Family trees: Tracing the world's ancestor - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-19331938 <comment><USER4> _The Ancestor's Tale_ by Richard Dawkins looks at our ancestry right back to the start of life:

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ancestor%27s_Tale>

It looks at a list of different species and then considers the most recent common ancestor we have with that species - fascinating stuff.

<comment><USER5> Someone has decided to downvote you. I really don't much like Dawkins (I'm a Christian), but this is very interesting. I hit the update button - <USER2> comment is a very worthy contribution to this discussion!

<comment><USER6> I suppose I understand, but his science books (which all of them are, save for "God Delusion") are top notch. If you want to understand Evolution, there's no better writer on the topic.

<comment><USER7> I would consider The God Delusion a science book.

(It's really good btw. I would recommend it to any theist.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> T-hawk This article makes the mathematical point, but deliberately ignores social reality. Yes, 100 generations is sufficient time for the premise to be possible, to fully propagate genes from every ancestor to every descendant.

But reality doesn't work that way. Human population groups breed within themselves. Mating pairs are not chosen at random from the entire human population. Consider all the remote groups that would have to be covered to satisfy the assertion. Someone alive today would have to become a common ancestor of every Lapp in Finland, every Aborigine in Australia, every Inuit in Nunavut, every Maori of Polynesia, every Falklander, every North Korean, and countless more groups that barely have any contact with the world community, let alone interbreeding. (And maybe we'll actually launch a Mars colony or interstellar generation ship, literally making it impossible.)

The article does mention this very offhandedly, inserting the clause "If people in this population meet and breed at random". But that antecedent is plainly false so the conclusions are not defensible.

<comment><USER8> Note that the article never specifically talks about propagating genes, just about being an ancestor. No matter how many generations you go back, there will be at most 46 ancestors in that generation whose genes a descendant has, and only one ancestor's mitochondrial DNA.

<comment><USER9> Not true regarding 46 ancestors - chromosomal DNA is swapped between the homologous chromosomes during meiosis: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meiosis#Prophase_I>

You are correct about mitochondrial DNA.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> By the same mathematical logic, almost everyone in the US today is a descendant of European royalty -- even people who are predominantly African or Native American. Similarly, everyone in the US with primarily European ancestry is a descendant of both Muhammad, the founder of Islam, and Charlemagne, the so-called "Father of Europe."

These claims were made by an entertaining article written 10 years ago in The Atlantic, "The Royal We," which covered the mathematical study of genealogy and is a good companion to the BBC piece: [http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2002/05/the- roya...](http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2002/05/the-royal- we/302497/)

<comment><USER11> I've actually traced my ancestry back to Charlemagne. It's an interesting exercise. Some of my links are not very well substantiated, but the dozen or two generations from Charlemagne forward are fairly well documented, depending on how many of your ancestors were bastard children of some horny nobleman. (Of course there are countless poor peasant farmers between now and then as well.)

<comment><USER12> I've also traced my ancestry back to Charlemagne. It's good fun but it's not the iffy documentation that is the main problem. It's the milkman effect. In talking with a researcher at a genetic genealogy center he said that around 10% of the population has a different biological father than they think they do.

<comment><USER13> I'd love to see this either substantiated or debunked - I've seen this claim made and refuted many times, but have never found a truly reliable source.

<comment><USER14> My recollection is that this number is based on a percentage of individuals seeking paternity tests-- where obviously we would expect to see a much larger number of false paternities showing up than in the general population.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I always get confused here between "Eve" and MRCA.

AFAIK "Eve" is not what we are talking here - that is not as identifying one person who is the ancestor of all living people, but that if we go back to the time of David, then he, and 80% of everyone alive at the time (approx 1 million) MUST be ancestors of everyone alive now. That is some of his DNA and some of everyone elses DNA at the time is in me.

That is pretty weird.

The other thing that gets me is that till agriculture, it seems human population was stable at around 1 million. Then it started to grow to 1 billion by 1800. Freddie Mercury could sing to the whole population of earth in three concerts.

<comment><USER14> I don't think the difference you're talking about is real. "Eve" is mitochondrial Eve, the most recent direct female-line ancestor-- the first human every woman can say was her mother's mother's mother's et cetera. There's a corresponding Y-chromosomal Adam; they probably lived 100-200,000 years ago, but not at the same time.

But of course if you're descended from her, you're descended from her parents, and her mate's parents too; nobody came from just one person. Each one out of our millions of common ancestors is an Adam or Eve by the popular definition: Every human being alive is descended from them. If they had not conceived, _no one_ currently alive would exist. There was never a biblically singular Adam and Eve.

<comment><USER15> So, the first person who was the MRCA-with female lineage only, ie the earliest woman who was the female ancestor of all living people, was 100,000 years ago.

But the earliest ancestor (female / male / mixed lineage) was only 3000 years ago.

(i.e. the first, had to have daughters only, the second, more recent could have daughter then grandson then great-grandson etc)

So, 3000 years before we can say anyone definitely was the ancestor of all, and there would be a lot of them. And 100,000 years before its female lineage. Then pretty much everyone is a common ancestor, back to plankton. And Dinosaurs!

<comment><USER16> More or less, except 3000 years ago travel was _far_ more of an issue. But, somewhere in the ~2,500-30,000 years it's probably true.

Also, with a population of 1 million people a female line 'wining' is much more likely than with a ~6 billion people population that probably will not happen again for a vary long time without some awesome mutation.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Mathematical proof why people get addicted to genealogy. They are almost certain to find they are related to someone famous if they go back far enough. It makes perfect sense why companies that provide genealogy research have no problem finding customers. The lure of finding out that you are as awesome as you thought you should be by way of royal bloodline, etc. is a pretty powerful market force.

<comment><USER18> My wife was playing around with the LDS Church's online genealogy tool and, not surprisingly, found European royalty in her ancestry. I don't think I quite succeeded at explaining that pretty much _everybody_ would have those.

For me, far more interesting than _who_ is in there is the _path_ things took between me and that royalty.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> The point in the title is valid, but his answer to the original question seems misguided to me: in the time of the bible the only lineage that mattered is the paternal one. If your grandmother was King David's daughter that would not make you his descendant. Not in the eyes of your contemporaries.

<comment><USER20> Except that Judaism has a form of Matrilineality so King David/etc were probably bad examples.

<comment><USER21> Matrilineality is mostly from the Talmud , a collection of Rabbinic opinion.

The Old Testament / Bible allows both parents to determine Judaism in the child.

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

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

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> I don't think so.

People will stop having offsprings (and even sex) well before that because they are immortal, even if they die, they can be resurrected because they have copies. Provided, human race doesn't get destroyed by itself or AI.

</comment><comment><USER23> If you guys have not read Galapagos by Kurt Vonnegut (finished it this week), you should.

Its about the evolution of the human species over the next million years turning on very specific events in Ecuador in the year 1986, and the common ancestor of all future humanity.

In his unique style, of course.

<comment><USER24> That one is Vonnegut's sleeper masterpiece - the choice of narrator was especially clever. How can you have a narrator narrate a million-year-spanning story? Vonnegut figured it out.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> The most important question is ofcourse, what do I have to do to be one of those common ancestors and have my dna be part of every human alive? Is it just having as many wives as possible like solomon and khan, or is there a better strategy?

<comment><USER14> Well, your number of children is linear, but your number of descendants is exponential. For the CS students, what this means is that the number of children you have personally, even assuming they all reproduce, rapidly becomes immaterial next to the number of your descendants.

The only reason having more children might be beneficial is if it significantly increases the odds that they personally, or their children successfully reproduce. If you have some other way of boosting those odds -- say, by being a successful parent to a smaller number of children -- that's just as good in the long run.

<comment><USER26> But each generation only carries half the DNA of the previous one. So after 5 generations there is a vanishingly small chance that anyone after that will still carry your DNA, with the exception of male lineage -- there you know that the Y chromosome has made it through.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> What is the probability that a descendent carries even at least one gene from the "Most Recent Common Ancestor"?

The human genome has only 20,000 protein-coding genes (which comprise 1-2% of human DNA). I'll be generous and use the 1% figure to assume that human DNA has about 2e6 "genes" (protein-coding or otherwise).

After 100 generations:

Probability any one gene comes from MRCA: 1/(2^100). Probability any one gene does not come from MRCA = 1 - 1/(2^100) Probability NO gemes come from MRCA = (1 - 1/(2^100))^(2^6) = 0.9999999999999999999999999999495129020658552444536494

Probability at least one gene comes from MRCA = 5.05 × 10^-29

<comment><USER28> I think that you have confused mutation with gene in your initial assertion.

There is probably only a few percent of variation between all of your 2^100 ancestors genomes (the majority of whom will be related), so protein coding regions of your genome and your MRCA are actually likely to be very similar.

Now if that MRCA had a specific mutation, the chances of your inheriting that specific mutation are probably low, but depend on that mutations prevalence in the population as well as whether the mutation is deleterious or not.

100 generations is very few in terms of changes within the genetic make up of a population under normal circumstances.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> > That's why everyone alive in the Holy Land at the time of Jesus would have > been able to claim David for an ancestor.

This really threw me for a while, as it seemed to be an obviously false statement. Until I realized the author had switched contexts on me: Jesus claimed male ancestry, but this statement is including ancestry from both male and female lines. So it seems overall believable, however I still see many provably false assumptions in this article.

* The population of the Holy Land was a constant 1 million people for 35 generations. Assumes no population growth. (false)

* No imigrants (false, see next bullet)

* No intermarrying with other cultures (false, because this intermarriage is often cited in the Bible as a reason people turned to other gods)

> More specifically, imagine the simplest case of a population of a constant > size - say a million (the approximate size of the Holy Land at the time of > Jesus).

I'm just quoting this to show that the author asks us to assume a constant size population

I'm certain that there were thousands of people in Palestine that could have claimed an unbroken ancestry from David. But based on all the flaws in this article, I don't trust the assertion that everyone in the area can claim an unbroken line (even including female ancestors).

