Show HN: MealSquares, our whole food Soylent alternative - <AUTHOR> http://www.mealsquares.com/ <comment><USER2> I have the same reaction to this as I did to Soylent: I'd be a lot more inclined to try it if there was somebody involved with it who had some demonstrable background or expertise in nutrition, health or medicine.

The human body is a complicated thing, but while it's hard to improve, it's very easy to screw up. And screwing up someone's health can have consequences for them that last for years or decades. It can literally _ruin their life._ If that happens it won't be much comfort for them that their sad story has led you to pivot to a more promising approach.

For all the intellectual firepower of people in the tech community, there is a curious strain of _anti_ -intellectualism that comes forth in projects like this; an eagerness to discount the expertise of people who have studied a subject for their entire lives, just because they weren't CS majors. It's like trying to send a man to the moon without working with any aerospace engineers. I honestly do not understand it.

<comment><USER3> Rubbish.

Firstly, nutrition science is not real science - we don't have a full understanding of how our body processes foods, etc to be able to model it properly. So it's not real science.

Secondly, having a balanced nutrition isn't nearly as complicated as you make it out to be. Variety and everything in moderation. Humans would have evolved to be able to live off a variety of different diets and foods. Most of our history involved a food shortage and so a very specific set of nutritional requirements would definitely not have been selected for.

<comment><USER4> > nutrition science is not real science - we don't have a full understanding > of how our body processes foods, etc to be able to model it properly. So > it's not real science.

So, does this mean science is happening only when we have total understanding of something? What have these physicists been doing all these years!? Of course we don't know it well enough. Science is pretty simple, though: cause and effect. If someone eats only celery, they will die (lack of calories). I don't know what you're talking about when you talk about "real science".

>Variety and everything in moderation

And this is exactly the point op is making. You don't get that variety by eating only these. So the options are:

1\. Have total faith that their good enough for you to eat every day (and thus trust the makers)

2\. Don't eat them at all (don't trust them)

OP wants to trust scientists, not just some guys making food in their kitchen. So he chooses the latter option.

<comment><USER3> See my replies below regarding "not real science". I'm happy to accept your point in that regard.

As for #1 and #2 - we've created a kibble/pellet formula for virtually every other animal on planet earth. Why not humans? Seems incredibly narrow minded to me.

Not to mention that the average american diet is atrocious so the bar for an improvement is pretty low.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I suppose products like these are positive, though I find them profoundly depressing. That eating well has become such an after-thought that no-one takes time to actually make themselves a whole meal, and rather than reprioritise their lives they'll ask a group of people with no discernable nutritional credentials to send them a square of food that they cut into 100 calorie segments, and eat day in, day out.

 _Scarfing down pastries or energy bars when you don 't have time to think about food? You can do better._

Yeah, you can.

<comment><USER6> If you like spending time and effort preparing healthy meals for yourself, more power to you. The MealSquares target user is a busy startup founder whose diet is currently made up of microwavable meals or something like that. You tell someone like this to eat healthier and they say "yeah, I really should", but it's hard to fit in the time for cooking, nutrition research, and meal planning in between all of the other important stuff they're doing. Personally, I like the fact that people are doing important stuff, and I'm hoping that MealSquares will allow people to spend their time doing lots of important stuff and eat healthy while they're at it.

<comment><USER5> _Personally, I like the fact that people are doing important stuff_

But that's exactly my point, eating well is "important stuff". I suppose it reflects the general mentality that crunching away on your mobile photo sharing startup is "important" while eating well, being healthy and being happy are optional extras.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> What I love about this is it's less an alternative of Soylent and more an alternative for the terrible meal replacement bars at the convenience store. Those are packed with sugar or sugar alcohols and rarely have oats or other ingredients I prefer. Although MealSquares does have a sizeable amount of sugar, I can't wait to try MealSquares if it's a decent price since I like the ingredient profile otherwise.

Edit: Price looks to be fair.

