Torvalds: git vs CVS - <AUTHOR> http://marc.info/?l=git&m=113072612805233&w=2 <comment><USER2> Exercise: what are the downsides of the current generation of DVCS ?

(Assume you may be something other than a coder that carries all files in a laptop.)

<comment><USER3> Poor or inefficient support for large binary assets, such as compiled objects, images, or video. Especially in the context of video game development, binary assets that constantly change are highly painful to deal with in Git or Mercurial.

<comment><USER4> How is it possible that nobody has dealt with this problem yet?

<comment><USER5> Active open source development rarely meets "AAA" game development.

<comment><USER6> One could argue that the traditional source control model (where everyone has a copy on their own machine) isn't a great way to deal with huge binary assets. I've worked on game projects where the binary churn was on the order of gigabytes a day. Even though everyone was physically co-located, when everyone arrived at 10am and started to update to head, a hundred computers all trying to download the days worth of 2 gigs of assets over the network didn't make for a pretty picture.

You can try to cronjob the updates, staggered around 4am. Or you can realize that the majority of people are only modifying a subset of these assets, and roll your own link-based asset manager for large binaries.

<comment><USER5> Yes, absolutely, you wouldn't want everyone to keep pulling _all_ data, git- style. The programmers usually only need the assets in the game-ready format, not the source models, textures, etc. which are typically much larger, and only needed by the artists/level designers working with them.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> _But if you have hundreds of developers, and you have a dynamic trust network (I trust some people, they trust others, and we all tend to trust people more or less depending on what they work on), the CVS model is absolutely HORRID. It just doesn't work._

I can count on one hand the number of projects described by that sentence. No surprise, the Linux kernel is one of them. Linus built a tool to satisfy his needs. But most developers work in smaller groups, and these groups have explicit trust. Working at a company, the trust network isn't dynamic. Even in large open source projects, most of the commits are by a handful of individuals. It's not a big deal if the occasional one-time contributor e-mails a patch.

But most of my gripes with git don't have to do with its ideas. Although it's distributed revision control, in my experience everyone designates one repo as authoritative. Like centralized RVCs, certain users are explicitly granted write access to said authoritative repo. So git ends up working like an svn repo with a ton of branches.

My complaints about git have to do with its interface. Coming from svn, git is very frustrating to use. Certain benign commands in svn will erase your data in git-land. For example, "git checkout filename" is the equivalent of "svn revert filename"; it erases any uncommitted changes. Of course, git has a revert command as well, but it doesn't behave like other RVCs. Git checkout can bite you if you have a branch with the same name as a file or directory in your source tree.

My biggest annoyance is if I accidentally commit and push something. Usually it's when I forget which branch I've checked out. Undoing a commit/push means rebasing or resetting, and that's where git drives me insane. I have used subversion, CVS, and even Visual SourceSafe, but only in git have I lost previous commits. Again with the misleading terminology. Why call them commits if you can destroy them with a single command?

<comment><USER8> It sounds like you'd like Mercurial better. The interface is much more SVN- like.

<comment><USER7> I totally forgot about Mercurial, probably because I have no bad experiences associated with it. I haven't used it much, but the times I have used it have been forgetful. I think that's a good thing when it comes to revision control.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> This is a super level headed response from Linus on a topic that he usually rants about. That's pretty cool.

<comment><USER10> I follow the Git mailing list, and he's even-keeled and surprisingly helpful in discussions. The tone of the original post is representative of what he normally writes.

I'm sure he's no saint, but his most famous rants were responses to sniping. The Minix/Linux debate was started by Tanenbaum, Bram Cohen picked a fight over merge strategies in a list discussion, and the 'C++ sucks' rant was in response to some flamebait.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> We just made a selection of version control system at <http://getnightingale.org>, and Git isn't that great either (it's over- hyped). CVS does suck (and SVN does too for our purposes). But Git requires that users either use cygwin or install half a linux environment in Windows. Just because Git is coded by Linus, doesn't instantly make it a good product. In the case of Git, I REFUSE to force newbie windows developers who want to mess around with our project to be forced to install 2 linuxy environments, or have to integrate it into mozilla build (every other system is just a simple file you can add to path).

We settled with Mercurial, because hgweb isn't that memory intensive and our 512MB RAM prgmr VPS can handle it (although, we hope to upgrade the VPS, to allow more checkout's simultaneously). SVN/CVS also consume little ram on the server too though.

People who wish to make a selection should try them all out, and ask around. Because whilst Git users are very passionate about Git, I couldn't find a single one on IRC who had recently tried mercurial or Bazaar. Furthermore very few (if any) actively used Git in Windows

But that's just what I found. I didn't run proper benchmarks and things would be different if we had a better server (Loggerhead for bazaar wanted 2gb when running).

<comment><USER12>
      But Git requires that users either use cygwin or install half a linux environment in Windows.

That was true, but is no longer. There is a Windows port of git called MSysGit available on google code: <http://code.google.com/p/msysgit/> .

<comment><USER11> MsysGit is still a huge collection of random packages, many of which you don't need for other revision control systems. No it isn't cygwin, but you require 130mb of linux packages still to install it.

It's nowhere near self contained. Bzr,Hg,cvs,svn (and others), are just a small directory, and need none of those. MsysGit is overrated too. Usable yes, but ideal? Hardly..

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> This is effectively a summary of his Google Tech Talk on git.

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4XpnKHJAok8>

</comment><comment><USER14> "So one of the worst downsides of CVS is _politics_. People, not technology."

<comment><USER15> Although it's not as if switching to distributed revision control will eliminate politics. It just transforms them and pushes them around. Who owns the mainline of a project? Why won't s/he accept my patches? etc.. etc...

<comment><USER16> Of course it doesn't eliminate politics, but it cleanly separates technical concerns from political ones. With a centralised version control system, technical problems can have political ramifications ("$LEADER said she'd give me commit access three weeks ago and she still hasn't; sure she _claims_ she's suffered a server crash but I think she just doesn't like me") and vice-versa ("$COMMITTER didn't like $OTHER_COMMITTER's contributions, so they started a revert war").

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER2> I'll leave here a short note on a test I ran with mercurial v1.31, it may give someone ideas. The document was a 45 slide OpenOffice presentation (.odp, OO.org v3.1, Linux). Large font text, nearly all pages had one or more images. Did not delete/replace pics more than a couple of times, but did reorder a bit, especially at the end.

Surprisingly, reordering did not affect much the size of the hg store, which is only 60% over doc size. That may be either because hg is being extremely smart about the content, or because OO doesn't move binary chunks around after they are inserted in the file (more likely).

On each commit, a script noted changeset number and output of 'ls -s' on the doc file and the .hg/.../_file.d store. Only started at 11, and trimmed most of the lines.

        c.set  file   file.d
        11     320     632
        15     488     944
        20     736    1336
        25    1056    1804
        26    2044    2800
        29    2336    3260
        30    2336    3480
        31    2356    3560
        35    2688    4104
        38    2852    4388
        39    2848    4468
        40    2856    4540
        41    2924    4676

</comment><comment><USER17> I program solo, and for fine-grained version control, I use comments and conditional compilation, which I remove when the time comes. I also take periodic tarball snapshots of my code just in case.

Before you downmod me to -∞ for my uncouth approach, consider this:

According to Linus, Git > tarballs > CVS > SVN (he made a statement about tarballs being better than CVS somewhere else). That leaves Git and tarballs.

