyd.html](http://www.qssinc.com/newsHyd.html)

Ah, it looks like their initial involvement was already questioned a year ago: [http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/contractor- ch...](http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/contractor-chosen-to- fix-healthcaregov-faced-questions-from-lawmakers-last- year/2013/10/25/fe27e8ee-3da3-11e3-b6a9-da62c264f40e_story.html)

</comment><comment><USER3> Looking at this quality of American contractor work, I believe it would have worked better if they had outsourced it to say, even India.

</comment><comment><USER4> Health care in the United States is screwed up. I fail to see how more government intervention like this is going to fix it. The same guys who run your DMV and tap your phone lines are now going to provide your medical care? No thanks.

<comment><USER5> Well, the only credible free market alternative is to re-instate the forces necessary for free markets to naturally regulate themselves by banning things like employer-sponsored health benefits. Which I'm guessing has a snowball's chance in hell of making it through Congress. (It certainly would still result in lots of people shouting "Government! Aaaa!" and flailing their arms. But I'm beginning to think you can't even walk down to the corner store to buy a bag of chips without someone doing that nowadays.)

As to how it might fix things, well, I'm not sure what we got is likely to work out better than that option would have. Nor is it likely that it would work better than the option with the most proven track record, which is a single-payer system. But that, too, is politically unlikely. And will probably continue to be so as long as we remain a people who'll readily burn an extra $10 in gas in order to get across a state line so we can save $3 in sales tax. So yeah, what we got isn't great. . . but it's what we could get. And it's at least worth a shot. Considering the system we've been operating under is inarguably the worst one in the developed world, it certainly seems better than doing nothing.</comment></comment>


Crispr gene editing in human embryos wreaks chromosomal mayhem - <AUTHOR> https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-01906-4 <comment><USER3> This highlights why it was so irresponsible to create CRISPR babies, and why you take things slow in science. Don't let the analogies about bio being programmable just like a computer fool you - it's not that easy or that simple. Bio is messy and complex.

Note: looks like these findings are from preprint, and so still need to undergo peer review. This is a phenomenon that was anticipated however based on the science, even though as the article states there some controversy around the specific mechanisms at play.

<comment><USER4> As a biologist and programmer, nothing makes me roll my eyes harder than SV types talking about biology like a computer.

The analogy might hold if we treated CPUs like a magical artifact that we don't have the technology to understand.

<comment><USER3> I don't know if that would be enough to make the analogy hold, since what we do know about biology includes a lot of things that are distinctly non- computer like. At the end of the day, one is a system designed by humans for humans, while the other is a system that's an emergent phenomena of billions of years of chemistry, physics, and statistics. In computers you create the rules and then build systems that follow the rules, and then push the rules to their limits to see what you can do. In bio the only rule is that an arrangement of atoms that's more likely to replicate a version if itself into a future time period will be more likely to be found in that future time period compared to an arrangement of atoms that isn't. And that principle has had 4+ billion years to play with the rules of physics to see what it can do, and we're just trying to decipher that now.

<comment><USER4> I mean, I think that there is _some_ merit to biology-computer analogies, I just don't think anyone can expect those analogies to hold in reality. But you are exactly on point. There are presumably "rules" in biology, but they are occluded by spooky action a distance and oodles of hidden and ever-changing state.

<comment><USER5> I think it's important not to say that biology is somehow 'spooky', or not governed by physical rules. We actually know the outlines of those rules pretty well - they're just complicated.

The really big difference is that biology computes at _overlapping_ time and distance scales, simultaneously. There are biological computational processes that occur at microseconds, to millennia, from fractions of a nanometer to kilometers all happing in concert and referencing each other. In the building of our own computational tools we generally try to avoid mixing physical scales like that. The analogies to computers aren't inherently wrong, they just need to mix in a lot more complexity.

<comment><USER4> "Spooky action at a distance" doesn't imply that it's not governed by physical rules - and I think it's certainly a valid descriptor for biological systems as a whole.

Yes, we can break down aspects of biology into nice subsystems that we can define rules for - e.g. we have a pretty good idea of how DNA polymerase, or the ribosome carry out their duties (in isolation). It's when we start looking at the emergent properties of having all of these things in one larger system that our understanding starts to break down.

<comment><USER6> Valid / invalid for metaphors, to me, depends on the audience.

For laypeople, ill equiped to deal with high orders of complexity: spooky.

For people in the field: details.

For some audiences being accurate is less descriptive than being reductionist. Because if you lose your audience's attention, you've communicated no accuracy.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> "the researchers used CRISPR–Cas9 to create mutations in the POU5F1 gene, which is important for embryonic development."

Title should say "researcher succeeds in disrupting embryo development"

</comment><comment><USER8> I'm confused. Don't we use crispr all the time on other organisms? Mice, drosophila, etc. wouldn't we already have seen this?

<comment><USER9> What makes you think we haven't?

"Previous work using CRISPR in mouse embryos and other kinds of human cell had already demonstrated that editing chromosomes can cause large, unwanted effects. But it was important to demonstrate the work in human embryos as well, says Urnov, because different cell types might respond to genome editing differently."

It says of one study "Of 18 genome-edited embryos, about 22% contained unwanted changes". Such a failure rate probably isn't such a big deal in some applications. In embryos, especially human embryos, it's definitely a big deal.

<comment><USER10> In a way, large changes that make the embryo completely unviable would be less bad: the embryo would be wasted, but at least you wouldn't have caused someone a lifetime of genetic disease.

The worst case scenario would be a viable but badly diseased embryo.

I wonder if they can tell which of these outcomes they got from the experiment.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Looks like biological systems are kind of complicated.