</comment><comment><USER30> Jon Kleinberg, Professor of Computer Science at Cornell University on the pigeonhole principle: [http://edge.org/response-detail/2890/what-is-your- favorite-d...](http://edge.org/response-detail/2890/what-is-your-favorite- deep-elegant-or-beautiful-explanation)

</comment><comment><USER31> > If you go back on average 1.77 times further again (35 generations) everyone > in the population will have exactly the same set of common ancestors

The problem is, different people have different life span. And different people can share the same parent.

And sometimes in extreme cases, father - daughter love?

<comment><USER32> There's a method to estimate that: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Most_recent_common_ancestor#MRC...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Most_recent_common_ancestor#MRCA_of_all_living_humans)

"Studies have used computer modelling to estimate that the MRCA of modern humans lived between 5,000 to 2,000 years ago."

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> Perhaps this person:

Person Who Will One Day Become Warlord-Ruler Of What Was Once Nebraska Born In Omaha Hospital

[http://www.theonion.com/articles/person-who-will-one-day- bec...](http://www.theonion.com/articles/person-who-will-one-day-become- warlordruler-of-wha,27406/)

</comment><comment><USER34> I may be missing something but it doesn't seem necessarily true. Our last common ancestor may have already died and we may not get another with all the divisions that exist, or space travel that may happen (ie. we don't and won't breed at random).

</comment><comment><USER5> So in 3000 years we'll all be having sex with our relatives. Good to know!

<comment><USER35> We already are.

<comment><USER5> There's a cheery thought!

Seriously though, what about if you marry someone from a different country? I'd imagine the chances are somewhat lower.

<comment><USER35> Never mind a different country - if you married someone from a different species they're still related to you. The only difference is the number of generations you need to go back to find the common ancestor.

<comment><USER36> Are we sure abiogenesis only happened once? Given how quickly life appeared once the conditions were right, it doesn't seem too implausible that the lightning strike might have happened in two different tidal pools on opposite sides of the planet, and it seems just vaguely plausible that there would be (bacterial) descendants of each that have no interbreeding in their ancestry.

<comment><USER26> I asked this in a thread on Slashdot once, and got a really good answer. Basically, there are a number of molecules that can have a left or right chirality. These happened by random chance at the beginning instances of abiogenesis, and were replicated faithfully since. So if it happened twice, a number of those molecules (or larger structures) would be backwards. From a macro perspective, things like the heart being on the left side, or the direction of other internal organs (i.e. appendix on the right side). At the molecular level, things like the spiral of DNA. There is some more information in Wikipedia, under abiogenesis and homochirality.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> > In 3000 years someone alive today will be the common ancestor of all > humanity

The title is very misleading. It's not true about any single person, unless there's a species bottleneck with only one survivor, and then there's a practical problem.

It would be more accurate to say that all those living 3000 years from now will have their genetic roots in all those living in the present. But if that had been the headline, no one would read the article.

How about this: "In 3000 years everyone alive today will be the common ancestor of all humanity". True, but not very exciting.

<comment><USER38> The title is accurate. The article states explicitly that 3000 years ago the common ancestor of all of humanity existed. It's just that 3000 years ago wasn't the point where one and only one common ancestor existed; some 80% of the population may have carried that distinction.

<comment><USER37> > The title is accurate. The article states explicitly that 3000 years ago the > common ancestor of all of humanity existed.

The title -- "In 3000 years _someone_ alive today will be _the common ancestor_ of all humanity" -- is _not_ accurate. There was no single "common ancestor", because modern humans owe their genetic inheritance to multiple sources. This will be true in the future as well.

<comment><USER38> I'm not sure I understand the relevance of your point. If you're saying that there is no _single_ common ancestor, but multiple common ancestors at the timespan of 3000 years, then yes that is true. But that doesn't invalidate the fact that any of them is the (perhaps better stated as "a") common ancestor.

<comment><USER37> > But that doesn't invalidate the fact that any of them is the (perhaps better > stated as "a") common ancestor.

The title clearly suggests a single ancestor, an individual.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> Very interesting! If I didn't misread, a better title would be "In 3000 years almost everyone alive today will be a common ancestor of all humanity."

From the story: "In fact about 80% of the people at that time in the past will be the ancestors of everyone in the present. The remaining 20% are those who have had no children, or whose children have had no children, and so on - <USER3> other words, people who were genetic dead-ends."

This puts a whole new perspective on the often quotes statistics about Genghis Khan's progeny.

</comment><comment><USER40> So it seems that recessive traits, like blue eyes, will likely be bred out of humanity in relatively short order.

At least until full blown reproductive genetic manipulation comes into effect.

<comment><USER41> You need to (re)read Mendel. Recessive traits and dominant traits stay at a constant fraction within a population (absent selective pressures).

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> We don't have conquerors and kings anymore, in most parts of the world.

The common ancestor would probably have to be the ancestor of a very successful nation that would rule (a big part of) the world, and no current world ruling nations let their governors reproduce at will, like they did in the past.

Currently the world is full of Genghis Khan descendants, but also, there are no Genghis Khan equivalents anymore.

Simply remember the Monika Lewinsky scandal.

</comment><comment><USER43> What I am more interested in is: will someone who is alive in 3000 years be a common ancestor of all humanity?

<comment><USER44> Quoting the article: "And one can, of course, project this model into the future, too. The maths tells us that in 3,000 years someone alive today will be the common ancestor of all humanity.

A few thousand years after that, 80% of us (those who leave children who in turn leave children, and so on) will be ancestors of all humanity. What an inheritance!"

<comment><USER43> Heh =). But what I mean is something like, will there be someone alive in 3000 years that is about 2000 years old.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER45> The concept is totally flawed, because the probability of inbreeding goes up as you go back in the generations, so:

Probability your parents are the same person: 0

Probability one of your grandparents is the same person (i.e. your mom's mom is your dad's dad's wife): very low

But then you get up to the point where you have 10k or 10m ancestors and those numbers start to skyrocket.... especially given how relatively geographically constrained we are.

So if you go back 3000 years, you'll have whatever 200 million (whatever the global population was in 2000 B.C.) ancestors. But that number will be chock full of "repeats". In fact you might only have 20 million "unique" ancestors in that era.

You'd need to model migration to actually figure out when you could reasonably expect that everyone would be somehow descended from you.

But even if you completely buy in to the premise of the article, they still get the analysis wrong.

It's not that _someone_ will be _the_ common ancestor, it's that _everyone_ ¹ will be _a_ common ancestor of all humanity.

¹ who breeds and whose children breed, and their children breed...

<comment><USER46> > It's not that someone will be the common ancestor, it's that everyone¹ will > be a common ancestor of all humanity.

Yes, that's actually stated very pointedly in the article.

</comment></comment><comment><USER47> Haha, I cannot believe that they could not get a better picture of the guy in the article than they did.

Picture: [http://news.bbcimg.co.uk/media/images/62401000/jpg/_62401882...](http://news.bbcimg.co.uk/media/images/62401000/jpg/_62401882_yanwong_bbc.jpg)

</comment><comment><USER48> It's a consoling thought for the childless... almost all the branches of the vine end.

<comment><USER44> I think you misread (or didn't read the entire article). The article states that the majority of the "branches" will live as long as humanity itself. I am currently childless and did not find this a consoling thought (quoted from the article):

"In fact about 80% of the people at that time in the past will be the ancestors of everyone in the present. The remaining 20% are those who have had no children, or whose children have had no children, and so on - in other words, people who were genetic dead-ends. [...] A few thousand years after that, 80% of us (those who leave children who in turn leave children, and so on) will be ancestors of all humanity. What an inheritance!"

<comment><USER38> No, it is true that eventually most branches will end. It's just on the timespan of 3000 years, 80% of the population will likely be a common ancestor. But if you extrapolate back far enough, there will be one and only one. The only way branches can survive forever is if you assume that all genes have essentially the same chances of survival. This obviously isn't true. Even the smallest enhancement will quickly spread throughout the population.

I am curious when the most recent _unique_ common ancestor of humanity existed. Would we consider him human now or something in between?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER49> Or would have been, if genetic manipulation technology hadn't been invented.

</comment><comment><USER50> Yes, and that person will be the inventor of some robot or other.

</comment><comment><USER51> Good to see a More or Less story on HN. For those who don't follow it, it is basically either a UK current affairs show for the mildly autistic, or a regular open university maths and economics lecture - <http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b006qshd>

<comment><USER52> I really hate this trend for describing anything somewhat intellectual as 'autistic'.

<comment><USER37> Yes, but psychologists love it -- it's bread on their table. Anyone sufficiently to the right of the mean I.Q. can be diagnosed on the autism spectrum, and be put into pointless therapy.

<comment><USER53> I don't really understand this view of therapy. In my experience, it's something you choose for yourself, because you recognize the need. The odds that you receive a psychiatric evaluation against your will and be compelled into therapy are amazingly slim. Especially for something like 'autism- spectrum' disorders, where the majority of sufferers appear to be high- functioning.

<comment><USER37> > I don't really understand this view of therapy. In my experience, it's > something you choose for yourself, because you recognize the need.

That would be nice, but it doesn't reflect reality. In schools, children are frequently given autism spectrum diagnoses against their better interests, or wishes, or the wishes of their parents (but not always -- sometimes parents force these things on their children). But the patient's wishes are often the lowest priority.

Ideally, people would volunteer for therapy solely on issues they choose for themselves. But this isn't how clinical psychology works in modern times. Schools have a vested interest in getting diagnoses, because special-education funds are only available for those with a diagnosis.

The reason Asperger's is being abandoned is because it was applied in exactly the way described above, until everyone realized it was a scam -- even the therapists who benefited the most. Now it's slated for removal from the next edition of the DSM, and further, the diagnosis criteria for autism spectrum is being reworked to prevent another epidemic of nonsense diagnoses such as we have just seen.