Now, Visual Studio is my primary development environment, and it does not integrate with Git (as far as I know), and Git just isn't well-supported on Windows (there are some fragile solutions). Secondly, I probably spent a whole day playing with Git where it's supposed to shine (OS X with GitX), and I just find it kind of awkward and unintuitive for no benefit.

<comment><USER18> I use Git on Windows with Visual Studio and I don't face any issues whatsoever.

Yes, Git is not integrated with VS but I have no trouble switching to explorer and commit my changes using TortoiseGit. TortoiseGit scans my working directory and presents list of all the changes made in a session.

And yes, to be on safer side, I copy and store my working directory + Git to a different location.

<comment><USER17> Check out these replies:

[http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1500400/is-tortoisegit- re...](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1500400/is-tortoisegit-ready-for- prime-time-yet)

It's not just the fragility and lack of integration, but also I'm just not seeing much of a benefit to counterbalance the complexity and awkwardness.

<comment><USER18> Well, I have been using it for 'production' work for last 6 months and I have not found any issues. I am not suggesting that everyone will have the same experience but I think you should give it a try before dismissing it outright based on someone else's experience.

Also, if you could provide some real details on the 'complexity and awkwardness', I could share my experience which could be helpful.

<comment><USER17> > give it a try before dismissing it

Giving it a try can only prove the presence of fragility, not its absence :-)

Generally, people are very reluctant to criticize "hip" tools like e.g. Clojure, Haskell, Google Go, Git or its accessories. So, when 3 out of 4 people say they had problems with it, to me it weighs very heavily on the negative side.

<comment><USER19> For the record, I agree with you on Git (on Windows at least). It's improved at a rapid pace but it's still a bit awkward.

However, that's no reason to dismiss all version control.

<comment><USER17> I'm glad you agree, because for the rest of the equation (Tarballs > CVS > SVN), Linus agrees with me. So you see, I embody the combined wisdom of both of you, as far as version control goes.

<comment><USER19> You have his equation wrong. He says in this article that SVN is still better than CVS. And really, I would agree that tarballs are better than CVS. So the equation is more likely SVN > Tarballs > CVS. Don't put words in Linus's mouth.

Also Subversion no longer stores it's data in a database so Linus's objection in this article has been resolved.

Finally, Linus's needs are pretty unique in the world. Linus isn't satisfied with Subversion for the same reasons it might work perfectly well for you.

<comment><USER17> > He says in this article that SVN is still better than CVS.

He says SVN is better, but is more fragile (which for source control, I interpret as being worse):

        SVN fixes (supposedly) those "implementation
        suckiness" issues. ...
        I think it's also a much more fragile setup and
        there's apparently been people who lost their
        entire database to corruption

Even if SVN = CVS, clearly Tarballs > SVN, according to him. His actual quote was Tarballs >> CVS. I can dig it up if you can't.

<comment><USER19> Thousands of companies (and millions of developers) use Subversion. It's 10 year old. It's an Apache project now. It's solid. It's a simple and easy to use tool that will make your life better. That's all.

If you find that personally offensive, so be it.

<comment><USER20> Linus was more ranting that Subversion uses a binary database. If it gets corrupted, you're screwed.

CVS's database is just RCS files, plus a little. Nice and easy to restore if Bad Things start to occur.

<comment><USER19> Subversion now use text files for storage too. You have the option of that or the Berkley DB.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> The longevity of CVS speaks for itself. It's not perfect, but it has served me and my projects perfectly fine for over 20 years. Anytime I've ventured over to work with some other VCS, it inevitably was a distraction and a waste of time.

Any new VCS goes through these same rants -- not able to distinguish themselves on merit, they simply attack the dominant player. With Git, one learns quickly -- oh, it's all about the Python 'community' and their politics, I see.

When it ain't broke, don't fix it!

<comment><USER22> I once moved a project from ClearCase to CVS because the performance of our ClearCase setup was _really_ eating into our time. I didn't have any major complaints from SVN as well.

Some reasons I moved to bzr are: \- repository backups are free due to the distributed nature \- python scripting \- fast local operations

So, yes, I don't really have a big issue with svn (or cvs) but given a choice I would go with bzr (or any other DVCS).</comment></comment>


What Hasn't Changed: The Internet Keeps Getting Bigger - <AUTHOR> http://500hats.com/what-hasnt-changed

<comment><USER2> For background: Dave believes in companies with straightforward revenue strategies with measurable traction that could hockey-stick but haven't yet. He believes in a lage and talented mentor pool to find the design, data, and/or distribution problems standing in the way of accelerated customer/user growth to add the value needed to get to the next level. He looks for companies that could exit 20mm-500mm but wants MORE exits rather than larger ones. Kind of the opposite of how YC seeks to grow it's portfolio through a few huge winners.

THEN he believes in doubling down when the signs of that "next leveling" emerge.

I feel like there's a lot of misunderstanding of 500 Startups on HN so I wanted to try to get that out of the way. In my opinion there is room for 500 and YC to both grow without getting in each other's way, perhaps actually helping each other on the few companies they agree strongly on.

<comment><USER3> thanks, that's a good summary of our approach.

however, we will also invest in a few stories without clear path to revenue if growth is strong. but admittedly this isn't our favorite strategy. we certainly prefer strong business model over none, even with a small base of customers.

<comment><USER2> Thanks for the addendum! I'm aware of that corollary but it's harder to explain as a coherent thesis. Paul always made it very clear to me that "there are starving startups in India than more traction than you" and "10mm users is the new 1mm users" so I've never been clear where that line was for you guys. As such, I usually leave it out of my explanations of my understanding of the 500 thesis.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Fred Wilson's specialty is with larger consumer/enterprise investments (<http://www.usv.com/investments/>) vs Dave McClure's speciality is in smaller investments and also international.

According to Dave, it seems like there's so slowing of momentum for growth with the smaller (base hits) he sees both domestically and internationally. And I appreciate his blog post that champions the consumer web.

But I wonder with Fred's observations if people might need to be a bit more wise with consumer internet plays if raising funds might be more difficult than previously. I also wonder when you combine both Fred and Dave's observations that maybe you see an opportunity for bootstrapped ventures to start out a lot smaller, maybe even w/o outside funds.

<comment><USER5> I think what both Dave and Fred echoed is something that that everyone here came to a realization few years ago (the time for startups without any revenue model is over).

But that said, there is nothing stopping the next Instagram or the next Pinterest from becoming really successful. Both these sites (I am sure I can think of more) broke out during the very same period VC's kept claiming they are not going to fund startups without any revenue model or whose model is based on ads (or ads related).

So personally, I don't think what Fred said (or Dave) is anything to be sweating about. Just keep pushing products out, that is what I think.

<comment><USER6> The viewpoint of an investor is by nature skewed by their portfolio and those that they interact with. Those are all parties that have already somehow 'made it'.

The dark horses don't drop in frequency but as the size of the market increases your chances of interacting with one as an investor during the time when they are still small enough that you could get a relatively large slice of the pie for a good price are decreasing.

That's one of the genius elements in YC, they have made a focal point for such companies at the time when investment is at its cheapest. All it takes is one or two successes for this strategy to pay off wildly.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Perhaps I am mistaken however no one is calling anything dead, they are simply switching strategies. In my opinion B2B wins hands down when the product could be used equally by businesses and consumers at a minimum.