</comment><comment><USER12> Let's face it. Crispr was evolved by bacterial cells in the grip of a phage virus invader. It had to act with enormous speed to try to get ahead of the virus's high speed reproduction machinery and spread the word to successor generations - if any. Fidelity was sacrificed to make an RNA threshing machine and even then it lost more often than it won against the phage. The winners trapped those palindromically patterned bits and lived to breed another day - maybe.

</comment><comment><USER13> My intuition suggests that the precise editing will not work out no matter the technology used. What I see is something that can read and combine traits from multiple places scattered all over DNA, calculate some kind of acceptable range, be able to change that range that "recalculates" DNA then edit it in multiple places simultaneously. This will work on just tuning the genome though.

</comment><comment><USER13> I wonder why I haven't heard about the efforts to design gene editing tools from scratch using protein design. So they will not "steal" some poor bacteria IP, but will build a customized tool based on the requirements. Hard problem? Absolutely. But it will pay out in the long-term, also will allow to improve these proteins over time.

<comment><USER12> This exact scenario is now evolving in dozens of labs the world over to use the essence of the initial CRISPR mechanism in a new and superior(patentable) way to perform gene edits in the precise location with the precise new information required. It will end up better, but probably slower and surer.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Biological noob here, but isn't Cas9 not well suited for humans? I recall that I read or heard somewhere that Cas12 was preferred for this usecase.

</comment><comment><USER15> The double negative in the title of the original article is bad editing - <USER2> either wrecks the chromosomes or creates a mayhem. If it wrecks the mayhem, it is a good thing(TM).

<comment><USER4> The title says "wreaks", not "wrecks".

<comment><USER14> Yes, I believe that is correct. The expression is, after all, "wreaks havoc".</comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: YC like button - <AUTHOR> http://zupa.hu/ycombinator-like-button/

<comment><USER2> I've never understood why people randomly put really big pictures of their faces on things, with no context/tag/info, it's just a face, not even "Hey, this is me" in the sidebar.

<comment><AUTHOR> I find it boring to see an apple with a writing: "Eat it!". I guess I can figure it out myself what to do with an apple.

I think it's great to know who you are dealing with, I have a picture of me on my business card as well. Maybe you should concider it.</comment></comment>


Illinois Bet on Video Gambling and Lost - <AUTHOR> https://features.propublica.org/the-bad-bet/how-illinois-bet-on-video-gambling-and-lost/ <comment> lojaff-PPIL Hi all — I'm a reporter involved with this video gambling story at ProPublica Illinois. The story mentions video gambling addiction may be on the rise. We're looking to learn more about that directly from people affected by it. If you or someone you know compulsively plays the video slot or poker machines anywhere in the state, please consider answering a few confidential questions here: [https://www.propublica.org/getinvolved/help-us- investigate-i...](https://www.propublica.org/getinvolved/help-us-investigate- illinois-video-gambling-addiction)

By sharing your story, you'll be helping us understand this important and overlooked cost of video gambling expansion. Thank you!

-Logan Jaffe firstname.lastname@example.com

<comment><USER2> Logan I don't have names for you but this story is spot on, I hope the Trib and local news stations pick it up.

Video gambling is totally amok in many parts of Chicago and its environs.

For people who haven't seen it in person: even regular Mom & Pop restaurants have video slots. Donut shops. Italian sandwiches. Bars. Imagine if Subway devoted a quarter of its restaurants to video slots. It's crazy.

And watching the people who play these games it's obvious it's not rich people, it's most often (IMO) fixed-income retirees. People who can least afford it.

I'm for legalized gambling but what's going on in Illinois right now is totally bonkers. Legalizing video slots and putting them everywhere is the second dumbest idea in Illinois since Mayor Daley sold off some of the highways.

<comment><USER3> > I'm for legalized gambling

How do you prevent people who can't afford it from gambling when it's legal?

<comment><USER4> I'm for legalised gambling too.

You simply don't. Not your problem. If an adult decides to gamble, it's his decision and none of your business.

<comment><USER5> When he loses all his money and then needs welfare or starts mugging people it becomes my business.

<comment><USER4> And the solution is stand your ground law.

<comment><USER5> If I have to get into a gunfight on the street because banning gambling machines would be against "freedom" well I guess I'm not that into freedom.

<comment><USER4> It's about deterrance. Hardly anyone is going to attempt anything funny if you might be packing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> It really is a blight. Everywhere you go (other than Chicago) there are sleazy-looking banners offering video gambling. Even unexpected places. Literally every strip mall I'm aware of has at least one, regardless of the income tier the strip mall targets. Even the mom & pop diner just off the highway now has its windows plastered with adverts for video slots and video poker.

Searching for video gambling will only turn up the dedicated establishments (it doesn't turn up that diner, nor many dozens of bars) but you can still see how ridiculous it is from searching any downstate community.

[https://firstname.lastname@example.com...](https://firstname.lastname@example.com,-88.2827851,16z)

Here, the same chain has locations barely a thousand feet from one another, and they're not even the only dedicated dens in that immediate area.

Bar - doesnt show up when searching 'video gambling': [https://firstname.lastname@example.com,-88.2040812,3a,75y,97...](https://firstname.lastname@example.com,-88.2040812,3a,75y,97.9h,80.65t/data=!3m6!1e1!3m4!1sVdErxAGriHxia1Zwr4JBDQ!2e0!7i13312!8i6656)

Family Diner - every window is now covered with gambling advertisements, but street view is from 2015, before they converted. Still useful for understanding how persvasive the spread is and the types of businesses that are converting to stay competetive. [https://firstname.lastname@example.com,-88.2190425,3a,75y,6...](https://firstname.lastname@example.com,-88.2190425,3a,75y,68.14h,79.47t/data=!3m6!1e1!3m4!1sLvwPz8saESAYSb_XSSJoew!2e0!7i13312!8i6656)

<comment><USER7> On an unrelated note, as a non-American, it's stunning to see how wide those roads are, how big those parkings are, and the amount of SUVs and pickup trucks. I mean, that's kind of the American stereotype, but it calls my attention to see that it's actually true. (Speaking about the last link in particular.)