> The odds that you receive a psychiatric evaluation against your will and be > compelled into therapy are amazingly slim.

On the contrary, it's an everyday occurrence, especially among children, who aren't mature enough to realize that psychologists aren't doctors.

> Especially for something like 'autism-spectrum' disorders, where the > majority of sufferers appear to be high-functioning.

Yes, and that is the present problem area -- bogus diagnoses, using vague criteria that can be applied to nearly anyone, with obvious advantages to everyone except the patient.

Mental health professionals, aware that autism spectrum diagnoses are out of control and no longer have any connection to reality, have joined an American Psychological Association task force charged with redefining ASD to stem the tide of nonsense diagnoses. One of those behind the redefinition effort (Dr. Fred Volkmar, director of the Child Study Center at the Yale School of Medicine) says of the diagnosis surge, "We would nip it in the bud."

<comment><USER54> "... Asperger's is being abandoned.... Now it's slated for removal from the next edition of the DSM"

REALLY??! Wow. I sure _thought_ I was seeing a bunch of misguided hullabaloo, but I'm surprised to see the "industry" itself is aware of it and addressing it. Do you have a link or any kind of substantiation?

<comment><USER52>
        >Asperger's syndrome... will be folded into a single broad diagnosis, autism spectrum disorder

^ FTA quoted as a source. It's not going anywhere, just re-labelling. There are definitely things behind AS, it's certainly not all just 'hullabaloo', even if a lot of cases might be.

<comment><USER37> > It's not going anywhere, just re-labelling.

Not really. Two things are happening:

1\. Asperger's is being dropped as a diagnosis.

2\. ASD diagnostic criteria are being redefined with the specific aim of reducing the number of diagnoses, to avoid another epidemic of nonsense treatments of people who, apart from being intelligent, are otherwise normal.

Further reading: [http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/20/health/research/new- autism...](http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/20/health/research/new-autism- definition-would-exclude-many-study-suggests.html?pagewanted=all)

> There are definitely things behind AS ...

Yes, there certainly are. It's a gold mine for clinical psychology, because anyone to the right of the mean population I.Q. can be diagnosed using the present criteria, and because of this kind of abuse, it's being abandoned -- it's just too tempting to apply it to everyone. As one of its prominent critics has said, "It's not an evidence-based term."

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER55> Not if people alive today are still alive in 3000 years, which isn't terribly likely but not wholly out of the question either.

<comment><USER15> If they had kids today, and _then_ stayed alive, it would work out pretty much the same. Except it would be fairly crowded.

</comment></comment><comment><USER56> You better hope it will be me!

</comment><comment><USER57> Except that there is zero empirical evidence that the Bible figure "Jesus" actually existed...

<comment><USER58> Given that the article makes it clear in the first sentence that this is about more than the specific example of Jesus that's relevant how?

<comment><USER59> not mentioning Jesus was never a common ancestor to all people, even in the bible.

Adam and Eve were (and I guess Noah?)

<comment><USER60> Also, from where did Jesus get his Y chromosome?

<comment><USER58> If you take the bible literally and assume that God is the father then is the fact Jesus has a Y chromosome proof that God is a man?</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Chineasy: Visual-based learning for Chinese - <AUTHOR> http://www.chineasy.org/

<comment><USER2> As a Chinese student, I like the way this website introduces new characters, since many Chinese characters evolve from abstractions of real objects. I also appreciate how the designer uses traditional Chinese chars instead of Simplified: Simplified chars have less connection with the shape of the object it stands for, or its meaning. And in my view, they are not as beautiful as the traditional ones. However, somet advice for Chinese learners: Most people in mainland China use Simplified Chinese instead of Traditional. So if you want to communicate with people from Beijing or Shanghai you'd better learn Simplified Chinese well.

</comment><comment><USER3> It's a little late for me as I've just worked my way through the 1500 most common characters using Skritter but I do love this highly graphical approach. Reminds me a bit of the Heisig system (which I haven't actually done myself).

Some of the statements in the text are a little dubious. For example, that you only need 1,000 characters for basic literacy and that with the top 200 characters you can read forty percent of Chinese popular literature.

I've read elsewhere that 1,500 characters is considered the minimum for basic literacy (a university graduate will usually know 3,000 or more). Even if 40 percent of the words in a given book make use of the top 200 characters, that only means you might occasionally recognize the odd character here and there. The meaning of the text will certainly still be utterly incomprehensible.

</comment><comment><USER4> I highly suggest that in this day and age, you teach using simplified characters. For entire swaths (not to mention the overwhelming majority) of Chinese people out there, simplified is the way to go.

</comment><comment><USER5> Beautiful. Is this your project? If so, what are your plans for it?</comment>


My thesis on Microsoft - <AUTHOR> http://www.beyonddevic.es/2015/01/27/my-thesis-on-microsoft/

<comment><USER2> I see MS becoming like hp or yahoo; a bet against innovation.</comment>


Brick and mortar sales floors are getting empty - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/oktium/productive-boredom-or-what-salespeople-can-do-with-the-empty-sales-floor-hours-478cff391989 <comment><USER2> At least for clothing stores, I much prefer to go to a store than to order online. You can't feel a material online; check size; color sometimes isn't accurately represented online; etc...

The proposed use an iPad and offer tech support may work for Best Buy or the tech section of Target or Walmart but no online experience (yet?) can make up for the lack of physical touch of a dress shirt or jeans or whatever. I personally, seek out an ultra soft t-shirt material when shopping for printed tees. If it doesn't feel how I like it, I move on.

Conversely, if I had a tech support question about a laptop or iPad or whatever; I wouldn't message a Target or Walmart (there are basically no electronic stores left here) floor salesman; I'd go right to the manufacturer website and call / email / chat with them - BUT - Joe User probably doesn't know to do that I guess.</comment>


The death of American optimism - <AUTHOR> https://www.newstatesman.com/2019/02/death-american-optimism <comment><USER2> TLDR: Our candidate didn't win, so America is doomed, doomed, doomed.</comment>


Our Reaction To Your Reactions To the Twitter Confidential Documents Post - <AUTHOR> http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/07/15/our-reaction-to-your-reactions-on-the-twitter-confidential-documents-post/

<comment><USER2> The Scorpion & the Frog <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Scorpion_and_the_Frog>

</comment><comment><USER3> I'm definitely not a big fan of Techcrunch but I kind of agree with them on this issue. They have these documents, there is information in them that would be interesting to the general public, they should publish them. It seems like they are showing some modicum of restraint by not posting the embarrassing personal information. Beyond that what would you really expect?

</comment><comment><USER4> I guess that hacker is really mean spirited..knows how to torment not only twitter but also everybody else in tech community by getting the monkey (techcrunch) drunk ..with this monkey getting high now there is going to be shit (these kinds of stupid stories and discussion) everywhere tech people read news

</comment><comment><USER5> These are times when I wish i could "bury" articles on hacker news

</comment><comment><USER6> Is there any reference if the hacker stole the password to an account in Google Apps for Your Domain?

I use it and there are pretty much no password recovery options:

Please contact your domain administrator to help you access your username or reset your password.

<comment><USER7> He 'guessed' the password for Google Apps.. The wheedling out of passwords was done for Yahoo! email accounts, which offers an abundance of ways to get at forgotten/lost/'wanna-get-me-one-of-those' passwords.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Is a whole new news item really necessary? He could have showed "his reaction to our reaction" in comments, or whatever.

All this talking around the issue is annoying. Show the damn documents. This is nothing but corporate voyeurism, so give us a flash. Either that or link to the .zip/torrent!

<comment><USER9> The whole point is to try and whip up some PR for techcrunch. They're obviously going to string it out as long as they can. They'll probably release 1 doc a week for the next year.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Attempt to cover their ass?

BTW, How does Techcrunch look like these days?

<comment><USER11> With all due respect... RTFA or don't comment.

<comment><USER10> Please update HN guidelines page with that new point.

<comment><USER12> You shouldn't need guidelines to tell you to read the content of a submission before talking about it.

<comment><USER10> Thanx. I'd rather not comment than having to read crap.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: A game I made in 48 hours - <AUTHOR> https://joemanaco.itch.io/timezone <comment><AUTHOR> Author here: Last weekend I participated in the Ludum Dare Game Jam (#44, Theme was "Life is your currency") and did a game from scratch in 48 hours:

TIME ZONE

How to play?

Arrow Keys Left/Right: Move left/right Arrow Keys: Up: Jump X: Shoot

Instructions: Try to reach the exit before your life counter reaches zero. You can earn valuable time by collecting Life Capsules. When you destroy an enemy they will drop Life Capsules. But be careful: Each shoot costs you time.

Play at itch.io: [https://joemanaco.itch.io/timezone](https://joemanaco.itch.io/timezone)

Source code: [https://github.com/JochenHeizmann/timezone- ld44](https://github.com/JochenHeizmann/timezone-ld44) (will add Readme/Build Instructions later on when I got some more hours of Sleep)

Soundtrack: [https://soundcloud.com/jochenheizmann/timezone-ludum- dare-44](https://soundcloud.com/jochenheizmann/timezone-ludum-dare-44)

Ludum Dare Game Page: [https://ldjam.com/events/ludum- dare/44/timezone](https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/44/timezone)

I did everything from scratch (Code, GFX, Audio, Level Design). I've used Monkey (which transpiles to Javascript) to code it, Photoshop for the pixels (Artwise I was inspired by Downwell, which I tried to mimic, but I suck at art) and Logic and Renoise for the Music and Sound FX.