When I started VisiDraft a year and a half ago, my strategy was B2B because my clientele would be using the product for work. I could as easily have structured my plan to have a consumer facing application but based on what I encountered it was a no brainer.

Microsoft, Apple, HP, IBM all of these name makers started as B2B companies. Why? Several reasons. You only have to sell to a few people, making your traction and revenues immediately positive. In addition, it allows a much more intimate feedback loop for iterations when you actually work hand in hand with another business designing solutions for them. you are basically getting another partner with domain expertise - you don't get that with B2C. It allows you to grow without losing a huge chunk of your business - in my experience most companies don't want anything to do with owning a chunk of a start up.

I am quite confident that no one is saying that B2C is over, and in fact a good number of software developments don't fit into a B2B model. Where there is equal ability to face consumers or other businesses, I will always opt to the business.

The last thing I will say is: Businesses around the world are sitting on +2T in cash right now. VC's aren't anywhere close to that and they rely on consumers to go buy things, which is looking pretty flat currently at least in the US. Go where the money is.

<comment><USER3> both areas have tons of opportunity.

however, there is plenty of growth in consumer spending and particularly in online ecommerce all over the world. while I won't disagree corporations are also sitting on lots of cash, it's certainly not the case that consumer online spending is flat, even in the US (& absolutely not around the world).

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> "The number of recent internet services that have grown from nothing to hundreds of millions of users is frankly rather astonishing – Pinterest, Instagram, Groupon, Zynga"

Ok.. and... who else? I wouldn't call a few handful or even 20-30 astonishing.

"Almost every possible internet distribution channel has MORE users than ever before – whether it be search, social, mobile, video, local, SMS, email, chat, etc."

And every channel has also been saturated with tons of competition. Search = millions of pages indexed everyday, and tons of old brands ranking before you. Social? Good luck getting your new content noticed when you have 0 followers.

"it's certainly MUCH cheaper & faster to build product than ever before"

Cheaper and faster? When you have to build multiple products for iPhone, Android, Windows, and for: search, social, mobile, video, local, SMS, email, chat...

"that just means less competition for those of us ready to really dig in and invest at scale in all the millions of new "small" businesses that will emerge and dominate the globe in coming years."

It's not small vs. big. It's enterprise vs consumer internet. There are tons of small enterprise companies out there.

</comment><comment><USER9> The enterprise market wil be a tougher nut to crack for startups for simple reasons :

1- Inelasticity of demand : Just look at windows, Word,...etc many companies "waste" hundred of millions of $ in software that's loathed by their employees, yet they still force feed it in the name of standardization. The users don't get to vote on the products they use unlike their consumer mkt counterparts (with their wallets or attention.) so change is very very slow.

2- procurement process lack of transparency : Yup, it's still an old boys club out there & the company that gets a signature on the dotted line is not always the one with the best products. Relationships & brand name matter enormously, esp if you're a clueless CIO who's climbed to the top mostly on your corporate politicking talents.

I stil think that the best way to approach the enterprise market is to have an acqhire exit in mind. grow big enough to attract the attention of IBM, Oracle & Microsoft. (Yammer stands as a recent example, but IBM made dozens of acquisitions in the 100~500 Mil $ range.)

<comment><USER3> while there are recent examples of large-scale adoption of enterprise solutions (Yammer, Box), most enterprise sw requires well-trained expensive people to do direct sales. this is certainly doable with the right people, but they are not in limitless supply. scaling enterprise sales is usually people- bound, and hard. this is often the limiting factor in scaling enterprise business, and requires experienced and well-financed teams.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Framed through Naval's vision of individuals as micro-enterprises, Dave and Fred's perspectives line up pretty nicely together. The line between consumer and enterprise is blurring in more ways than one.

<comment><USER10> for the record i think Dave is absolutely right it's easier than ever to build a consumer audience (albeit at times a niche one = time to pivot). at the same time, i think Fred's point is focused on the fundraising prospects for each type of business, and in this i think he's right: the "powers that be" (aka the later stage investors who, as Dave rightly points out, sometimes don't know whose tail they're chasing) are demanding enterprise deals right now. in response to Dave's point on the difficulty of scaling sales in enterprise, two trends are making that easier: a) BigCo interest in startups from every angle is very high and b) individual interest by traditional "enterprise types" (mba's, executives, etc) to get in on the startup pie is increasing as well. not necessarily a good thing on the macro level, but paired with a killer product it can make scaling more straightforward.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Pinterest, Instagram, Groupon, Zynga, and "in some cases billions of revenue"? Unless I'm looking in the wrong places, that is a factual error.

While getting hundreds of millions of users is great, it's not quite the same as getting to profitability. If you're using Zynga and Groupon as success stories, your business model might very well consist of, "looking for the next big fad and hoping to find a way to monetize before it fizzles".

<comment><USER3> "some" in this case was Groupon & Zynga, not Pinterest or Instagram. while perhaps not the best cases of getting to sustainable profitability, nevertheless both Groupon & Zynga did phenomenally well in customer acquisition and revenue... what they have failed at is long-term retention.

regardless, the argument Fred seemed to be making was that distribution and customer acquisition is getting "harder"... this is not the case.

<comment><USER12> If the number of people on the internet isn't growing (and it has pretty much plateaued in the US, at least), and there are more competitors, then yes, I would say consumer is "getting harder." Good ideas will always buck the trend, of course, but I think there is going to be some consolidation in this space.

<comment><USER13> check the stats for both time online & online spend -- I'm sure both are still growing; even in the US. then add in the # of young / old people on smart phones and tablets that weren't online 3-5 years ago, and you could say that even raw # users in US is also growing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> If it's "REALLY EASY" and "cheaper & faster" to build an internet or mobile business that can potentially gain millions of users, this begs the question, is this valuable?

Every app or service which attains a million users reduces the impact and worth of attaining a million users on the next app or service.

Where is the value today?

</comment><comment><USER15> > it's taken for granted you can pay online and have goods delivered to your > door. While this isn't the case yet in many big markets in Asia

Just nitpicking here but I found this comment a bit strange. eCommerce is HUGE at least in China. Taobao for example generated 3 billions US$ in sales in 24 hours recently.

<comment><USER16> Everything is huge in China. That doesn't mean that most chineese can order something online and receive it at their door.

(I don't know if they can. But your comment is a non-sequitour.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> I agree with Dave's conclusion, but my rational is different: the trend towards enterprise is precisely what will open up the consumer space. It's the same force that has left enterprise relatively uncrowded in recent years.

</comment><comment><USER18> Not sure how seriously I'd take anything said by a guy who invested in 9gag.

<comment><USER19> YCombinator invested in 9gag as well. That has absolutely no bearing on Paul Graham's insight into the current investment climate.

<comment><USER18> I didn't know that. This significantly alters my opinion of YC.

<comment><USER20> Why? I know that 9gag is not the most serious business out there, but don't you think it could be a viable and sustainable business?

<comment><USER21> I think it's because 9gag is the site that redditors like to mock.

I'm not sure I blame them.

<https://9gag.com/gag/5553078>

<https://9gag.com/gag/5920690>

<comment><USER3> you guys feel free to mock 9GAG, 500, & YC.

9GAG has grown to tens of millions of users and billions of page views per month in less than 2 years. the company was generating single-digit millions with a team of less than 10 people.

in short, it's a great business that has tremendous scale, and you haters can all go put a sock in it.