<comment><USER8> Keep in mind that restaurant is on the outskirts of Urbana and footsteps away from I-74 in a very rural part of Illinois. It's a college town, but that's a couple miles away from the campus.

Most Illinoisans live in or around Chicago. Chicago has big streets too, but does not look like Urbana:

[https://firstname.lastname@example.com,-87.7207679,3a,75y,6....](https://firstname.lastname@example.com,-87.7207679,3a,75y,6.89h,90t/data=!3m10!1e1!3m8!1sHSQFRiwrBbA01YsuALixkw!2e0!6s%2F%2Fgeo2.ggpht.com%2Fcbk%3Fpanoid%3DHSQFRiwrBbA01YsuALixkw%26output%3Dthumbnail%26cb_client%3Dmaps_sv.tactile.gps%26thumb%3D2%26w%3D203%26h%3D100%26yaw%3D79.00348%26pitch%3D0%26thumbfov%3D100!7i16384!8i8192!9m2!1b1!2i45)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Quote "At every key point, state officials made decisions that undercut taxpayers and helped the companies that market video gambling"

And that is one reason why I left Chicago. Both city and state are corrupt. I remember receiving an automated ticket for running a stoplight on a date when I wasn't even in Chicago.

<comment><USER10> I got a ticket for running a light in Chicago, but because I was from out of state, it took them 'extra long' to send me the ticket in the mail (their words when I called). By the time they had mailed me the ticket, the deadline to pay had already passed and the fine had doubled.

<comment><USER11> Something like this happened to me as well.

I skipped a toll station on the highway; which should be fine. A sign tells you that you can pay online within 7 days by searching your license plate. The next day I searched my license plate to pay what should have been $3-$4 in tolls and nothing came up. A month later I got a letter in the mail telling me that I owed the state around $100 for the tolls I "failed to pay" with nearly $90 assessed in late fees. The whole system is scummy.

Literal highway robbery.

<comment><USER12> I had a similar issue after moving from Illinois to Wisconsin and getting new plates - but forgetting to update the plates within I-Pass. (So, I had a valid I-Pass, it was just on the same old car with new plates.)

A few years later I received a collections notice for $1,400 for ~$30 worth of tolls. (This was the first notice they'd sent me. No one could explain why.)

After spending hours on the phone with I-Pass the best they could do was reduce the fine to $300 while making the snarky offer that I could go to court if I didn't like it.

This was effectively a customer service issue (I was a valid customer in good standing), and I still wound up paying 10x the actual cost just to avoid missing work and traveling.

<comment><USER13> As an Illinois resident, I had a different experience dealing with I-Pass issues. Apparently my card on file expired, so they couldn't refill my account. By the time I realized a week or so after noticing that I was getting the yellow light and not blue, I updated the card, paid the outstanding tolls. A month later, I get a fine notice for like $500. I called customer service. Took about 90 minutes on hold, but once I got a hold of someone, the gal was very pleasant, took a look at my account, said something along the lines of "Your accounts in good standing, I'll cancel the fines." Never heard another peep about it. Also one of the few times I asked to speak with her manager to let the manager how happy I was with the service (rare for a government employee).

<comment><USER14> Worth mentioning the ipass (and tollway) phone lines are actually handled by a group that helps people who are blind, visually impaired, disabled and Veterans. I have never had a bad experience with calling in.

<comment><USER13> I was not aware of that. Good to know.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> The shear absurdity of trying to fund anything beyond pet projects using gambling taxes should be clear to anyone.

This is pretty much a privatized tax collection for deliberately preying on the weak.

I mean do the reverse math, if gambling revenue had met expectation, how much money would the poor have had to burn on gambling?

</comment><comment><USER16> I am in support of legalized gambling but the way it is done in states like Illinois and New York (my state) just preys on problem gamblers and is indeed a money grab by the state.

The arguments for making gambling illegal or restricted in these states are all nullified by the state running them. They offer games with bad odds, in poor facilities. New York sued daily fantasy sites saying it is "dangerous and addictive" but then reeled that all back once they agreed to get a cut of the action.

</comment><comment><USER17> I used to work for my uncle who had video games, pinballs and video slots. It was semi-regulated years ago but then more rigidly controlled. And yes there people who ranged from addicted to casual as were the drinkers at the bar.

It's not the machine it's the thrill though. MY uncle was contacted by a man's wife who said he dumped his entire paycheque into the slots. My uncle took a slot machine to the man's house, set it for free play but the man was not interested in that. The devices people use for gambling slots, dice, cards, don't matter it's not what it is it's the result people desire.

I've seen people win $100,000 get it in cash and dump it all back in and be happy. Or others who spend $1,000 to win a $50 bonus pot, a very common thing.

I can even somewhat tell what models of slots are in the picture in the article shows a (left) IGT/Spielo Prodigi VU, (middle)a WMS BB2 and (right) a Bally AP-1 V32.

<comment><USER18> >It's not the machine it's the thrill though. [...] set it for free play but the man was not interested in that.