<comment><USER2> why not support WASD? we've been using our left hand for directional controls since at least 1981

[http://www.sextonsmusicandgames.com/80s-classic-arcade- games...](http://www.sextonsmusicandgames.com/80s-classic-arcade- games/y8azyi81bholy5zxwr7dhmtty5lvou)

probably want to make jump / shoot right-hand actions as well, like in most games

I really like the concept and wanted to play the game, but as it stands the controls are too annoying for me

<comment><USER3> Why WASD and not ESDF? People have been touch-typing with their left hand in that home position since the late 1800s. (Or do you actually operate WASD with your pinky, ring, and middle fingers when gaming?)

<comment><USER2> Don't be dense. WASD is the most common layout, but sure, if you're that opinionated make it ESDF then. My point still stands. Left and right hand controls should follow a common sense approach

<comment><USER3> Maybe I'm weird, but being right-handed (like most people), I prefer directional controls on the right hand and action buttons on the left. Your characterization of the former as "left-handed" and the latter as "right- handed" controls seem backwards to me. So, to be honest, I don't even use WASD (or ESDF).

<comment><USER4> WASD is an incredibly common movement control scheme for video games. I'd go so far as to say it is the predominant four-directional control scheme for video games made in the past 20 years that were made to be played with a QUERTY keyboard.

> being right-handed (like most people), I prefer directional controls on the > right hand and action buttons on the left.

It is right-handedness that led to this because it was used in conjunction with a mouse, so all those right handed players had a mouse in their right hand, meaning their left hand was on the keyboard.

If you, as a right-handed person, use a mouse in your right hand and the arrow keys in your left hand, you are very much in the minority. Even for games that don't use a mouse, this convention (and muscle memory) is so established that it makes sense to use WASD, even for right-handed players. However making it configurable is always desirable to accommodate the minority of players who might not want to use WASD for any reason.

If you're not an avid gamer or primarily gamed before keyboard + mouse was common, this might indeed seem strange. But for anyone who's gamed consistently in the past 20 years it is very normal.

Why not ESDF? I don't know why initially but today WASD is established convention.

<comment><USER5> > Even for games that don't use a mouse, this convention (and muscle memory) > is so established that it makes sense to use WASD, even for right-handed > players.

A further argument for movement from the left hand comes from consoles, which starting with the NES if not earlier have consistently (always?) had the d-pad on the left. I remember having some trouble reversing that learning for the PC platforming games that used the arrow keys for movement.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Took me a while to work out you could actually make time from killing enemies -- I saw they only created one time crystal, and that it took about three to kill them, then died due to being out of time, so didn't realise that the monster's ones are significantly more valuable. :)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for your feedback.

Yes, I wanted to implement a separate crystal for the enemy loot to make it more obvious, but I ran out of time.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Great animation. And the movement feels really good too. I like the premise, but the one hit death on the enemies is very frustrating.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for you Feedback.

I think I have to tweak the hit boxes a little bit, so it's more forgiving. And probably also change from insta death so you only loose time/life when you hit an enemy.

<comment><USER7> A little more forgiving hitboxes would already help a lot. There is a lot of "I barely touched him" in there. But playing it some more, and getting it bit farther in the game, I'm already really enjoying what there is.

Edit: Finished level 3 with almost 2 minutes to spare. Would definitely play more of this. Specially levels that focus on forward momentum, like level 1.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, I think for a more complex post-compo version a lot of thought has to be put into the level design to consistently push the player and give him this feeling of "Shit, I'm almost out of time" \- but also with the possibility that he saves himself in the last seconds.

<comment><USER7> My mind instantly goes to a random, infinite level, turning it into a runner. But I don't want to backseat design your game. I actually really appreciated when I reached the end of level 1 and learned I don't have to keep restarting from the beginning. That was a nice surprise.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> This game is incredibly difficult in the first level itself.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, I made a playthrough on YouTube if you prefer watching it ;-)

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pSW4QmNz1JY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pSW4QmNz1JY)

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Impressive game for only 48 hours of dev--need more levels! Was able to get a pretty speedy deathless run after learning the patterns. Actually skipping most enemies seemed to be a good strategy. Also enjoyed the mechanic of bouncing enemies into position to progress faster.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Way too hard, you should also continue jumping as long as up is pressed.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, it's very hard :)

You should be able to adjust the jump height by pressing/holding the up key. Didn't that work for you? Which browser/os?

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I love this! I am _terrible_ at it.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you. Yes, it's intentional a quite hard game. :)

<comment><USER12> It's even harder playing it under Remote Desktop over slow connection!

<comment><AUTHOR> LOL :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Greate game. As a backend developer, is amazing that you did that in 24 hours.

PD: the music is the best part of the game, perfect for coding :)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you. Hey, I'm also a backend developer by day ;-)

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Lots of fun and great sound, too

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks!

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> The character sprite and animations look very similar to downwell: [https://youtu.be/kY83H8BdxhI](https://youtu.be/kY83H8BdxhI)

Not a criticism, just an observation.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, a lot of people mentioned that. Indeed I had the mobile version opened next to me while I pixeld it and tried to recreate this minimalistic style. The idea was that because I suck at pixelart I would probably be able to create a consistent and nice looking game in this simple style.

And I think especially in the sprite I took a little bit too much "inspiration".

I replaced the sprite now with something more unique. You can play the updated version here: [https://joemanaco.itch.io/timezone](https://joemanaco.itch.io/timezone)

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> I think it would be great if you could remove the 3,2,1 countdown in the beginning. Just let me restart ASAP!

</comment><comment><USER17> Great game. Hard, but not impossible.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Took me some time (heh), but I've finally "compelted" the game.

I really did enjoy the music.

<comment><AUTHOR> Glad you enjoyed it. Thanks for the feedback.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> awesome game, may I ask what the knowledge u need to build such a game? More details are appreciated!

<comment><AUTHOR> Coding wise the game is pretty simple. It has no real physics or anything involved and basically simple "Rectangle-Collisions". You can have a look at the source code (although it's pretty dirty with lots copy/paste involved during the hard time constraints).

As mentioned I did it in Monkey, but it should be also easy to recreate it in vanilla javascript, because all you need is a basic canvas you can render to, and there you go.

The real hard part was to get all the differents parts involved ready in time. For example the art took me alone around 10-12 hours because I'm really bad at graphics and I put a lot of effort and lots of trial and error in the animations.

The music I did in Logic Pro and Renoise, and it took only around 2 hours because I'm quite experienced in doing music (doing it since my childhood). But if you listen carefully you will find out that the arrangement is very simple, and it's also not mastered. Turning this in a full-blown-not-so- repeatedly track would take several days I think for me (I sticked to the 80:20 rule here ;).

The level design I did in Tiled, and I had the Tiled loader ready before the Compo started.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> This is great!

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks :)</comment></comment>


Famed Hacker Kevin Mitnick Shows You How to Go Invisible Online - <AUTHOR> https://www.wired.com/2017/02/famed-hacker-kevin-mitnick-shows-go-invisible-online/ <comment><USER2> Shamed 0-day peddler Kevin Mitnick. [https://www.mitnicksecurity.com/shopping/absolute-zero- day-e...](https://www.mitnicksecurity.com/shopping/absolute-zero-day-exploit- exchange)

</comment><comment><USER3> Also how to get yourself noticed by the security agencies of your country.</comment>


Pay-per-email plan to beat spam and help charity - <AUTHOR> http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn17577-payperemail-plan-to-beat-spam-and-help-charity.html <comment><USER2> There used to be this checklist floating around with reasons why ad-hoc spam fighting plans don't work, pre-set to just check off the options instead of having to go through a laborious explanation why this idea won't work...

It has some application here.

To me this looks more like Yahoo is looking for additional revenue streams. It starts off with a cent for charity, we'll see where it leads.

<comment><USER3> <http://craphound.com/spamsolutions.txt>

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> If the stamps are anything like certificates, I think this is just going to become an inconvenience and not really be THAT effective (though I'm sure it will be put a significant dent in the problem, at least initially).</comment>


Ask HN: is this reddit? - <AUTHOR>

Posts about world news, plane crash survivals... What's happening?
"Hacker news" - I was always hoping that the title would give it away.
I refrain from upvoting that stuff. I hope you will too.
And if you finally came to your senses, please don't submit stuff like that. It's ok to have a slow news day.
Thank you, and I apologize for the rumblings of an old fart. <comment><USER2> Everyone can also assist by "flagging" off topic posts.</comment>


SPDY: An experimental protocol for a faster web - <AUTHOR> http://www.chromium.org/spdy/spdy-whitepaper <comment><USER2> As I said in response to the previous submission re: SPDY, I think the protocol is great. However, relying on TLS NPN to enable it means I can't implement a SPDY server with OpenSSL versions prior to 1.1.0, or _any_ version of Windows SChannel (even in Windows 7).

Please, _please_ could browser developers consider supporting the _Connection: Upgrade_ and/or _Alternate-Protocol_ headers as an alternative?

(I know I'll probably get downvoted for sounding like a broken record, but I'd really like to spread the word about this issue)

<comment><USER3> Why should people care about what certain obsolete versions of OpenSSL support? Also - it doesn't appear that 1.1.0 is released; do you mean to say it's only supported by an unreleased version?

<comment><USER2> It would appear so, yes: <http://www.openssl.org/news/changelog.html>

        Changes between 1.0.1 and 1.1.0

        [..]

        *) Add Next Protocol Negotiation,
           http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-agl-tls-nextprotoneg-00. Can be
           disabled with a no-npn flag to config or Configure. Code donated
           by Google.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> This is the protocol that Amazon's new Browser (Silk) uses to keep the connection with Amazon EC2. I think it is very interesting that this protocol works so great.

I would love to test silk just to test the speed.

<comment><USER4> Where did you get that information? is there an official statement about it? I thought about this too when I read the blog post but couldn't find more information about it.

edit: after reading another HN's thread I found this <http://aws.amazon.com/es/amazonsilk-jobs/> suggesting the same thing. Thanks anyway.

<comment><AUTHOR> I actually got it from a thread in HN: "Amazon's Silk Web browser adds new twist to old idea" <http://news.ycombinator.net/item?id=3049216>.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> SPDY is probably landing in Firefox trunk soon, for release early next year.