<comment><USER20> That was my point, it might not have the best content on the internet,but it clearly has a huge user base, and a very active one. I don't get why it wouldn't be a good investment decision.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Swaptree.com - a startup to easily trade or exchange of your music collection or book collection - <AUTHOR> http://www.businesshackers.com/2007/11/05/swaptreecom-a-startup-to-easily-trade-or-exchange-of-your-music-collection-or-book-collection/

<comment><USER2> Swapit.com was a spectacular failure as well.

You can't just slap Web 2.0 branding on bubble 1.0 ideas and expect them to work. How long before we see collaborative filtering for online dog food purchases?

<comment><USER3> So was switchhouse. No one even bothers with physical media any more for music. Books and movies aren't far behind. Games are the only thing I can think of that might work and have some steam left in it.

<comment><USER4> Books and movies aren't _that_ far behind, but they are behind. Here's a thought: a library where, to take out a book, you have to digitize part of the copy and give the result back to the library for publication to a website. Your allowed lending rate goes down if you do it badly. Add a mail-out option ala Netflix on that same website, and we're in business.

<comment><USER5> In the business of being sued?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> oh. you mean like lala? oh wait. they had to change their business model because it doesn't work.

<comment><USER6> does seem like lala... and speaking of which, the screenshot on lala.com looks almost exactly like anywhere.fm

(confession: I have never used iTunes before)

<comment><USER5> They all look like iTunes now.</comment></comment></comment>


The benefits of a college degree in one graph - <AUTHOR> http://voices.washingtonpost.com/ezra-klein/2010/08/the_benefits_of_a_college_degr.html <comment><USER3> "Virtually every single member of congress, every senator, every Capitol Hill staffer, every White House advisor, every Fed governor, and every major political reporter is a college graduate."

Who cares? Notice that they didn't mention Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, Mary Kay, Richard Branson, Michael Dell, Walt Disney, Henry Ford, Frank Lloyd Wright - who arguably have all contributed more to this country than our established political leaders recently. Clearly this is the washington post - but the myopic view of looking at the political arena, if anything - <USER2> what is wrong with associating college with "smart, capable, and adding value to our country." I'm just saying that many people in the US are not proud of legislators - and saying that they all went to college hardly proves a good point.

Hard work, natural curiosity, caring about your community, a desire to learn and being in the right place at the right time has more to do with being successful and adding value to our society than becoming part of the "College club" that is Washington.

<comment><USER4> What about the people who dropped out of college hoping to be the next Bill Gates or Richard Branson and failed? These guys are now part of the statistics shown on the graph.

Bill Gates was successful and dropped out of college. He was also hard working and curious. Does that mean that everybody else who's hard working and curious will be as successful without a diploma? I wouldn't bet on it.

Also, having a desire to be in the right place at the right time doesn't guarantee that you'll do just that.

I agree that having a diploma is not what is going to make you successful. But at least, it gives you better odds to beat economic troubles, which is the point of the article.

<comment><AUTHOR> > These guys are now part of the statistics shown on the graph.

Most likely they're in the negative space though, the part of the 'employed'.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> All the arguments over the value of college always seem to ignore one obvious element—some of us go to college because we will learn things we could not or would not otherwise learn. I'm a Computer Science senior right now, and sure, I could have learned all the stuff I learned from buying my own books, but I never would have. Also, the awesome professors, though rare and littered among terrible ones, completely make it worth it.

<comment><USER6> _some of us go to college because we will learn things we could not or would not otherwise learn._

And some of us went to college because we had to prove to HR people that we know what we know with very expensive pieces of paper. I stopped going to college after I didn't attend classes or buy books for a semester, and got substantially the same grades. I didn't attend classes or buy books because I wasn't extracting value congruent to the time and money it cost to attend class. I ultimately made the decision to not go at all because the amount of money I was making running my business exceeded the amount I could make with a degree working for someone else.

Computer science is probably one of the easiest fields to learn without formal instruction because deliberate practice is so easy and information is so accessible. The absolute most I learned in a college course was in a digital logic course. After the first class, the professor, whom I had before, took me to his office, told me I wouldn't learn anything in the class, gave me an FPGA development board (similar to [http://www.altera.com/products/devkits/altera/kit- cyc2-2C20N...](http://www.altera.com/products/devkits/altera/kit- cyc2-2C20N.html#contents), fpga, ethernet, usb, flash card reader), told me to read about Verilog, build something interesting, and to not attend class, he'd just give me a grade on whatever I built. I implemented a basic computer that would read and execute instructions off the memory card. Almost everything in computer science came together once I implemented jump instructions. I got almost nothing out of most classes, but an incredible amount out of that one. College is tedious if you already know a lot about a subject.

If I could go back and was really interested in learning, I would have moved close to a college, and paid professors for short duration one-on-one instruction and guidance, probably just an hour or two a week, with independent study. It would have been substantially less expensive and more effective. You can't get a degree that way, but you can learn. I find the pacing of college courses to be too slow, if I am interested in learning about a new subject now, I'll get course videos and speed them up a bit, and skip ahead liberally. I can usually get through a semesters worth of lectures in a day.

<comment><USER7> You're mixing up computer science and programming. Programming is easy to learn without formal instruction. Theory on the other hand, can and does become quite complex. Sure, its still possible to learn theory on your own, but the professor with the Turing award makes things much easier.

<comment><USER6> Actually, I'm not mixing them up. There are incredible amounts of information readily available that will enable you to learn theory. If you are smart and motivated, you can learn theory without instruction.

<comment><USER7> That can be said about any field. You stated that computer science was one of the EASIEST fields to learn without formal instruction. My claim is that learning theoretical ideas, discrete mathematics, automata theory, and formal languages without formal instruction is not any easier than any other scientific field, such as chem, physics, or mathematics.

<comment><USER6> I would argue that because of the computer savviness of computer scientists, documents and tutorials about computer science are more likely to be easily located and properly formatted for display on the internet.

<comment><USER7> That again is a false assumption. I have professors who are great theorists but can't use a computer very well. It doesn't take computer savvy to be able to do computer science well. Hence my statement that you are confusing computer science and computer programming. The tutorials you see online are for practical applications. What you're seeing isn't computer science at all. Just a byproduct of it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Economists of education (Mark Blaug is one whose writings on this subject I have read) point out that college students start out as young people who come from higher socioeconomic status families, all over the world. Those young people thus have better social connections to succeed in paid employment and more capital to found businesses and invest and do other things that lead to high income in the next generation than do young people who are unable to afford college. Moreover, college attendance, even though it costs money to the students, is heavily subsidized by general taxation all over the world, and college subsidies operate as a wealth transfer from working non-college- attending young people to studying college-attending young people. It's not clear at all that there is any added value from the educational operations of a college

<http://www.paulgraham.com/colleges.html>

and that college-educated people can look at a cross-sectional chart like the one jacquesm kindly submitted here and believe that it shows a longitudinal causation relationship is a demonstration of how badly colleges fail at teaching statistics.

<comment><AUTHOR> Going to college allows you to tap in to that network of social connections though, which in turn will increase your chances a bit.

No guarantees there though, on an individual level.

Now, what would be more surprising is to show that an increase in education level would show a decreased chance of being employed. So in that sense this graph should really not surprise anybody.

<comment><USER9> _Now, what would be more surprising is to show that an increase in education level would show a decreased chance of being employed._

Extend the graph to the PhD level.