</comment><comment><USER8> This looks great! I'm currently vegan and have known for a while that it is not the best I could be doing nutritionally or morally. Rather than make my diet more complicated, I've been looking toward a primarily whole foods diet, sans animal products. With all the _convenience_ , sugar, etc. of processed foods, making the jump has been much harder than I expected.

I'm excited about Soylent, but I'm not fully sold on the ingredients being primarily from supplements. I very much look forward to a vegan version.

Please continue researching, and try to gain the volunteer support of some nutritionists, then be quick to hire one when your Kickstarter succeeds!

Thanks for bringing your idea to everyone!

P.S. I also think this idea will be great for those who cannot afford the luxury of researching and buying healthy foods. Convenience is a huge reason the junk food industry is so large, especially in low-income areas. The price of $12/day is a nice starting point, and the lower it becomes, along with the more in-store availability - the healthier our population will become.

</comment><comment> wc- Despite all the controversy, soylent did show there is a market for this. If MealSquare can actually deliver to early adopters in a timely fashion, I'd imagine they could capture a lot of the Soylent market...

Looking forward to the crowdfunding and more timeline details!

</comment><comment><USER9> Hey Romeo,

This is incredible. I love this idea and hope it can come to light.

Quick question, I took a look at the price in the FAQ:

"We're looking at $12/day as our absolute ceiling and aim to hit significantly lower than that. MealSquares will come down in price as we scale. At $12 a day a MealSquare costs $2.40, which is very competitive with other options."

Is this for 1 day worth (2000 calories) of MealSquares? Is this assuming a bulk purchase (1 week or month)?

<comment><USER10> Right now, our family's meals cost ~$3.70/day (plus the "free" labor of preparing it). Until it's within a dollar or two within that price, I won't be able to try it out.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I'm usually on a low carb diet and I jog/weightlift a lot. Normally, I aim for about 4000-5000 calories/day, so I may be atypical of your average American. Also, my nutritional goals are high poly/mono fats, high protein, high fiber, and low sugar/starches.

The carb content in these bars bother me (42g/bar x 5 bars a day), and I'd prefer bars with more fiber and significantly less sugar even if that means it'd taste more like bark.

Compared to the same weight of almonds, for example, these bars have 25% less protein, ~4x more sugar, 1/3 the fiber, slightly more saturated fat, and significantly less mono/poly. Now I know almonds aren't substitutes for meals, but when I'm lazy to make or buy a meal and am looking for convenient finger food, this is what you'd be up against.

I understand that meal replacements that look and taste like chocolate chip cookies are appealing. These bars seem like a tastier version of your typical chalk-like protein bar. I think if you cut back the carbs, you might be able to stand out in that market.

<comment><AUTHOR> we're at a 40/40/20 macro split C/F/P for our V1, a low carb version might happen in the future.

<comment><USER12> 40/40/20 is a very good macronutrient target. Kudos.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> It's unfortunate to see that the product uses animal-based foods, and eggs at that. Something like Soylent should in my opinion be vegan (for the environment and the animals). If I recall correctly, Soylent was pretty close to vegan.

<comment><USER14> A bit offtopic, but I'm always sad that more research hasn't been done in making eggs/milk cruelty-free - that the "cruely-free science" went straight to synthetic meat. I'd love to see more research in mass-cloning female chickens to avoid the "sexing" problem, or painless alternatives to de- beaking, or hormonally-induced lactation in cows. Even the ideal pastoral rural hobby egg-farmer has intrinsically cruel aspects because of the useless male chicks and occasional violence between chickens... but it feels like these would be lower hurdles to overcome with technology than weaving synthetic beef on a magical meat-loom.

<comment><USER12> I think it's because cruelty-free is already quite easy to get: just buy food from local, organic farms that actually raise animals instead of mass- producing them.