The real problem is lack of good server implementations now. Google has whatever they use, but basically nobody else does.

Community of the web, let's get this rolling!

<comment><USER6> Apache SPDY module: <http://code.google.com/p/mod-spdy/>

Tomcat SPDY implementation: [http://svn.apache.org/repos/asf/tomcat/trunk/modules/tomcat-...](http://svn.apache.org/repos/asf/tomcat/trunk/modules/tomcat- lite)

(haven't tried yet)

<comment><USER7> You're not the only one. I can't find a single person who tried the Apache SPDY module. There is also no recent activity on their discussion board, which is not promising.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> For those of you running chrome, browse to chrome://net-internals/#spdy in order to check out the SPDY connections currently open in your browser (probably at least gmail for most here.)

</comment><comment><USER9> "For best performance, it is expected that clients will not close open connections until the user navigates away from all web pages referencing a connection, or until the server closes the connection. Servers are encouraged to leave connections open for as long as possible, but can terminate idle connections after some amount of inactivity if necessary. " it's basically a "long connection" scheme, the servers will suffer. But skimming the spec, I can't find a TCP preferred port nor an URI scheme, how do I start a connection ?

<comment><USER10> Overall, the servers would have to suffer less than they do now. It's just a single pipe instead of multiple short-lived parallel connections.

<comment><USER9> I didn't get my idea right: the profile load of the server will change (from many short connections to less long connections), I'm not sure they are prepared. But I'd like to try it, just because it looks interesting.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I've been following japhr's blog <http://japhr.blogspot.com/>. He has some great articles on his chain about writing <http://spdybook.com/>

If you want to know more about spdy from on node.js w/ full unit testing then I recommend reading through his blog and book.

</comment><comment><USER12> While SPDY seems pretty good actually, and that I understand they just want "a quick hack to get that out fast" a part of me can't help to think "I'd rather have it done the Right Way and use SCTP"

<comment><USER13> SPDY runs over TCP and SCTP is a replacement for TCP. Getting SCTP supported across all operating systems and hardware is a huge endeavor almost at par with converting to IPv6. SPDY, by comparison, is already in place and working. Getting it "done right" may never happen.

SCTP would still necessitate a new application-layer protocol.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> What exactly is the advantage of this vs http over sctp?

<comment><USER15> As previously discussed, SCTP does not pass through home NATs and thus effectively cannot be used on the Internet. Also, SPDY has very effective HTTP header compression.

Edit: I forgot to mention that neither Windows nor OS X include SCTP. (Unless you want Chrome to install kernel modules.)

<comment><USER14> SCTP passes through home NATs just fine if you layer it on top of UDP

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Note: This is officially pronounced 'speedy', not 'spidey' as I persist in doing in my own head.</comment>


Ask HN: Where do you listen to podcasts? - <AUTHOR>

In the car?  At home?  At work? In complete isolation? While making dinner? <comment><USER2> On the walk home.

Find it hard to listen to a podcast (that's at all interesting) while I try to concentrate on anything else.

</comment><comment><USER3> Home, work, bus, car, bathroom, grocery store...everywhere. For better or worse, it my primary means of consuming education, entertainment and (mostly tech) news. I can't get enough. Sadly my iPod Touch died and android doesn't have double speed podcast playback. There's now 50% less time in my day.

</comment><comment><USER4> Going to uni takes at least an hour on the train and on a bus (not even counting the return trip) so I listen to podcasts then.

</comment><comment><USER5> While working out

</comment><comment><USER6> Walking to/from work, while cooking.

</comment><comment><USER7> train, bus, working out or if its really interessting i sit at home and stair at the wall.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Car

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Home

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Work

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Isolation

<comment><USER8> Hey, how long does it take to get unsubscribed from viewpointr? And why do I have to fricking EMAIL someone to get removed?</comment></comment>


Ajax.org - The real-time collaborative application framework - <AUTHOR> http://www.ajax.org <comment><USER2> When I opened this for the first time I was really excited. It seemed like a really in-depth API/library with a lot of options. But when I started actually using a lot of their demos with Firefox 3.5 I noticed how many visual and coding compatibility issues there are. Things are quite often visually "odd", and sometimes values simply return NaN.

<comment><USER3> I couldn't get a single demo to show up in Safari 4.0.4.

<comment><USER4> Or Chrome, so perhaps Webkit is not supported yet.

<comment><USER5> The site completely puked in Opera

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I just tried this on my iPhone and it turned into a Droid.</comment>


Ask HN: What are your opinions about GridFTP? - <AUTHOR>

<comment><USER2> For anyone else whose first thought was "WTF is GridFTP?": [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GridFTP](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GridFTP)

<comment><AUTHOR> to me seems a very niche protocol written for physicist from physicist. Usually this means that there's an equal probability for it to be an awesome or horrifying experience. I've been offered a job which has to deal with that, and I'd like to make my mind wether is something worth working on, or is better to stay away.</comment></comment>


Show HN: Vim-Like Layer for Xorg and Wayland - <AUTHOR> https://cedaei.com/posts/vim-like-layer-for-xorg-wayland/ <comment><USER2> I am also using a custom keyboard layout (basically the movement layer from the NEO layout + left alt → left ctrl, right alt → left alt, caps lock → esc). Initially it was implemented as xmodmap, then as xkb layout and finally as C program using Interception Tools [0]. I had problems with both xmodmap and xkb where it wouldn't work in certain applications; Interception tools works everywhere (even in VMs and outside of X/Wayland).

[0]: [https://gitlab.com/interception/linux/tools/blob/master/READ...](https://gitlab.com/interception/linux/tools/blob/master/README.md)

<comment><USER3> Does it need root/sudo? Or only plugdev or some other "sit-in- front"-privileged group and there you go?

<comment><USER2> I don't think the program itself needs elevated privileges, because it only reads from stdin and writes to stdout. I am running the interception tools as systemd service, though. I think the Intercepton Tools themselves need elevated privileges; I mean, it's kind of key logger if you think about it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I've done a similar thing at the hardware level using a QMK layer. The main benefit for me is being able to use VIM movement keys in every text input.

As I'm using a dual boot setup, it's also pretty handy to have the mapping directly embedded in the keyboard firmware.

<comment><USER5> Thanks for mentioning QMK [0], it's not something I've heard of before, and it seems like a huge step up from standard keyboard firmware. As far as I can tell only a small number of manufacturers officially support it, but at least one person seems to have made some progress getting a standard cooler master keyboard to run it [1].

[0] [https://qmk.fm/](https://qmk.fm/) [1] [https://github.com/qmk/qmk_firmware/tree/master/keyboards/bp...](https://github.com/qmk/qmk_firmware/tree/master/keyboards/bpiphany/unloved_bastard)

<comment><USER6> It's reasonably simple to port QMK (at least partially) to a new microcontroller.

I have worked on Teensy 3.6 support for QMK, and plan to work on Teensy 4.x support as well.

<comment><USER5> Is any special hardware needed, or is it all software work?

<comment><USER7> It's more like full-hardware-no-software work.

Basically if you want to use this on your "standard" keyboards bought off the shelf, you have to either:

1\. Open your keyboard, replace the keyboard controller with something that you can program via soldering etc.

or 2. Pray your keyboard doesn't use a mask ROM to store its firmware, and it has a powerful enough MCU as keyboard controller, then figure out how to reflash it and port QMK to it blindly.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> The NEO keyboard layout ([https://neo-layout.org/](https://neo-layout.org/)) which I'm using for over a decade, has a similar concept of a number of additional layers.

This is quite handy for having a bunch of special characters for programming readily available (hover over the layers on [https://neo- layout.org/](https://neo-layout.org/) to see).

For any other modal use-cases (e.g. resizing windows, changing music volume), I use i3's modes: [https://i3wm.org/docs/userguide.html#binding_modes](https://i3wm.org/docs/userguide.html#binding_modes)

</comment><comment><USER8> They're using sway/i3. I don't understand why they're doing it like that when sway/i3 already has support for modes.

They could have just done something like this in the sway/i3 config:

      mode "normal" {
        bindsym i mode "default"

        bindsym q kill
        bindsym y exec volchange -5
        bindsym u exec volchange +5
        bindsym o exec brightness -200
        bindsym p exec brightness +200
        bindsym w exec mpc prev
        bindsym e exec mpc toggle
        bindsym r exec mpc next
        ...
      }

      bindsym $mod+c mode "normal"

EDIT: I've realized their method has the benefit of working with other window managers that don't support modes or on-the-fly reconfiguration.

</comment><comment><USER5> As someone who uses Vim daily, I quite like this idea. I would customise it to mimic the original Vim bindings a bit more closely where possible though, to e.g. keep Ctrl-D as page down.

I'm not sure if this would be possible, but it would be fun to have customisable per-application bindings (based on the active window, probably) in addition to the set of global bindings. I can also think of minor cases where motions would be useful, like 3x alt-tab (i.e. 3gt) to switch to a specific application.

I wonder at what point the depth of the mode-ness will become too much, if you were running this, for example, with a vi-mode bash readline.

<comment><AUTHOR> > e.g. keep Ctrl-D as page down.

I tried doing the same using xdotool by binding Ctrl+F<something> to PageDown but for some reason it didn't work for some reason and I didn't investigate enough.

<comment><USER9> I believe a possible reason is that the OP used xkb, which if I'm not mistaken is lower level than xdotool (so xdotool would not suffice)

<comment><AUTHOR> I am the OP. What I tried was something along these lines.

e.g. to get w in normal mode to send Ctrl+right, I did the following.

1\. Bind w to F14 in normal mode.

2\. In i3 config, add `bindsym 0xffcb exec xdotool key ctrl+Right`

If I simply ran the command (`xdotool key ctrl+Right`) in normal mode, it would work but it didn't work via a binding.