In my humble layman's opinion it's the risk taking. There's no risk in playing a free machine and there's no reward since it won't pay anything.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Just a statistical nit: the article states that there are more non-casino video gaming machines in Illinois than in any other state in the country, including Nevada. While that's true in absolute terms (based on ProPublica's figures from this article) the opposite is true in per-capita terms. There are more machines in Illinois than in Nevada, but there are also more people in Illinois than Nevada by a factor of 4, and, consulting the table in the article, you'll see that there are not 4 times more machines in Illinois. In fact, per-capita, according to this table, Illinois ranks last, not first.

(I agree with I think most of this thread that these things are a blight.)

<comment><USER19> What happens to that statistic if you subtract the areas where this is not legal (the entire city of Chicago - actually looks like all of Cook County, and I haven't seen any of these machines inside the county)? My guess would be that stat goes up quite a bit.

<comment><USER20> There's video gambling in some of the southwest suburbs. Palos Hills, Orland Park. Those are both Cook.

<comment><USER21> Which are both hard to get to without public transport that one sees in Chicago proper (PACE barely counts). A lot of folks in the city don't own a car. At the same time those same folks are probably smarter than to spend money at gambling parlors.

<comment><USER20> palos and orland are pretty reachable by metra, though the times aren't ideal. Once you're there my memory is that it's walkable enough to a bar with gambling. It'd also be like a $5 uber/lyft from the metra.

My suspicion is that urban gamblers mostly take the blue line to the shuttle to Rivers.

<comment><USER22> Horseshoe runs something like hourly shuttles to Chinatown.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> In a kind of dark way, this is great news. It will be useful for other states, as well as the city of Chicago, to have an example use case for NOT legalizing video lottery.

<comment><USER24> Maybe we can prohibit drinking and drugs eventually, too!

<comment><USER23> Sensing this is sarcasm relating to the restriction of freedom of choice, and would like to address it in a couple ways that might provide a different perspective.

The point isn't that gambling shouldn't be legal anywhere; it's that the current state of the government is unable to properly handle the social and financial oversight and fallout in regards to taking such immense measures. Compared to other state's tax rates, there is no reason why Illinois should be on the low (30%) end.

>the Video Gaming Act allocates just 5 percent of the revenue from the machines to local governments, even though they shoulder the bulk of the social costs related to gambling

Think about that - it's crazy. Five. Percent. Sometimes it is worth restricting the freedoms of individuals if they have a large net detrimental affect on society. At five percent they most certainly do. The majority of said society should decide whether restrictions are to be redacted, not a handful of politicians who live in the pockets of lobbyists.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Heck, even gas stations around my area have signs stating "VIDEO GAMING" like it will draw in patrons with nothing better to do. The convenience shop down the street from me (Chicago outskirts) routinely has people occupying seats and looking dejected, but not actually playing any of the gambling games when I'm there.

<comment><USER26> I don't like the term "Video Gaming". I play video games. I'm a bit of a gamer. But I am in no way any sort of gambler. Conflating the two makes one look less a dangerous vice, the other more of one. Video games and gambling terminals are totally different things.

(Yes, the lootbox debate, but you know of what I speak).

<comment><USER27> gaming has included gambling since gambling was invented.

gam·ing /ˈɡāmiNG/ noun

1\. the action or practice of playing gambling games. "gaming is evident everywhere in Las Vegas, not just on the Strip"

2\. the action or practice of playing video games. "I'm fourteen years old and enjoy gaming and playing baseball"

<comment><USER28> "gaming" has long included gambling, but _" video gaming"_ has only recently included gambling, in the popular lexicon, anyway (no doubt you can dig up an obscure reference from long ago; law of averages and all that).

<comment><USER13> Video gambling has been around a long time. Greasy spoon/truck stop diner my family frequented as a kid some 30 years ago had video poker & keno. And they weren't hidden away in a corner - they were right there in the dining area.

<comment><USER28> Sure, but that doesn't contradict one word of my post. I suspect you're trying to make the argument I preemptively rebutted with my "law of averages" reference.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> I watched this a year or so ago, it might have been on YouTube but got taken down

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

It's a documentary about video gambling machines in Australia, quite eye opening to say the least....

</comment><comment><USER30> The knock-on effects from this poorly considered legislation are ridiculous:

 _The legalization of video gambling also triggered another shift in the state's revenues, one that led to a drop in education funding. While the bulk of video gambling revenue goes to fund Illinois Jobs Now!, most of the state's casino revenue flows into the Education Assistance Fund, which provides grants to public elementary and secondary schools, colleges and universities for building projects and other expenses.

But when video gambling became legal, gamblers no longer had to travel to the state's 10 casinos to place a bet. Between 2013 and 2017, state revenue from casinos in Illinois declined 15 percent, from $462 million to $393 million, as income from video gambling machines grew nearly 900 percent, from $30 million to $300 million, state records show.

The cannibalization of casino revenue contributed to a 22 percent decline in the amount of money going to the Education Assistance Fund between 2013 and 2017, leaving fewer dollars for the state's struggling schools._

<comment><USER31> Seems more like a tax distribution problem than anything else. Casino revenues went down $69 million, but video gambling revenue went up $270 million. Seems like a good deal tax wise.

<comment><USER32> Also, the bottom line is that these sorts of "solutions" are just a way to increase the pool of discretionary spending funds. Dedicated revenue sources almost always seem like a way for the state to pass an unpalatable vice product (legalized pot or gambling being two big ones recently) to the citizens. "Hey, you're going to have people gambling in your back yard, but it's for the kids! Please don't notice that while the gambling generates an extra X million, we also cut X million from the general fund allocation to the same expense"

TL;dr- I'm fine with this stuff being legalized, but this helps demonstrate the possible backfiring with the feel good optics often tied to this sort of thing.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> I can kind of understand how people get addicted to Video games, spending all their days and nights behind a screen. I dont understand how you can do the same feeding money into a random machine with flashing lights and nice sounds non stop.