<comment><AUTHOR> I've done something else (no access to PhD employment stats, maybe someone else does?), I've changed it in to an 'employment' graph, instead of an unemployment graph:

<http://ww.com/employment.png>

Same data, same conclusions?

<comment><USER10> Did you just subtract the values in the original chart from 100%? If so, that's not the actual employment level. Unemployment means seeking work but not finding it; it excludes everyone who is disabled, discouraged, or simply not looking for work (e.g. full-time moms).

The overall unemployment level in the U.S. is a little under 10%, but the employment level is somewhere around 65-70% (iirc). So 20-25% of the population is still unaccounted for in this figure. A chart breaking that down by education might be interesting, too.

<comment><AUTHOR> > disabled, discouraged, or simply not looking for work (e.g. full-time moms).

Ah ok, I wasn't aware of that distinction (I figured they'd been taken out). Still, the larger point stands, the difference looks huge when you look at this graph, but it is 'upside down', we're talking about the tops here, not about a base 0 reaching to 15%, but a base 0 reaching to 100% where this is the remnant between the tops and the maximum.

What you're saying is that the maximum should have been 80% or 75% instead of 100%.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I can't speak to the validity of this graph, but my immediate response is to think of all of the other factors that go into getting a job. I know people with the personality and intelligence to get jobs they are unqualified for, quickly earn promotions, and never go a week or two without being employed. I also know people who cannot hold down a job painting doors.

College degrees are handed out like candy to anyone who pays enough money and jumps through enough hoops. Relying on education level as a signal of ability is ridiculous, and the existence of this graph shows why: we emphasize education for the sake of financial gain.

People who truly crave knowledge and training are lumped in with people who thrive on doing what they're told and avoiding independent thought. There is more to a person than their education level, and when it comes down to being truly valuable in a business, some of the motivations for education are probably a detriment.

</comment><comment><USER12> What's conveniently left out of all the graphs and articles I've seen showing this....is whether they bothered to establish any causation.

Why shouldn't we just presume that people who have access to college also have better access to employment?

<comment><USER13> I cannot prove causation, but all the job applications I recall seeing ask for the applicant's educational level. Companies use that as one of their qualifiers for choosing whom to hire. In other words, _those that have access to college have better access to employment._

<comment><USER14> Yeah, but I also can say that there are a lot of jobs out there that _ask_ for a college degree, but are more than willing to drop that requirement for the right person.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> (Since we're playing the dumb correlation equals causation game I'm going to play too:)

This is a graph of the inequality with which college graduates treat non- graduates.

</comment><comment><USER16> > among college graduates, there simply isn't an economic crisis in the United > States

Tell that to the guy who recently graduated with a bachelor's in business and accounting who was waiting our table last night.

<comment><USER17> You can find such people now and before the economic crisis. For the quote to be correct, the rate of employment among graduates before or during the crisis should be the same.

I am not saying that he is correct (I don't know, I don't have the stats). But your point is not valid evidence for this discussion.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> I'd be interested to know if it is really the amount of schooling that effects employability or if having less education is indicative of some other innate characteristic of a person. ie: low IQ or unmotivated etc...

<comment><USER19> Not innate, but social. A college degree is a very middle class, upper middle class thing to have. Not having a college degree is lower middle class, working class. It's faux pas to say "there's no unemployment crisis facing the upper middle class" though, so it's couched in cargo-cultish terms: "follow the early-adulthood formal-education rituals of the middle class and share in their good fortune".

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> As pointed out in one of the comments, this doesn't hold for recent college grads. I know a lot of very smart people who graduated in the past 2-3 years and cannot find jobs.

<comment><AUTHOR> What kind of fields?

I know plenty of people that graduated, some of them can't find jobs but they're mostly in the 'soft' sciences.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> So the non-diplomaed one is currently studying, working with dad without being registered as a worker or doing some stuff on-line or off-line that may be bringing some bucks for him??

Another thing the graph doesn't take in consideration is that as a non- diplomaed, you can afford to be jobless or work pretty much anything; however, as a college graduate with loans, you probably can't.

I think this is a larger topic/problem is to be just shortened in one graph.

</comment><comment><USER14> I don't understand this graph. Wouldn't "no diploma" also include "no college" and "some college"? And wouldn't that mean that the line would be in between those two rather than being longer? Or is this referring to no _high school_ diploma?

I'm also curious what the graph would look like if you included people who have Masters and PhDs.

<comment><USER22> No high school diploma.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> _And among college graduates, there simply isn't an economic crisis in the United States._

With a family member having a masters degree in education, and recently being laid off with about 700 other graduate degree holding teachers in an entire school district, I'm not buying this.

</comment><comment><USER24> I personally go to university because I think it is a lot of fun. It's not really stressful, I still have some time to do little side projects (most of the time, I am able to find a type of lecture that allows me to do that stuff on the side).

</comment><comment><USER25> I recommend a basic understanding of statistics. It will help you to understand just how little useful information is encoded in graphs like this one.

<comment><AUTHOR> Would you care to elaborate?

<comment><USER26> That fact that there's a correlation between education and employment doesn't tell us if there's a causation. What's very likely is that the kind of people who will prioritise getting a degree is also the kind of people who can and will adjust and pivot to a new type of employment environment.

If you're trying to decide to go to college, you're already very likely to be employable. Telling a 50 year unemployed old blue collar worker that he should have gone to college is a "let them eat cake" response.

<comment><USER27> Ok the typical correlation/causation argument doesn't apply here. There have been MANY studies on degree vs. employment and the results always look like this.

Second, stop using the word pivot when it doesn't apply. Not only is it a stupid buzzword, people aren't even using it correctly!

<comment><USER28> 'Pivot' is the new 'leverage'. We're just leveraging it in different ways. You should pivot into this new verbal environment.

<comment><AUTHOR> New rule: you can't do that while I'm drinking hot tea.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Great unless you're in the 5% of holders of bachelor degree's without a job...

</comment><comment><USER30> correlation != causation

<comment><USER31> Yes, it is true that correlation is not causation but the article is not claiming causation. It is observing that the correlation between the unemployment rate and the education level of those in power means that they are out of touch with the problems of those suffering. It is the correlation that is the basis for the argument, the fact that lower education levels might be causing the higher unemployment for the specific populations is not relevant and is never claimed by the article.</comment></comment>


Upping your Value as a Developer - ru-lai https://firstname.lastname@example.com/upping-your-value-as-a-developer-d20ca8cd1c07 <comment><AUTHOR> I have noticed this same problem as well. It's especially difficult in a startup environment because you're encouraged/required to wear many hats. Shedding duties and distributing workload can be quite a challenge, particularly if you have a personally to just get things done.

<comment> ru-lai Exactly. I think getting things done is really important, but getting the right things done is much more so.

And if your boss isn't demanding something and no one cares much about it, it is probably not worth doing it at all (unless you are running your own thing and can show how it is important).

</comment></comment><comment><USER2> >>In short, I was promoted as Engineering Manager, hated it, fired myself, limited communication with coworkers, worked fewer hours, eliminated distractions like Slack, and ultimately obtained the results I was looking for.</comment>


Smash the Past - <AUTHOR> http://oneplus.net/smash

<comment><USER2> This is repulsive. Promoting waste and destruction when there are many better ways to deal with a phone you don't want or need anymore.