This was infact the initial idea behind all this but after quite some testing xdotool turned out to be unreliable so I repurposed it as a shortcut layer.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I'm fan of heavy key mapping customization to boost productivity.

The most productive remapping so far which I made is to globally remap (via xkb) Left Alt + HJKL to respective arrow keys. Works in all GUI applications which rely on arrow keys for navigation, plus standard Ctrl + Shift + Left Alt + H (Left Arrow) works to select previous word in text fields (e.g. in browser).

Next one is to remap Left Ctrl to Left Shift and to press it with upper side of the palm just below pinky (not sure how this part of the hand is called correctly) instead of utilizing finger for that. Works best on mechanical keyboards without bevels.

Also I find quite useful to remap keys 5-0 to Right Shift + Q (5), W (6), E (7), R (8), D (9), F (0). I find these keys are easier to reach and type without a mistake instead of using standard 5-0 keys which you should stretch your fingers to type. For example, to type "()" I use Left Ctrl (remapped to Shift) + Right Shift + D, F which is easier to type without fingers leaving home row.

<comment><USER11> I use Hammerspoon and Karabiner Elements on macOS to rebind keys (including the examples you gave). There's some examples and repositories available for these applications.

On Windows, I use AutoHotKey, though mainly for gaming (be aware it can get you banned on some games though; investigate this beforehand).

On Linux, I have a bit more difficulty with all of this because:

1) There's no standard application or configuration or even desktop. As of now I mainly use Gnome, but my preference would be to use more lightweight WM/DE on some of my devices.

2) I sometimes use a Linux desktop in a VM, from macOS.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> I've been thinking about doing something like this for quite a while. One question that's been bothering me is: How will I know what mode I'm in? Can I somehow change the cursor system-wide? Can I add some sort of notification to my i3bar?

EDIT: I just noticed that the article mentions this as a "bonus" at the end. Does this work reliably with i3status-rust? In case of i3bar at least there'd always be a delay coming from the low refresh rate of (in my case) 5s.

<comment><USER13> I wrote a keyboard hook in C for Windows (I was using AHK but it was unreliable). Initially it was modal but I found over time that I would get caught out. So now it's not modal. I hold down capslock and then use ijkl to navigate etc. The only thing left that is modal is spacebar for select/visual mode but I still a have to hold down capslock for that (e.g. capslock down, space bar, ijkl to select text, capslock up). Also I was using hjkl but switched to ijkl to match the arrow keys. I don't use vim enough anymore to justify hjkl.

Holding down capslock turns out to not be a problem in practice. The main benefit of vim style navigation for me is not leaving the home row.

<comment><USER12> > Also I was using hjkl but switched to ijkl to match the arrow keys. I don't > use vim enough anymore to justify hjkl.

Same here. ijkl is so much better!

> So now it's not modal. I hold down capslock and then use ijkl to navigate > etc.

Hmm… maybe I should try that. Then again, I _am_ afraid of getting the Emacs pinky all over again…

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Get a keyboard with layer support, [https://docs.qmk.fm/](https://docs.qmk.fm/). No need for different modes ...

</comment><comment><USER15> I wonder if, instead of having two different layouts and changing between them, an alternative would be to put all the navigation keys at fifth level and above, and then hijack the Kanji modifier to switch to them, or maybe pretend you're a Far East keyboard and use Eisu_toggle.

</comment><comment><USER16> Good idea. This could be also useful for assigning custom functionality instead of vim (e.g. window management).

Also one can switch backlights/keyboard colors depending of the keyboard mode for visual feedback.

</comment><comment><USER17> In the fluxbox WM you could achieve something like this using keymodes

[http://fluxbox-wiki.org/Keymodes.html](http://fluxbox-wiki.org/Keymodes.html)

</comment><comment><USER18> Have you considered just using a (sticky) compose key and setting macros for some weird characters? That way you wouldn't have to run scripts to change modes.

</comment><comment><USER19> Does this get confusing when you're actually using Vim? Do you ever use Keyboard Normal Mode when you're in Vim?

<comment><AUTHOR> No, it doesn't. I use keyboard normal mode sometimes for things other than navigation, like seeking audio, etc

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> sadly wayland means only sway. I've done some remapping as well, but don't know how to make Gnome in wayland mode (which is nice on a cramped notebook and someone has to test wayland...) read anything from a user-specified directory, so I have to edit stuff in /usr every update anew...

</comment><comment><USER20> Some concrete examples of using it? Did I miss the demo showing some good exemplary behaviour driven by this?

</comment><comment><USER21> I just had a crazy idea based on this- (it's not going to be useful as is, mostly novel and potentially good)

You know how a desktop screen is fixed width and windows cannot be outside of the screen (at least in tiling), I want a single workspace for all windows, where they arrange non-ovrlappingly and screen would just be a view to a fixed point so I can scroll (quickly using hjkl) in 4 directions to look at other windows and even maybe select a group of windows and make them my current view.

Much more dynamic than i3, my current wm.

<comment><USER22> I've never used AwesomeWM but from a brief reading, maybe it could do part of what you want: "maybe select a group of windows and make them my current view".

From what I understand, windows don't belong to a workspace, but a workspace is a collection of windows having a certain tag. A given window may have multiple tags, so it can belong to multiple workspaces.</comment></comment>


Meditation: Why Bother? - <AUTHOR> http://www.vipassana.com/meditation/mindfulness_in_plain_english_3.php? <comment><USER3> This is almost poetry, expertly written.

"The essence of our experience is change. Change is incessant. Moment by moment life flows by and it is never the same. Perpetual alteration is the essence of the perceptual universe. A thought springs up in your head and half a second later, it is gone. In comes another one, and that is gone too. A sound strikes your ears and then silence. Open your eyes and the world pours in, blink and it is gone. People come into your life and they leave again. Friends go, relatives die. Your fortunes go up and they go down. Sometimes you win and just as often you lose. It is incessant: change, change, change. No two moments ever the same."

<comment><USER4> Reminds me of:

"You can never step in the same river twice." - <USER2>

<comment><USER5> It's interesting to me how much Heraclitus resembles an Eastern mystic. Fitting that he was both behind and way ahead of his time.

"Couples are wholes and not wholes, what agrees disagrees, the concordant is discordant. From all things one and from one all things."

"To God everything is beautiful, good, and just; humans, however, think some things are unjust and others just."

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This essay angers me with its presumption. It reads off like a fortune teller reaching for whatever level of generalized sympathy will get you nodding along. Maybe I'm just not sensitive enough to see the boiling resentment and stress in watching families sing Sweet Caroline along with the crowd at the local baseball game, or maybe I'm just far too aware of the postmodern tradition of misery the essayist is targeting to, ah, buy it.

 _We try to stick each perception, every mental change in this endless flow into one of three mental pigeon holes. It is good, or it is bad, or it is neutral._

Does anyone actually live just like that or is it a strawman that wrings another drop of ethos from the audience?

I don't want to make a statement against meditation, actually. I have some mental antiviral habits that make me think Vipassana as its practiced in the US is half truth and half marketing delusion, but at the end of the day stress _is_ a huge problem and anything that can get people to honestly, psychically relax has its value. My own experience is that meditation can take many forms and truly is a perspective inversion with a great personal ROI. I go backpacking, and I'll recommend it heartily too.

I want to go one step further. I've known and spoken to a few people who practice meditation both here and in China and will say the essay isn't wrong in its spiritual recommendation either. I am thoroughly convinced through testimony and personal practice that you can learn a lot from sitting still. There was even a link on HN a few days ago that suggested rational, tested support.

But even if meditation were the honest cure for all existential angst in the human condition, even if it cured AIDS and fixed Greece's financial woes, I'd still prefer someone talk to me with respect instead of trying to wheedle their way into my heart with meandering, gypsy-like proselytizing.

 _It only sounds bleak when you view it from the level of ordinary mental perspective_

You too can be _extraordinary_! How many payments is Vipassana? (Well $125)

 _There is only one way you will ever know if meditation is worth the effort. Learn to do it right, and do it. See for yourself._

The only valuable 3 sentences in this whole business.

<comment><USER7> Meditation isn't a cure, it's just a good way to actually hear the alarms that may have been going off for years - a diagnostic technique. You hear all of the (demons? background processes?) that you've gotten tuned out, and realize how much mental energy they drain. (Hold on - maybe I have email. And while I'm there - are people on HN voting me up? What was I saying?)

Since meditation is basically just _sitting still, shutting up, and listening_ , anybody who wants to sell you an _extreme_ ZenTM experience is suspect.

You. Just. Sit.

It's boring. So fucking boring. At least the paint is drying. You just have sore knees.

But it helps. While you were _so worried_ about random crap, how many little joys did you tune out? Your morning coffee. Playing with your SO's hair. Pay attention!

And yeah, I'm just as wary as you of someone trying to sell me _sitting and looking at myself in the mirror_ for hundreds (no, thousands) of dollars.

Previously: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=612740>

<comment><USER8> Saying that meditating is "you just sit" is like saying that exercise is "you just move". You'll get somewhere doing only that, but not very far. Things in life that are simple, we already all do--like wiping our asses. On the other hand, meditation ends up working for some people and not others, and different people require different amounts of time and effort to get anywhere. This indicates that meditation is like any other worthwhile thing in life--not simple.

<comment><USER9> With the school of Zen I am familiar with you pretty much do "just sit". The practice is called Shikantaza, literally "Just sitting" in english. With 10% chanting and bowing afterwards.

<comment><USER8> AFAIK, Shikantaza is only done after you've had a good amount of experience with other, more structured forms of meditation, like counting breaths or following the breath. At this point, you should already have some idea of where you're going, and "just sitting" will be more than just sitting to you.

<comment><USER9> I sit at a Dojo regularly and occasionally do introductions. We don't teach counting, but do teach following the breath at the nostrils and settling the mind in the hands, as things to come back to once the mind has wandered. There is some technical stuff about posture to learn but basically you just turn up and sit. If they do it differently somewhere else that's cool too, lineages vary.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> That's one of the best essays I've ever read. It says almost nothing about meditation, but it nails every frustration and unhappiness I've ever experienced.