<comment><USER34> You will be interested in this NY Times article from 2004:

[https://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/09/magazine/chrome-shiny- lig...](https://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/09/magazine/chrome-shiny-lights- flashing-wheel-spinning-touch-screened-drew-carey.html)

I suspect a lot of the techniques mentioned in the article made their way from slot machine design into mobile games.

<comment><USER33> Wow maybe I'm out of touch.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> I'm a trustee on the board of a very small village in Illinois. There was a vote to allow the gaming before I got on the board, and only one vote since then to approve a new license for an establishment. I argued the income-vs- sleaze ratio was lousy, but was out-voted. I wish I'd had this article and its facts to back up my more emotional reasoning for not liking it.

Video gambling is indeed a blight, even if it is profitable, but this article only makes it more depressing to see just how worthless (or actively punitive) it is to all but the companies that apparently wrote the original legislation.

</comment><comment><USER36> I lived in Capital City / a Central Illinois for a year, and I was blown away with how many establishments hosted gambling video games. Granted, most bars were divey, but even the ones that weren't (i.e. the nice bars in town) still keep a little section in the corner that looks like a degenerate's arcade.

I should also mention that housing is _cheap_ in this area. I'm talking 2br1ba house with garage and front/back yard, one mile from downtown for $600. So, renting a large commercial property was likely cheap as well.

</comment><comment><USER37> While there are clearly communities where this is a problem, I've lived in Chicago, now I live in the suburbs and still work downtown, and honestly outside of OTB and the Casinos, have never actually seen a video gambling machine in Illinois. So, this is not a state wide blight, but more of an isolated problem in various places.

<comment><USER38> As noted in the article, you most likely live in an affluent suburb. They don't have these things in Lake Forest or Barrington. On my way to work, on a short strip of road that runs through Hoffman Estates there are two Shelby's within a 1000 ft of each other. They are almost always empty apart from one or two patrons, yet they have been there for a couple of years now - I assume the few problem gamblers in the immediate area are literally supporting these places. Even if they _were_ generating significant revenue for their municipalities, the whole enterprise is immoral.

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> I left the state before the gambling and concealed carry changes took place.

My last visit was approx two years ago and it was impressive how much worse everything seemed to be. Highway rest stops with "no firearms" stickers affixed to their glass doors, the highly visible kind with a red circle and diagonal stripe over a black pistol. Those stickers are all over the place now, it felt like I must be surrounded by lethal weapons, what a miserable way to live.

The prolific gambling dens and video gambling machines just made everywhere feel like an urban ghetto wasteland on top of it.

I'm thrilled to have escaped before it got so much worse. The corruption was already exceptionally bad. The monetary costs and stress I endured throughout my adult years spent there on police encounters, traffic fines, parking tickets, towing fees, it's completely insane.

Living in CA is an absolute dream in comparison. We may have high state taxes but I'm not constantly getting antagonized by a corrupt government desperate to raise money through continuous public contact. There are also extremely affordable parts of CA, I own desert property that's fully paid for just a couple hours from LA and the Pacific coast, an hour from Big Bear. The yearly property taxes are equal to a fancy dinner, 5 acres and a cabin for the price of a car. People obsess over the housing problems of very specific internationally-desirable elite-class pockets of CA, there's plenty of CA to go around.

<storytime>

The first time (and only in over 10 years) I ended up in traffic court in CA was for excessive speeding, it was for 90+ in a 55 - a mandatory court appearance. The police interaction was more entertaining than stressful, and when I went to court the judge started the session by announcing that the state had requested _all_ fines be pushed to their maximum due to some temporary political budget problems. She then announced, that in protest, since the county doesn't find it appropriate given the general economic downturn, all penalties issued that day would be at the absolute minimum. I paid less than a hundred bucks for that ticket.

This situation, from start to finish, would _never_ have happened in IL. I would have had police with guns drawn on me when pulled over, searching my vehicle after smelling nonexistent marijuana. The judge would have been a dickhead obsessed with people removing their hats in his courtroom before wiping out their savings accounts.

</storytime>

<comment><USER13> > it felt like I must be surrounded by lethal weapons, what a miserable way to > live.

You already were, but now it's legal for law-abiding citizens to have them.

<comment><USER39> The average law-abiding citizen I knew back in IL was one heated discussion on a bad day away from shooting someone had they always been carrying.

Furthermore, the vast majority of people qualify as law-abiding citizens. A very small minority of the population will illegally carry firearms with them. I do not accept your statement as anywhere near accurate.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> Anyone have an examples outside of Vegas and maybe the first two Connecticut casinos where bringing in legalize gambling actually derived on the promise of raising projected revenue benefiting the wider economy?

<comment><USER41> Gambling is zero sum, so within a closed system, it can never be beneficial. The only way it can be beneficial is if it extracts value from outside of a particular locality and distributed the losses externally. Why vegas or macau can succeed is because most of the gambling in these cities is done by people outside of vegas and macau. If gambling in vegas was confined only to the people of vegas, then vegas would collapse as a portion of their citizens' lives are ruined.

Though I'm personally against all types of gambling, I believe in individual rights and a person's right to waste their money as they see fit. However, I don't think governments should be so closely tied to it and I certainly don't think governments should be depending on it for funding of any sort. They should tax the companies involved in gambling, but they should be "in bed with them" so to speak. And I don't think state governments should be involved in lotteries either. Lotteries should be purely private and the government should tax it. I don't think a moral or sane government that truly cares about and represents their citizenry could be involved in lotteries or gambling.