[http://www.phones4charity.org/](http://www.phones4charity.org/)

[http://www.ncadv.org/takeaction/DonateaPhone.php](http://www.ncadv.org/takeaction/DonateaPhone.php)

[http://www.cellphonesforsoldiers.com/](http://www.cellphonesforsoldiers.com/)

<comment><USER3> If you actually watch the video, it isn't exactly encouraging you to smash your phone, it is just using it as a metaphor to move on to new technology. I'm sure they would love you to donate your old phone to one of these charitable organizations.

<comment><USER4> If you actually read the contest, 100 people will receive phones in exchange for destroying their current ones.

<comment><USER5> And if you look at the form, it has a field "Destruction method", for which the example text is "Hammer / Baseball bat / Screwdriver / Fire / Blender / etc."

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> The actual number of phones to be smashed is probably statistically insignificant compared to the number dropped and broken each day - I suspect there are more than 100 dropped/cracked/unusable phones daily here in the Chicago area.

The bigger issue for me is that this is effectively really only available to people who either have another phone available for use or who can do without a phone for several days ("After your submission has been reviewed and accepted, you should have your new OnePlus One in approximately 48 hours." but there's nothing about how long they're going to take to review submitted videos).

They also want to be sure you're not smashing an older phone - they have a fairly limited list which looks like it's all current high-tier phones, so if you're using a slightly older one (e.g. Nexus 4, HTC Amaze) it's not listed. I'm not familiar with all the phones on their list, so this may also be related to screen size - only larger phones need apply since the OnePlus One is a phablet?

<comment><USER7> I don't think it's even related to screen size. They are all quite recent high-end smartphones. Phones that could still be useful to a lot of people.

This is just dumb marketing at its worst.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> About 30,000 to 40,000 cell phones weigh about one tonne. That yeilds about one kg of gold. There are other materials that are recovered - paladium; silver. (I'd guess the copper is worth something too? Not sure how easy that is to get out after you've got the other stuff).

That doesn't have much to do with this contest I guess.</comment>


How Long Will the Phone Ring? - <AUTHOR> http://tawkon.com/blog/en/ring_time

<comment><USER2> "tawkon is a free application that will alert you when radiation from your phone spikes and suggest ways on how to minimize your exposure."

I want an app that will tell me when my phone's aura is no longer blue, because phones with blue auras are really good listeners and I want people to be able to hear me when I call them! /s

</comment><comment><USER3> Why is an app that's supposed to be measuring radiation collecting and reporting stats on if my calls were answered or not?

</comment><comment><USER4> How long does it typically take for a voicemail or answering machine/service to pick up? And what percentage of your long ring-time countries (e.g., Libya) have such a service?

Given that only 5% of calls go unanswered in Libya after ringing for so long, I think that's a huge confound that affects our behavior.

</comment><comment><USER5> Interesting, but very little data. They seem to have lots more that they aren't showing. A list of countries (top 50) would be nice. And it would totally rock if we could get the full (anonymised) dataset in csv format or something.

</comment><comment><USER6> I'm usually waiting till the phone recognize the caller :)

<comment><AUTHOR> :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> just wondering. Is there a difference between the different carriers?

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi Oren,

While there is a difference between carriers, but it seems to be only slightly. What we found was that geographic location was the greatest indicator.

We were actually quite surprised by the results ourselves.

<comment><USER8> Did you measure both when the (remote, physical) phone of the called party began to ring, _and_ when the caller began to hear a ring, or just the latter?</comment></comment></comment>


What America Lost When It Lost the Bison - <AUTHOR> https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2019/11/how-bison-create-spring/602176/ <comment><USER2> > _"...would have been even more powerful in centuries past, when 30 to 60 > million bison roamed North America. "They would have been everywhere," says > Matthew Kauffman..."_

Interestingly, current scientific evidence suggests that this was not at all the "natural state" of North America, and that it was actually a temporary ecological imbalance lasting for a couple centuries after smallpox and other diseases wiped out ~95% of Native Americans after contact from the Europeans -- and suddenly the bison went essentially "unchecked".

Obviously this doesn't change the evil of their almost-extinction or the need for bison as a proper balance -- just that the gigantic hordes of bison that Europeans first witnessed likely isn't the right baseline either.

See "1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus" for a highly readable account of evidence on both sides from 2006.

[1] [https://www.amazon.com/1491-Revelations-Americas-Before- Colu...](https://www.amazon.com/1491-Revelations-Americas-Before- Columbus/dp/1400032059)

<comment><USER3> Presumably they were also unchecked many thousands of years previous, before the arrival of humans?

<comment><USER4> The arrival of humans could have also coincided with a reduction of the population of predators of bison? Just thinking outloud I'm not exactly sure what the range of wolfs and bears were before the arrival of humans

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> My dad was a beef cattle farmer. Beef cows are large animals - 800 pounds isn't unusual - and if you accidentally get between a mama cow and her calf she can kill you. Dad got thrown more than once that way.

He once investigated raising bison. Doing his due diligence, he visited a bison farm. The fences were telephone poles drilled ten feet in the ground, and highway guardrail instead of wire. Dad backed away slowly and stuck to Black Angus.

<comment><USER6> The tribe here uses regular cattle fences. As far as I know only two juveniles have gotten out and that was at an entrance.

<comment><USER7> My godfather has a bison ranch, one of the larger ones.

Regular fences work, as guidance really. If a bison wants to get through, they're weak as water and won't stop them.

You need telephone post thickness fence preferably cemented into the ground if you want to really stop a bison from getting out. If they are in stampede mode, you're screwed, would have to drive I beams into the ground.

Bison treat fences as guidelines really, they'll move around it if they're not in the mood to care, but if they are in a "screw this" mood, that fence is going down.

Note, when I say regular cattle fence, I mean 8 foot posts driven into the ground, with barb wire every foot to 8 inches apart. Anything less and they tend to work their way through it trying to get at grass on the other side and then no more fence. And that wire has to be taut, like string on a guitar play a note tight.

As an anecdote, even with fences like that, he had about 4-5 bison that escaped. Each one got put down to make sure the rest of the herd didn't get escape into their blood.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> I didn't realize bison were so rare.

Where I live, there is a race literally called "The Buffalo Run" [1], a few miles outside Salt Lake City. There are bison everywhere including on the race path.

One of them nearly killed a runner a few months ago. [2]

[1] [https://www.buffalorunadventures.com/buffalo- run/](https://www.buffalorunadventures.com/buffalo-run/)

[2] [https://www.theepochtimes.com/man-gored-trampled-by-a- bison-...](https://www.theepochtimes.com/man-gored-trampled-by-a-bison-while- on-trail-run-at-utah-state-park_2950858.html)

<comment><USER8> That runner was my brother; we used to run the island very frequently, but now no more. Rare as bison may be, they are incredibly dangerous when too close to people.

<comment><USER9> I think it's worth mentioning the unexpected follow-up: after recovering from his injuries, your brother later took a date to the same park, where SHE was attacked by a bison. I'd stay away after all that too!

[https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2019/10/01/bison- gores...](https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2019/10/01/bison-gores-utah- woman-date/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> My dream for the United States is that we repopulate everyone to Texas* and let the rest of the country be wild, in varying degrees, and accessible by bullet train. That's my stance as an avid outdoorsman. Then we could see all this natural majesty flourish.

* I have not looked up the numbers recently, but I recall that we could fit the entire population of the United States in to Texas with a resulting population density less than that of Manhattan. Obviously doing this is not feasible, for a number of reasons.