It makes me think that if someone can be that insightful, I'm more likely to go along with whatever he suggests because he's got it figured out so well. Maybe it's time to give meditation a shot.

<comment><USER11> If this comment was meant to be sarcastic then it was expertly executed! BTW, you really don't need a teacher to learn meditation... just sit down, shut up and focus on your breathing for a few minutes each day... and watch how wild your mind is.

<comment><USER10> Not meant to be sarcastic at all. I just appreciate the insight in the essay.

I'd rather someone be an example of the results of their ideology, than have them try to sell me on it. I think it speaks volumes.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I think that, given a limited amount of time, I'd rather do exercise (cycling) than meditate, as it's a pretty good way of 'getting away from things' and thinking without interruptions, and I also get some physical benefits from it.

<comment><USER13> Exercise is awesome.

I do think the concept of "limited amount of time" is a little flawed. Perhaps the real reason people shy away from meditation is that it's hard and takes discipline and willpower (in a good way)?

<comment><USER14> I don't think the concept of "limited amount of time" is flawed.

Frankly, some people are constantly working and don't have time to meditate. It isn't that they shy away from it because it is hard or takes discipline and willpower, it is because we live in a world that (unfortunately) gives us a limited amount of time during the day that we can spend awake consistently if we don't want to possibly damage our health.

<comment><USER13> Fair enough. Still though, I don't know, I personally spend a lot of time on things that are not obligatory, so that time is mine to choose how I spend it. Family time, kid time, HN time...

If you're "constantly" working, then that's a choice you made, right?

[edit: just realized I sound kind of like an ass. I shouldn't speak for other people. Just read this as me talking to myself :)]

<comment><USER12> It's not about 'constantly working' (I don't), it's about having lots of things that I like to do, plus work. I think even if I were wealthy and didn't have to work I'd find more ways to fill my time than time available. In some ways that's good - I don't remember the last time I was bored - but it does mean my time is limited.

I guess the point is that for me, exercise is probably more efficient, time wise, in terms of benefits/time, and also includes some of the mental things that I think meditation must give you, but of course it's a fairly personal thing, and to each his own.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> >And just because of the simple fact that you are human, you find yourself heir to an inherent unsatisfactoriness in life which simply will not go away. You can suppress it from your awareness for a time. You can distract yourself for hours on end, but it always comes back--usually when you least expect it.

Or you can embrace that inherent unsatisfactoriness and affect real change in the world.

>Examine each of these goals and you will find they are superficial. You want food. Why? Because I am hungry. So you are hungry, so what? Well if I eat, I won't be hungry and then I'll feel good. Ah ha! Feel good! Now there is a real item.

I'm pretty sure happiness is the superficial goal when it comes to food. Food can be a want yeah sure, but it's also a NEED.

In general I just can't abide by this sort of nihilism couched as noble anti- materialism.

If the truest expression of your philosophy leads to you sitting in a cave waiting to starve, freeze, dehydrate, or get eaten by wolves, you can just fuck off.

<comment><USER16> Apparently, you didn't understand the essay or the meditation. Meditation is not nihilism or anti-materialism. I am not sure how i can explain it to you to make it clear to you. I remember from a Buddhist saying that if your glass is full, there is nothing one can do about it. You need to remove something in your glass first before you can pour anything else into it. I feel like you are full of ignorance and false assumptions about meditation. Unless you become openminded and really try to understand what meditation is, nothing is going to change your mind.

<comment><USER15> You're really going to call me close minded in defense of an essay that gets all of five paragraphs in before calling my experiences and emotions fake?

An essay that dismisses the idea that there exists people comfortable with feeling the full range of human emotions, that dismisses civilization as a whole as self deception?

And you're sure you want to defend a Buddhist by telling me he's not anti- materialistic?

Also in response to that Buddhist saying? I choose to get a bigger glass.

<comment><USER17> When he says they're 'faking' it, it's the wrong word. I would say more that in a meditative mindset, the cognitive dissonance and sheer mental noise most people are dealing with on a minute-by-minute basis becomes very apparent

Until you've been able to get your own mind to quiet down, to get rid of the nagging voices and tugging emotions and distorting filters in your head, it's very very difficult to notice this

If you've never experienced this sort of total perspective shift, I recommend that you read a bit more and reconsider your objections. Meditation is not about freezing to death in a cave

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> What's with the see-saw of meditation articles lately? It's better than expected, _science™ proves it!_ It's a waste of time, _news at eleven!_ We'll show you how for only _some monies!_

<comment><USER7> It's one of the common HN tropes. Pretty soon we'll have _yet another_ post about nootropics or polyphasic sleep. "Ask HN: I want to be smarter, but don't want to expend any effort! Help me get something for nothing!"

Meditation actually helps (in my experience), but it's about on par with _actually getting exercise_ or _getting enough sleep_ \- totally lame. :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> This succinctly and so eloquently said everything my father has spent my entire life trying to teach me. It's beautiful.

If I have kids, I hope that one day they understand this essay.

</comment><comment><USER20> I had an understanding of what meditation was while on an acid trip. Some people who've done lsd describe a spiritual experience which they experience. I can say I had a good experience. What I felt was an experience of me and everything around me moving as one. That is to say the universe and I are connected to one another. It is an experience which is difficult to articulate, but something which one feels. This experience is largely missing in the sensory experience of everyday life.

However, one of the better parts of my experience was watching the plants. Their movement as one is what one is attempting to mimic in meditation. Plants are immensely connected to the world in a way we are not. Mimicking them is how we can connect ourselves to the same feeling. This mimicking of plants is what I feel meditation is. It is why it became easier for me to meditate after doing lsd than before as the reasoning behind it makes much more sense.

Some things which helped me understand meditation at a deeper level are:

* Bhagavad Gita - The last couple of chapters make more sense. The whole I am everything was a bit annoying before, but it makes more sense when you get the point. If everything is One, then everything is beautiful.

* Foucault's The Subject and Power or anything Foucault - Meditation is supposed to break the chains our desire. Foucault's The Subject and Power is immensely powerful in understanding that we are all part of a system and governed by rules. Humans are by no means free but are held together by a discursive power which we are unaware of. One of the things we are supposed to realize is how we are entrapped by these rules and gain the ability to break rules.

If you think this is all tripe please feel free to ignore it. This is after all my own experience and it can be completely different to a different individual.

</comment><comment><USER21> A lot of people find this article well written, or alternately, they find the article patronizing and some are angry at it.

I just think the article is incorrect, which is a necessary consequence of its sweeping generalizations. A quote from the article: "You are a mess." The author spends much of the article telling the reader how unhappy the reader is, how much the reader is suffering. From a rhetorical perspective, I can understand why the author would do this. Yet I'm not convinced that I'm unhappy, and the rest of the article falls apart without that foundation.

"It [life] is an emotional roller coaster, and you spend a lot of your time down at the bottom of the ramp, yearning for the heights." To me, life feels more like emotional airplane, at home above the clouds but makes the occasional layover in Detroit.

Your experiences may vary.

<comment><USER22> I read the article, and instead of getting angry when he said "You are a mess", I stopped to think: "Who is he talking to? Is he talking to me? Or perhaps to the people who actually feel like they are a mess, and will identify with what he is saying?"

I have lots of problems, but I don't feel that I'm a mess. I'm overall quite happy. I still really appreciated the article, and it made me think that meditation might be a good thing for me regardless. There are certainly lots of things in my life that I could be better at dealing with, and probably some things that I'm not aware of.

And let's say that something terrible happens in my life. My family dies, I lose my job and get cancer. Would I be sad and unhappy? Probably. Would meditation help me in that situation? It might. Even though it wouldn't revive my family, get back my job or cure my cancer, it would perhaps help me deal with the situation in a better way.

If you spend your programming life never looking at your old code to see if you can improve it, always making the same mistakes and always getting a headache by supporting your old code, there's something you could do (code reviews, refactoring) - but you might not realize it or be motivated enough to do it. I think it's the same with the rest of your life.

That said, there is no point in spending all your time refactoring your code if you don't learn anything from it and if you're not shipping working code. And there's no point in meditating if you don't feel it has a positive impact on your life. :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Based on most of the people I know who meditate, they don't seem to be any different from a random sample. Are there studies that show that meditate is good for X? Perhaps the causation is actually that people with X tend to be good at meditating? Just wondering...

<comment><USER24> I know several people who have taken up meditation and they each have changed significantly through their experiences. Perhaps it's more useful to compare someone who meditates to their former selves rather than some nebulous concept of an "average" person.

<comment><USER23> Yea, it's quite true about that seeing improvement longitudinally would be better than the "average person". The study cited in the below BBC article studied people (Buddhist monks) that don't pass the self-selection filter though.

This study shows brief mediation gives improvement, however I'm not sure how they controlled for those who didn't complete the experiment. Could those people be self-selecting out of it due to difficulties - ADD perhaps?

Overall - I'm love to try a simple form of meditation to see if it'd work for my ADD self.

[http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/04/100414184220.ht...](http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/04/100414184220.htm)

<comment><USER25> I'm ADD, and I found it to be helpful during a period when I was sitting regularly.

I prefer just vipassana, watching the breath and watching thoughts as they arise and fade. No chanting or 'OMMM'.

An interesting book is "Zen and the Brain" by an emeritus professor of neurology, published by MIT Press. The author started doing zen while in Japan in the late 60s. Over about 1000 pages, he tries to come up with testable hypotheses explaining the phenomena and results of long-term meditation practice.

It's very detailed and dense. There are a few chapters that describe his subjective experiences, but the rest is pretty scientific. There are few illustrations, it's a massive block of text.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> This is very odd. The Buddha expressly forbade charging money for a Vipassana course (yes, Vipassana is that ancient). A real 10 day course is 100% free, including room and meals.