<comment><USER42> How is gambling a zero sum game? According to the article, taxes from the Casino operations are $393M, and from clubs operations $300M, so thats $693 tax revenue the government wouldn't otherwise have. How many hospitals, schools and other social facilities can be built with $693M per year. Also add in the venue staff running the place, the builders building the facilities, the engineers and technicians building the machines, etc. An enormous amount of people are employed in the industry, and the government gets $693M per year extra which it wouldn't have it Gaming was illegal. How is this a zero sum equation?

<comment><USER41> Gambling is a zero sum game because by nature, it creates no new or additional value. It's simply a matter of definition.

[https://www.investopedia.com/terms/z/zero- sumgame.asp](https://www.investopedia.com/terms/z/zero-sumgame.asp)

In other words, someone wins and someone loses. Just because someone benefits doesn't mean it isn't a zero sum game. Stealing is also a zero sum game. It benefits the criminals who steal ( but no new value is created ). It's simply a transfer of wealth, not a creation of wealth. That's why it is zero sum.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> I'm glad this is illegal in Chicago, but I feel for the rest of Illinois.

<comment><USER44> The article says that all of the current mayoral candidates want to legalize it in Chicago.

<comment><USER45> ==all the front-runners in the city's Feb. 26 mayoral primary support some version of a casino, and some want to bring in video gambling as well.==

This is explicitly about video gambling which "some" supported. All of them supported a city casino in that particular forum. It's semantics, but the difference is meaningful as a casino would be a single location that also employs significant people and these video gambling machines are self-run and in restaurants, gas stations and bars.

<comment><USER13> Isn't Rivers Casino (right near Ohare) in Chicago city limits? I've been there, and they definitely have all sorts of video gambling, but maybe they were granted an exemption?

I've been to Rivers a few times with the intent to do some light gambling ($200 cash, no more) and ended up not wagering a single bet. Just landed my butt at the bar instead. I'd rather a reasonably priced McCallan than a minimum $50 wager for a hand of blackjack.

<comment><USER46> Rivers Casino is across the city line in the suburb of Des Plaines. It is not within city limits.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER47> here is a different perspective:

illinois should concentrate on not worrying too much about what consenting adults do in their spare time. Until recently, even happy hours were illegal. Illinois should concentrate on fixing the state so that people are not fleeing in droves. Legal gambling is the last issue that the state should be concerned with.

<comment><USER48> The problem is that "consent" isn't a binary, it's on a continuum. When people are bombarded nonstop with advertising for video gambling, eventually some of them will take the bait. And those who do will be the ones more susceptible to the inherent lure of gambling, and as such the ones most likely to be addicted to it.

<comment><USER47> sure. On the flip side, few years ago I went to a casino in Rosemont, had a good time, ate a steak, played a few games and went home. And I am not addicted to anything and don't want it closed. 20% of people who drink alcohol get addicted. Should we close every bar in Chicago?

<comment><USER49> The straw man of banning gambling everywhere is not what this is about. Sure, consenting adults should be able to indulge in vices, but we should regulate them to reduce the social harm they cause.

<comment><USER47> that is a straw man itself. it is already regulated.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER50> While not video gambling directly, but there are plenty of those places around. Chicago really is obsessed with scratch off tickets and gambling in general. It is pretty sad. It's amazing to see the same people on a regular basis just throwing away money like that. 20 dollars at a time.

</comment><comment><USER51> In our state we have 'Nudgemaster' machines at bars, restaurants, bowling alleys. Video gambling isn't legal here (except at a casino), and these devices skirt the laws by accepting cash, and only giving out gift cards or merchandise as prizes.

</comment><comment><USER52> Isn't it clear and obvious that gambling is non-productive and negative sum?

<comment><USER53> That describes lots of activities.

</comment></comment><comment><USER54> So when gambling has failed to produce enough revenue, maybe, as a fallback, they might consider raising taxes to, you know, pay for all the things they need.

<comment><USER55> That is funny. Illinois has some of the highest taxes in country.

[https://www.google.com](https://www.google.com)

<comment><USER56> state income tax is laughably low

<comment><USER57> 4.95% flat rate is pretty high.

<comment><USER58> the states around illinois have a higher income tax, but they also have a progressive tax system which lessens the pain for lower income households.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER59> tldr: legalizing video gambling has brought in additional revenue, but not as much as expected. Illinois borrowed money in advance based on the expected rates.

<comment><USER27> That's good news. The public isn't being plundered by gambling as bad as government indented.

<comment><USER55> True, all the public has to do is pay back the money the government didn't make from gambling. That is a win, not in my book, but in some book.

<comment><USER60> Depends what they spent it on

<comment><USER61> Probably hookers and blow for one of their parties...

<comment><USER55> I stand corrected.

<comment><USER61> Hey at least the hookers benefited and they're part of the public.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER62> Not sure about Chicago, but my small hometown in Central IL is depressing to visit, glad I left Illinois.

</comment><comment><USER63> I wonder if VR gambling machines might provide a better gambling experience for gamblers while also preventing places from filling up with junky and bulky machines, and probably allow for more players too within the same amount of space.</comment>


Ask HN: What Are Your Favorite Blogs on Scaling? - <AUTHOR>

What are your favorite blogs and posts on the general topic of scaling?<p>I find that all of the best scaling resources I have ever come across were mentioned right here on HN. Since this is an issue that so many of us face, I think it would be useful to put together a list of such sites. <comment><USER2> <http://highscalability.com/> ?