<comment><USER11> Moving everyone in the US to Texas would only result in 0.2% of the population density of Manhattan (just checked with Wolfram alpha which is great for this kind of thing)

You might be thinking of moving the entire world's population to Texas, which would result in 56.7% of the Manhattan density (by 2017 estimates).

Of course we would still need to grow food in fields, which surely is the most space consumptious part of the population.

<comment><USER12> Apparently 41% of the land in the contiguous US is pasture or grazing land for livestock (548MM acre). Just staggering.

To compare, land we use to grow crops that we directly eat account for for ~77MM acres.

[[https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2018-us-land- use/](https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2018-us-land-use/)]

<comment><USER13> It is staggering only until you realize that the majority of land in the US is too arid to grow crops and was once called the Great American Desert -- basically most of the land west of the Mississippi. Such land grows primarily scrub and is ideal for livestock such as Bison and Cattle that are able to eat the vegetation that grows there naturally as a result of the limited rainfall available. That we have water intensive agriculture west of the Mississippi is only because we are depleting aquifers. It's not sustainable, and using this land for livestock is about the best thing that can be done with it. It's also what this land was used for prior to being settled -- large open plains on which Bison roamed.

<comment><USER14> The gist of your point is correct, but "West of the Mississippi" is the wrong dividing line. You have about a state and half of excellent land west of the Mississippi. It is all about the mountains - From when the mountains start just past the West coast, they cause clouds to dump their moisture on the west side. The east sides are arid, for a couple hundreds miles or more. And because we have multiples ranges of mountains, the western third of the nation is arid... with pockets of agriculture just west of each mountain range.

<comment><USER15> It's not just "a couple hundred miles past the mountains". It's basically even with the western edge of the Gulf of Mexico. East of there, there's enough rain. West of there, there's not.

<comment><USER13> You are right that "West of the Mississippi" is not the actual boundary, which is why I said "majority of the land". The actual boundary curves, being farther west in the Gulf and almost touching the Mississippi in the North, but "Western half of the US" is as good a description as any.

Point being, a lot of people who grow up in the Eastern Half of the US think the Western half has a similar climate, when it really doesn't. It really is an arid climate and the difference between East and West is rather stark.

Here you can take a look at a map of precipitation:

[http://www-das.uwyo.edu/~geerts/cwx/notes/chap17/rain_usa.ht...](http://www- das.uwyo.edu/~geerts/cwx/notes/chap17/rain_usa.html)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> "Lost the Bison". Losing something is unlucky or perhaps careless. The bison were not "lost", they were systematically exterminated.

<comment><USER17> Indeed. And the extermination of the Bison was a proxy for the extermination of the native Americans. [https://www.insidescience.org/news/bison- slaughter%E2%80%99s...](https://www.insidescience.org/news/bison- slaughter%E2%80%99s-destructive-legacy-native-americans)

<comment><USER18> I don't subscribe to the "Noble Savage" mythology. I'm not of the mind that European culture is all that great but somehow the technological leaps happened and those who stayed low-tech got crushed. The cycle will repeat, don't worry--we must be close to some tipping point of decadence.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> FWIW there are some bison in Golden Gate Park in San Francisco.

<comment><USER8> Do those bison ever do anything? They seem uncharacteristically docile compared to other herds.

<comment><USER20> Mostly a historical artifact. They're down to their last five or six, all of them female.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> [https://www.americanprairie.org/](https://www.americanprairie.org/)

Worth going check out what they are doing at trying to reset how the prairie was. We lost such a treasured natural wonder when we destroyed the flora and killed the fauna when we "won" the west.

Dan Flores has a great book called the American Serengeti that dives into how diverse it was. We literally had something on the level of the African Veldt and all the ecological riches that we've turned into a series of unsusaintable agricultural deserts punctuated with cities and suburbs. Here is a Joe Rogan interview with Dan that is worth the listen on this and coyotes in America. Conversation meanders a bit but really is a great episode.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LH1RUk1w_xk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LH1RUk1w_xk)

</comment><comment><USER22> "In areas where bison graze, plants contain 50 to 90 percent more nutrients by the end of the summer."

How does this work, thermodynamically speaking? Is it that by being culled, the plants engage in more photosynthesis overall, so there's a net gain? What about nitrogen?

<comment><USER23> Some plants have bacteria that can get nitrogen from atmosphere. Animals digesting those plants return nitrogen and other nutrients to the ground in a form that can be used by other plants, also by removing dead plants they open space for new plants to grow.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Slightly OT so I'm sure I'll be rightfully downvoted, but my favorite part of playing The Oregon Trail in first grade was always hunting for bison, even tho it was often a waste of resources because you couldn't carry all the meat back to use.

And I guess from skimming the article, that's sort of what really happened. We just lost nearly an entire animal group (I don't remember the proper taxonomy ranking, forgive me) because of excessive hunting.

The difference in the ecology with and without the bison is fascinating. I'm curious what other changes have happened in other parts of the world due to manmade extinction of an animal or organism group.

<comment><USER25> There's the dodos of mauritius

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> There is a taxidermied Bison in the museum of my (Australian) city.

The damned thing is HUGE. I cant imagine how terrifyingly amazing it would be to witness a herd of the big bastards running across plains.

<comment><USER27> I hand-fed one through a fence in New Zealand. The fence seemed feebly inadequate if the beast was determined to escape. This beautiful, large, shaggy-headed beast was, however, very gentle, much like a regular cow.

<comment><USER28> Only tangentially related, but we had a funny incident when an American visitor staying with us told us about his visit that day to a wildlife park here in NZ.

He and his wife spotted a hole in the wire netting fence enclosing the lions.

They assured each other it couldn't really be a hole - after all, the park owners would be sued up the wazoo if they actually left a hole in the fence, such that a lion could potentially escape and maul a visitor.

So they crept closer and closer until they realised that yes, it really was a hole and no, there was nothing else restraining the lion within.

I explained to him after all this that sueing people was not really a thing here, and he should assume that any such holes were just that - an actual hole.

<comment><USER29> Fences at zoos are generally for the visitors.

Modern zoo design largely uses things like moats to contain the animals, as they can be hidden from visitors and need dramatically less maintenance.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> There's a really good autobiography called buffalo for the broken heart which chronicles a ranchers quest to switch from a cattle ranch to a buffalo ranch. It really lays out the case for these amazing creatures.

<comment><USER31> Thank you for the recommendation. Probably my next book to read. There is a little bison operation here in Oregon and I'm a regular customer. Strange to think that we are saving them by eating them. I like the "move everyone to Texas" version proposed upthread better.

<comment><USER30> Well I guess I got downvoted because of the implication that you picked up on - "saving them by eating them." One kind of has to read the book. When you look at efforts to repopulate bison to the prairie, the most famous is Yellowstone. And indeed it's been successful. But we are talking about a herd of a few hundred - not the millions that once roamed the American prairie. Further, when you consider the prairie is not the Rocky Mountain region but places like North/Sohth Dakota, Nebraska, Iowa, eastern Colorado, etc, one needs to consider current land use/ownership - most of the land is privately owned and used to grow feedstock for the cow - An animal that is essentially a foreign invasive species. So before one gets all high and mighty about not eating bison, consider that by replacing cows with bison, the prairie ecosystem gets restored (the bison's hooves act as natural aerators vital to an amazing amount of bird species that also have all but disappeared), an amazing amount of feedstock land gets returned to its native state, etc, all without resorting to some tyrannical scheme to move everyone to Texas which despite its landmass could not support anywhere near the population of the US much less the world without an ecological catastrophe. Am I angry I got downvoted - not really - everyone is entitled to their opinion. But I do think we need an ounce of reality in this discussion. anyway read the book - if it helps the author is a conservationist and his plea/rationale is very humane and respectful to nature.