Some have suggested simply reading the sutra or running your own course at home, and I won't say it is impossible to achieve the benefit of meditation this way, but the distractions of the world will make it very difficult to really get started.

This is why when you go to a Vipassana course, you are instructed to bring no books, no electronic devices, not even a pen to write, as any and all activities will simply help your mind to become distracted from the monumental task at hand.

</comment><comment> ryan-allen For what it's worth, I've known a couple of people who have gone off and done the meditation course through Vipassana, and all have heartily recommended it.

Saying that, apparently the drop out rate of their course is something along the lines of 60-70%, most people do not have the discipline required to complete it.

I personally haven't done the course so I can't comment directly. I would say though, that meditation is beneficial, and I'm sure there are proper scientific studies that attest to the benefits.

Certainly the 'bio-feedback' movement is merely meditation techniques with some output you can discern, kind of like a server with monitoring.

</comment><comment><USER27> I did a 10-day vipassana meditation course and it changed my life. Meditation helps you to understand yourself and your thoughts, and I can't think of anything more important than that. I highly recommend it to everyone.

<comment><AUTHOR> How did it change your life?

<comment><USER27> It is a 10-day silent meditation, so you can't read or write or speak to anyone for the entire 10 days. This means that you are stuck inside of yourself, with no distractions, for 10 days. What happens is a lot of your problems come to the surface and you are forced to deal with them, and meditation helps you to deal with them. After the course, I have been able to use meditation to better understand myself, and my thoughts, and to deal with anxieties and problems that come up in my life. Email me if you have questions about it.</comment></comment></comment>


It's Crazy What Can Be Hacked Thanks to Heartbleed - <AUTHOR> http://www.wired.com/2014/04/heartbleed_embedded/

<comment><USER2> The title is a bit link-baitey, but the article drives home the (very important) fact that an unsecured internet of things is a dangerous thing. It obviously is not the first article to do so, but it is good to see people continue to note this point and, in the case of this article, provide concrete examples.</comment>


Ask HN: My web startup is growing fast what next? - <AUTHOR>

Dont ask me whats the url of the startup. Let us assume the question to be hypothetical.
Our website is in beta phase and I am the only coder in the team. Looking at the idea some investors have given us a decent amount of money.
We launched this site through invitations to 100 people. Within a week we hit the 1000 registered users mark. Till then we had hosted our site on rackspace cloud with a server with 256MB (thats not a typo) machine. The tech stack was LAMP.
Sensing the growth we increased the RAM to 1 GB. The number of users at any given time was around 40. The RAM was more than sufficient for such a scenario but still the site started slowing down.
I immediately shifted the mysql server to a different machine. That really did not make much difference.
So I looked at the most frequently used operations (which was some queries with joins). I indexed all the tables accordingly and installed memcache to cache the queries for half an hour or so (wherever possible).
Now the number of online at any given time is increased to 120. Total registered users is 9000.
Our investors are happy and co-founders think we are successful and now trying to buy an office for ourselves and build a proper team.
However I am clueless as to think how we can scale hence forth.
Can people give me some pointers as to the different paths I can follow? Please note that we cant host the server ourselves, we would love to continue with rack-space. <comment><USER5> I would be happy to look at your configuration and suggest options for scaling further (does not necessarily mean more resources or $$!). Please send an email with your account number to firstname.lastname@example.com. Myself or one of my teammates will continue our discussion from there!

Robert Taylor Sr Systems Engineer (Linux) Rackspace Hosting firstname.lastname@example.com

<comment><AUTHOR> This is the reason I love rackspace :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> From a scale/speed perspective, step one is figure out your next bottleneck. You should do this before it actually becomes a bottleneck. Obvious things come to mind:

1\. Memory - very easy to scale up to a machine with more, maybe throw a Nginx frontend on it if you are getting too many connections 2\. Bandwidth - <USER2> resources to a CDN assuming you already gzip and minify text, combine javascript files, and have appropriately sized photos. 3\. Disk I/O - <USER3> DB structure again, more/better caching, set up load balancers (there are tons of other optimizations to do before you get to this point) 4\. CPU - <USER4> your PHP to see what takes so long. Flush your output as soon as possible so users see something faster.

Lastly be sure you have a redundant setup with auto-failover. 9000 users get very unhappy very quickly when you start having unexpected downtime more than 0 seconds.

<comment><AUTHOR> Let me look closely at your checklist

1\. Memory: We have 2 GB and "free -m" shows that more than 200MB (least) is free at any given time. Do I still need to add more memory?

2\. Our site scores perfect A on Yslow. So minification , gzip, far future headers etc is in place.

3\. We have improved out DB structure a lot. Since we are adding more features continuously we are constantly changing the DB structure. With the help of some more experienced programmers I will get these things tweaked. But in MySQL okay if our user base will hit 1 Lakh in next three months ?

4\. CPU profiling is something that we haven't done yet. Will do this asap. Can you suggest some resources starting points ?

You also said something about load balancers. Will you please give me some resources to start up with ( I know I can google but ...) ?

5\. Fail-over is something that I did not think of initially. What are the best tools around ?for the same ?

The whole discussion might sound as if I want you guys to spoon feed me. But that is not the case. Let us look at the whole questions as an opportunity to share each others views on the same topic, even the experts might get to learn new things.

<comment><USER7> > But in MySQL okay if our user base will hit 1 Lakh in next three months ?

I doubt if many here will understand what is 1 Lakh. Better make it 100,000. :-)

(BTW, where do you live?)

<comment><AUTHOR> I live in Mumbai, India :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Maybe you should change the db structure, to optimize sql queries, use a caching system to delivery static content, or you can ask a more experienced developer to look over db structure and give you ideas. 9000 users don't seem that many to make the server run slow...

<comment><USER7> > 9000 users don't seem that many to make the server run slow...

I second that, especially when you have moved mysql on a separate server. I'm sure you're missing something basic here (as happens to many from time to time :-)).

<comment><AUTHOR> Our server is not slow at the moment. It is pretty responsive. But as 9000 reaches closer to 100000 I am sure existing safe-gaurds will not be enough, so I am asking what else can be done.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> It's really to comment on things like an office, raising money, growing the team, doing more customer development, etc. without knowing much (if anything) about your situation. I do have just one quick comment though -- you mentioned the speed of your site being a factor pretty early on. There are many factors that go into a user's overall experience but perceived speed of your site is a HUGE one. Don't let that be an issue for you right now as it can severely impede your growth.

</comment><comment><USER10> When optimizing, don't do it blindly. Do some actual tests or profiling to find the true bottleneck. It might be a specific query, the DB as a whole, etc. But unless you fix the biggest bottleneck, other improvements won't make much diference. Once you fix the biggest bottleneck, go back and do it again for the next biggest.

This way, you will know for sure if you need another machine, more RAM, or just another table index.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes true. I realized this during my initial optimization. I realized that some queries involving joins were taking unusually long time, a slight tweaking tremendous gain in performance.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> This is pretty basic, but in addition to mysql table structure and query optimization, have you done/considered any tweaking of the mysql config itself? (Usually at /etc/my.cnf)

We've repeatedly experienced _huge_ performance gains even with basic/minor tweaks of my.cnf.

HTH

<comment><AUTHOR> Cool. Something that I dint know. So far I have changed some table types to innoDB from MyISAM. Rewritten a lot of queries and in some cases maintained redundancy instead of normalization.

<comment><USER7> Likewise, you might want to check/tweak your apache config too (usually at /etc/httpd/conf/httpd.conf).

As you probably know, the default configs of both - mysql and apache are usually pretty minimalistic so tuning these in accordance with your load/traffic scenarios can pay you off big-time in terms of performance boost.

On that note, I'm sure they have some _highly_ competent people out there at RackSpace who should also be able to help you out with all this.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> I finally found a great guide about the topic: [http://www.amazon.com/dp/067232699X/?tag=stackoverfl08-20#re...](http://www.amazon.com/dp/067232699X/?tag=stackoverfl08-20#reader_067232699X)</comment>


Retail collapses, unemployment in the US and Canada hits all-time low - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@arabadzhiev1/retail-collapses-unemployment-in-the-us-and-canada-hits-all-time-low-b76cb148e182 <comment><USER2> I don't know if this is a Canada thing or not. I too am worried that we (Canada) seem to have declared a war on self-employed people (latest tax plan defn doesn't make it any easier) and at the same time, some big names in retail have gone away (Sears, Target, a whole bunch of others). Where are all these unemployed people going into?

<comment><USER3> Obviously, "Uber Driver, AirBnB Host, Social Media Manager, Social Influencer, Data Scientist, Insights Manager and etc."

Which are all good paying, secure jobs with good benefits, so that's all right, then.

<comment><USER4> What's a social influencer?

<comment><AUTHOR> I would say, mostly content producers and creators that have build up a significant audience. YouTube and Instagram could be considered the main platforms for influencers, but again those were occupations that did not exisit at all 10 years ago.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Why I hate Wikipedia - <AUTHOR> http://www.erfworld.com/2011/04/a-little-rage-rant-to-break-up-my-afternoon/ <comment><USER2> Are we sure this isn't the system working well?

Add a sketch of an article, someone else says if you don't have X,Y,Z it'll get deleted. People add X,Y,Z which only increases the usefulness of the article for any random reader.

The only step I missed out in the middle is people acting like martyrs and wasting energy they could be using to make the article better.

</comment><comment><USER3> The more general reason to hate Wikipedia is that if you have an idea for how to do Wikipedia right, you can't launch your own Wikipediaster. Nobody will come, because they're all either on Wikipedia or burnt out on Wikipedia.

</comment><comment><USER4> Okay, this one is a pretty easy Keep per both policy and guideline, so it won't be difficult to defend. That said, the deletionist attitude pervading Wikipedia is the main reason I stopped being part of it years ago.</comment>