<comment><USER3> I will second this one. It has some good articles.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Check out this post from one of the founders at Posterous:

<http://axonflux.com/building-and-scaling-a-startup></comment>


Startup Cliche Telephone Service - <AUTHOR> http://www.startupcliches.com/ Would you like to hear a startup cliche? Call (971) 250-0131. <comment><USER2> lol "I'm a hacker because I'm too lazy to program"</comment>


GitHub Flow - <AUTHOR> http://scottchacon.com/2011/08/31/github-flow.html <comment><USER2> "Every branch we push has tests run on it and reported into the chat room, so if you haven't run them locally, you can simply push to a topic branch (even a branch with a single commit) on the server and wait for Jenkins to tell you if it passes everything."

From this, it sounds like Jenkins is automatically picking up new topic branches, running the tests, and reporting on the results. Any suggestions on how to set something like this up? In my (very limited) experience with Hudson/Jenkins, this sounds like it wouldn't be possible without manually setting up a project for each branch.

<comment><USER3> Exactly! I'd love to see a post with this much detail talking about the technicals of their deploy process. Using this free-wheeling branching model, requires some very flexible deploy tools, which I don't think(?) exist in the wild. Please school me...

<comment><USER4> You use the github plugin with Jenkins, and tell Jenkins to build all branches. That's about it.

edit: more details here -- this is what Relevance uses for our CI: <https://wiki.jenkins-ci.org/display/JENKINS/Github+Plugin>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I wasn't aware that you can open pull requests from within the same project (i.e. not from a fork). The idea of using this for quick code reviews before merging code into the production branch is really interesting to me...

<comment><USER6> Most people using github for their everyday work do it the way Scott mentioned. Github's pull request system is fundamental to its success and everyone I know's workflow.

<comment><USER5> I'm familiar with the Pull Request system. I've just only ever used it to pull changes back into the main repo from other forks; I didn't know you _could_ use them from within the same repo.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Well written and presented. Important not to miss out his closing comment:

"For teams that have to do formal releases on a longer term interval (a few weeks to a few months between releases), and be able to do hot-fixes and maintenance branches and other things that arise from shipping so infrequently, git-flow makes sense and I would highly advocate it's use.

For teams that have set up a culture of shipping, who push to production every day, who are constantly testing and deploying, I would advocate picking something simpler like GitHub Flow."

So if you fall in the second category, this is a read for you.

</comment><comment><USER8> Question about the chat deploy bot: there are a few lines in there that look like this:

        hubot deploy github/ghost-down to production

Is that deploying a branch directly to production, or does that cause a branch to be merged with master and then master deployed to production? If the former, why deploy a branch directly rather than sticking to the "master is production" idea?

<comment><USER9> It's deploying a branch to production.

If you think about it, this is completely the example of "master is production-ready" idea. We care so much about keeping master deployable, that if we have code that may have issues and need to be rolled back, we deploy just the branch. That way if things break, you can "roll back" to master and everything is good again.

<comment><USER10> In any case, you can always do a `git co hash`.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Very good comparison between workflows of deploying several times per day versus much less often. While it might not be obvious to some, the exact same git "flow" won't work for both. Your tools should complement your corporate culture, not the other way around.

I think the most important thing to note from either method, though, is not to develop on master/trunk. Have a separate branch, or further branches off an entire "develop" branch. The tip of master should always be a stable build.

<comment><USER12> Yes, however the only factor here that implies _never_ working off master is the peer review. If one dev can take responsibility for the stability of a patch, then it's perfectly okay to work off of master locally and push when it's stable. If you need to put this work on hold or it grows into something requiring a topic branch, at any time you can simply do:

git branch new_topic_branch && git reset --hard origin/master

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> This sounds like a feature branch strategy, which I've only used in 1 or 2 person teams, never on projects that big.

There have been some articles recently on the downsides of feature branching that my experience agrees with ([http://continuousdelivery.com/2011/07/on- dvcs-continuous-int...](http://continuousdelivery.com/2011/07/on-dvcs- continuous-integration-and-feature-branches/)). I'm curious if the GitHub people have hit the same issues.

So if 2 people are working on the same feature, they're probably working off the same named branch.

Are there any race conditions with merging to master? I'm assuming that only one head is allowed in master, correct? So that before a pull request is accepted and merged into master, the latest master must first be merged into the feature branch and have CI run all tests successfully on it before the pull request can go. Does GitHub stop you from merging into master if someone else just merged into master and you're about to create a new head?

Then you have to merge the latest master into your feature branch, run CI on it again and then merge to master after CI is successful (assuming someone else didn't beat you to merging to master again).

(I've got a lot more experience with Mercurial than Git so my mental model could be a little off)

<comment><USER14> I actually just wrote up a blog post as well about why I don't like feature branches: [http://www.pgrs.net/2011/08/29/why-i-dont-like-feature- branc...](http://www.pgrs.net/2011/08/29/why-i-dont-like-feature-branches/)

My main reasons are that git history gets messy, builds don't run on feature branches (although github seems to have a work around here), and refactoring is harder.

My opinions are largely based on working on larger projects (more than 10 devs working in the same codebase).

<comment><USER15> Learn to use rebase and squash commits! It solves a lot of the issues you talked about.

<comment><USER14> Squashing commits can fix up git history, but it does not address the bigger issues: refactoring, lack of builds, and having to deploy multiple branches to test features. The first two make it very hard to do any significant code reworking on a feature branch.

<comment><USER16> I intend no ill will with this response, but it is worth pointing out that "the first two" "bigger issues" have nothing to do with your revision control system.