<comment><USER31> Thanks again for turning me onto the book. I just got it and I'm through the first chapter already. I eat bison for the same reasons alluded to barely in the first chapter: they graze well[1], and they have evolved together with the surrounding vegetation and wildlife. Yeah, the Texas thing is silly. Mostly wishful thinking on my part.

[1] [https://phys.org/news/2019-11-yellowstone-migrating-bison- sp...](https://phys.org/news/2019-11-yellowstone-migrating-bison-springtime- green-up.html)

<comment><USER30> I'm glad you like it. Above article is fascinating - it's like cows destroy the ecosystem through grazing while bison "engineer" it to make it better to the point they can see bison grazed land from space.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> We're screwed!

</comment><comment><USER33> Free lawn mowing?

<comment><USER34> Is actually being done by herds of sheep over here, especially in harder to access locations like sound walls and dikes.

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> Saw a wild bison chase a car up here. Pretty terrifying. They're huge and mean AF.</comment>


New Monte Carlo Simulation tool (Knockout.js) - <AUTHOR> http://montecarlosimulation.herokuapp.com/

<comment><USER2> This is nice. I think it should tell you the number of trials though, as well as sanitising the JS somehow. I just tested it using the function:

      eval(document.write("hello world!"))

and it gave me a page of text.</comment>


Ask HN: What are your unused domain names and how much would you sell them for? - <AUTHOR> Love to see what unused domain names you guys have and if there's a pricetag on them. Entrepreneurs always collect so many stuff, really believing they will one day use it. Share yours! <comment><USER2> [http://c.gg](http://c.gg) \- see front page

</comment><comment><USER3> runzoom.com healthdataweb.com

While I have blueprints for both I'd consider selling at the right price so if interested send me your contact information.

</comment><comment><USER4> Rapbattle.me Coinpeach.com Sathington.com Wislem.com

</comment><comment><USER5> skuvo.com atma.io - but not sure what to price it at, also given I plan to actually use these for my own projects someday as OP says :P

</comment><comment><USER2> solarsprint.com - $500 (although i'll likely donate it to organization teaching kids to build solar cars)

conferencecalljournal.com - $100

</comment><comment><USER6> teamstr.com

cdswitch.com

imager.io

witdaily.com

Don't have a specific price on any. Anyone can feel free to let me know they're interested via a reply here.

</comment><comment><USER7> autositer.com - $200

<comment><USER8> How many people own autositer.com?

<comment><USER2> Just me the domain owner.

Not sure why people re-posting it.

<comment><USER6> That's...bizarre. Three reposts.

Two are from a brand new account.

Maybe some kind of bot?

<comment><USER2> Maybe they have some sort of trigger on "autositer" keyword? Don't have a clue, never had anything like that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Kidslikemine.com

Willing to sell it.

<comment><USER10> Could be a good Minecraft service :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> peace.cm

Provide me with your contact info if you are interested.

</comment><comment><USER12> spare.io + pxe.io could be yours for $250 each.

</comment><comment><USER13> bestapps.it - hotapps.co.uk

</comment><comment><USER14> prankparcel.com - $500

</comment><comment><USER15> autositer.com - $200

</comment><comment><USER2> autositer.com - $200

</comment><comment><USER16> dopedesktop.com $200

</comment><comment><USER17> penguinlinux.com :)

</comment><comment><USER18> writepanel.com

</comment><comment><USER19> mvpbazaar.com

anyone ?</comment>


Ask HN: Favorite personal/resume/portfolio websites for developers? - jack-greenberg Which developer websites do you really like and enjoy looking at? Sites the are friendly, clean, clear, whatever, just nice. <comment><AUTHOR> CVCompiler.com</comment>


The "rare write" mechanism - <AUTHOR> https://lwn.net/SubscriberLink/724319/d25e2894c072d2af/ <comment><USER2> > _Cook 's implementation contains architecture-specific code that relies on > CPU features on x86 and ARM that selectively enable and disable write access > to areas of memory. Thus, the data write routines cannot be preemptible, as > interrupting the kernel after it enables writing on read-only memory would > result in leaving a window of vulnerability open._

Question from someone woefully lacking in kernel knowledge: what does it mean that

\- these routines are not preemptible, and

\- interrupting the kernel in this scenario would leave it vulnerable

?

<comment><USER3> That the routines are not preemptible means that an interrupt cannot run while that piece of code is running until it turns interrupts back on.

The point of this whole thing is to be able to write to "read-only" memory occasionally and be able to do it securely. That way things that aren't updated much (or that you have to be ultra careful with) can't be updated accidentally or via an exploit somewhere else in the kernel. If the memory is marked read-only most of the time then the CPU will prevent you from messing with it.

So you're supposed to start the process with one of these new functions (allowing writes), make the change, then end the process (locking the memory into read-only mode again) with another function.

This is where interrupts are dangerous. If interrupts were on then at anytime the kernel may switch what it's doing to do something else that it considers to be higher priority.

If the interrupt happens between when the work starts and the work ends then while the interrupt is running that memory is not read-only mode when code you don't control gets to run. On a very busy system you might be able to use a bug in another part of the kernel to update something that is supposed to be "read-only" because that protection is temporarily turned off.

By making it so an interrupt can't run you don't have to worry about that case.

There are a number of things in the kernel have to be run in the same mode for various reasons.

Sidenote: I've been following the LWN articles on the Linux kernel for a very long time and have learned a TON of interesting information about how all sorts of low level things work and the problems that can arise. I strongly recommend a subscription to LWN if you have any interest in this kind of stuff .

<comment><USER2> Oh of course - interrupts. Right. Which is what [I now understand] preeemptible means; system interrupts can intercept normal execution and cause the kernel to go do something else for a minute.

Thanks so much for explaining the read-write conditions too, I now understand this perfectly.

Thanks for the recommendation about the LWN subscription, I'll file that away as a serious consideration. For the meantime, I'm curious - does the subscriber-only content go free after a certain period, or do certain articles remain subscriber-only?

<comment><AUTHOR> > Thanks for the recommendation about the LWN subscription, I'll file that > away as a serious consideration. For the meantime, I'm curious - does the > subscriber-only content go free after a certain period, or do certain > articles remain subscriber-only?

All subscriber-only content becomes public after one week. However, that one week often makes the difference between learning about things while they're still active areas of consideration and discussion, versus learning about things when they're over and done with. A subscription helps you learn about things you can still _participate_ in.

<comment><USER4> > A subscription helps you learn about things you can still participate in.

As well as helping sustain such an amazing resource!</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Marketing Platform Independence - <AUTHOR> http://blog.asmartbear.com/marketing-platform-independence.html

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm wondering what patio11's answer is to the passage saying that SEO makes you platform-dependent, in the same way that iPhone apps make you platform- dependent on Apple:

"In my opinion SEO is the same way. It's an ever-shifting landscape of shit you chase without ever really knowing what the rules are. If you're doing SEO as one of ten tactics to get people to show up to your site, that's great. If you're betting the entire business on getting traffic through search results, at any moment a competitor or the platform itself could oust you."</comment>