Lack of builds is something about which you and your CI server need to have a chat, and refactoring is something about which you and your people need to have numerous chats before, during, and afterwards.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Is it really zero-downtime deployment? I've read about Passenger 3's zero- downtime deployment strategy, but on my Passenger 3 setup, the server is still always a little unresponsive for a few seconds after a restart.

<comment><USER17> As far as I know, they're using Unicorn: <https://github.com/blog/517-unicorn>

They spin up new instances of the app and let the old instances finish serving requests before killing them.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Its interesting that they abandoned CI Joe. I wouldn't say, I saw this coming. But, unless they wanted to maintain/write a full blown CI server themselves, it would have got harder for multiple projects.

<comment><USER19> Indeed. I'd love to hear the details on this. I was considering CI Joe for a project.

<comment><USER4> This isn't surprising to me. While CI Joe was decent and simple, its really extremely limiting once you want to do anything moderately complicated.

Jenkins has a crummy UI, but it is very powerful and has a lot of useful plugins. If you are moving to any sort of continuous deployment setup, as Github is close to, you really need something as powerful as Jenkins.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> For those who enjoyed this talk, Corey Donohoe gave an awesome presentation at Cascadia RubyConf that goes into more detail about what they use Hubot for, and also mentions deploying branches to a subset of their boxes. It was one of the best talks of the conference: [http://confreaks.net/videos/608-cascadiaruby2011-shipping- at...](http://confreaks.net/videos/608-cascadiaruby2011-shipping-at-the-speed- of-life)

</comment><comment><USER21> In a small web agency, mainly creating sites for clients, we find a mix of "git-flow"-style and continious deployment works best.

In the weeks before a new site is launched, we work to our own feature branches and merge into master when a feature is complete. In the run up to the site launch, when there's just CSS tweaks and the odd bug fix, people start working on directly master and deploying straight to staging servers.

When a site has been launched we normally keep working just on master, though occasionally creating feature branches for bigger changes.

This seems to work well for us as our DVCS needs change over time. I'd be interested to hear how other web agencies manage the different stages of developing clients' websites.

</comment><comment><USER22> One question i've always had: How often do "regular" people commit? Should I be committing every time I hit save... or should I wait? (I don't work in a dev team, so I'm looking for the wisdom of developers who have to work in teams.)

<comment><USER23> I like to think about my commits as units of work that I can pull back or cherry pick if I want to. It doesn't always work out that way.

Make sure your commits are cohesive to the change you are making. I think that is a good rule of thumb.

<comment><USER12> Yes, definitely nice if you can make your commits atomic changes. The more easily able to right a nice summary line (50 chars please!) the better.

On the other hand, some changes are big and messy. In this case I sometimes do intermediate commits, especially if it's at the end of a day just so I can keep yesterdays changes conceptually separate from todays. In the end I may rebase -i the whole thing and clean things up before pushing, but only if there are some obvious and quick ways to split it up.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Here's what I'm curious about that is not mentioned at all:

How do they manage deployment to staging? At my company we typically deploy topic branches directly to staging, but we have fewer developers and slower pace. If multiple people need to deploy topic branches we set up an ephemeral staging branch that merges the multiple topic branches together, but I can imagine that getting super hairy on a team the size of GitHub's.

Do they just mostly deploy directly to production, thus severely minimizing staging contention?

<comment><AUTHOR> it depends. when staging is in a good state we'll simply ask if anyone is using it. you can see a few deployments to staging in that screenshot i posted i believe. however, if the developer judges that a ci pass is good enough, a deployment directly to prod after they get the ci green light is also common.

this is also one of the benefits of deploying via a chat room - you can ask if you're going to be stepping on anyone before you do it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> How do you handle branches which require DB migrations?

<comment><USER25> I'm assuming they build a new db per branch on the ci server and auto run migrations on them. pretty typical

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> For reasons decided long ago, the company I'm at uses Mercurial, and I don't think we're in a position to retrain everyone and move to a private GitHub repo.

Anyone know of ideas for doing code reviews for the whole pull request, commit, or a single line like GitHub? This is probably the most beneficial part for us.

<comment><USER13> Could you use a private BitBucket repo for this? BitBucket has the same kind of pull request functionality that I'd think you could use to emulate this continuous delivery style.

<comment><USER26> To be completely honest, I've never been satisfied with using BitBucket, doing anything is comparitively harder, and honestly it just feels like I'm using an incomplete GitHub clone. (and I really don't like support teams that are "creatively bankrupt")

I'll look into if the issues feature works for us, but me might have to roll something of our own.

Doesn't mean I won't make the pitch for Git yet again.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> I'm curious how CI is done on branches. It's mentioned but not elaborated on in the article.

<comment><USER28> Every branch is scheduled to build in Jenkins as soon as it gets pushed. We get success/failure notifications in Campfire.

<comment><USER29> So is there a separate Jenkins job per feature branch? How are these created?

<comment><USER30> I'm not sure it's how GitHub does it, but we use the jenkins gem to do pretty much the same thing: <https://github.com/cowboyd/jenkins.rb>

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> I wish they'd post a guide on how to do a separate CI job per feature branch. That'd make this approach really scalable.

<comment><USER30> Using something like the Jenkins gem (<https://github.com/cowboyd/jenkins.rb>), it's pretty easy to script. The hardest part is setting up the job configuration the branches will use.</comment></comment>


The great nutrient collapse - <AUTHOR> http://www.politico.com/agenda/story/2017/09/13/food-nutrients-carbon-dioxide-000511?lo=ap_a1 <comment><USER2> I wonder what math is being used, and whether there's some way to package it in a way that's approachable to biologists.</comment>