<comment><USER14> But my point is that even local organic farms have to deal with the useless males problem. For eggs: if they have a rooster to breed more chickens, they kill the male hatchlings as soon as they're old enough to be sexed (which can be at birth or a few weeks later depending on the sophistication of their sexing techniques). If they purchase their chickens from a breeder, the same problem exists there.

I mean, simple respectable pain-management could help with de-beaking, but the existence of unwanted male birds is a hard problem.

I'd be a lot more comfortable with ovo/lacto vegetarianism (which is what I do) if those problems could be solved, and I'm no luddite - if there was a high-tech solution to these problems using crazy cloning techniques or somehow inducing parthenogenesis or something, that would be great.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> jack-r-abbit These have quite a lot of sugar and cholesterol. And are a bit higher on sodium than Soylent. Maybe I've not been following the recent recommendations but aren't these things we're supposed to avoid?

</comment><comment><USER15> I can understand the effort and I can support it if the main idea is to prevent people from starving. But I cannot understand people reacting whole foods as it is invented couple of years ago. My 4 years old kid don't consume food other than PediaSure[1] for two years. He really did well until this time and blood, urine test suggest everything is normal. So food replacement is not miracle and works under some circumstances.

[1] [http://abbottnutrition.com/brands/pediasure](http://abbottnutrition.com/brands/pediasure)

</comment><comment><USER16> There's a product in the Australia and NZ market called One Square Meal which seems exactly this (which would seem to raise the spectre of trademark conflict). [http://www.onesquaremeal.com/productinfo.html](http://www.onesquaremeal.com/productinfo.html)

For something that's 1/3 DI, it's pleasant enough, though a can get a bit tiring on the jaw if you're trying to wolf it down, which you often are if you're in a situation where you need a meal substitute...

</comment><comment><USER17> It would be good to have more information on what these taste like, what the mouthfeel is, and, possibly most importantly (since it's a prereq in my mind to ever buying any at all), how long they last in the pantry or refrigerator.

That said, the idea already appeals to me much more than Soylent, not particularly because of the whole foods part but because the image and info given suggest that a MealSquare will have some chew, crunch, and contrasting textures to it.

<comment><AUTHOR> We're still working on shelf life, we're within reach of a month and might be able to do significantly better.

Texture/taste wise they are like a cinnamon bran muffin. We were actually surprised we were able to get the prototypes tasting so good.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Hi, this is Romeo Stevens, cofounder of MealSquares. We're really interested in feedback.

Since Soylent is a similar product in our space, I wanted to discuss some points made by Rob Rhinehart in his post "The Fallacy of Whole Foods": [http://robrhinehart.com/?p=874](http://robrhinehart.com/?p=874)

Rob likes to compare Soylent to medical meal replacements. But medical meal replacements have taken a long time to mature. For example, it took a while for professional nutritionists to realize maybe they shouldn't pump newborns full of soybean oil [1]. This may sound silly today, but that was the best nutritionists could do based on the science available to them. And that's the problem I see artificially constructed meal replacements running in to--if you do the best you can based on the science available, that still may not be enough.

Different forms of the same nutrient _do_ seem to affect the body differently. We see negative health outcomes from substances such as beta-carotene, vitamin E, and folic acid in supplemental form [2], while high levels in whole foods demonstrate no such harms. So bioavailability is complicated, and for whatever reason whole foods seem to have consistently healthier profiles than supplements.

Many examples of strong nutrient synergy have been discovered. Vitamin D and calcium, vitamin C and iron, the fat soluble vitamins and dietary fat are some of the most well established. It seems likely that we've still got more to discover. Rob himself seems to acknowledge this in his inclusion of many non- essential nutrients like lycopene.

Even given these points, we don't consider Soylent a bad thing. Rob is right, the average diet is terrible, and anything that improves on that is great. We know MealSquares aren't perfect. Nutrition science has come up with no substitute for regularly eating fish for example; supplements don't cut it [3]. But including MealSquares in your diet means you are getting a solid dose of healthy, nutrient dense foods from a variety of sources. We don't think nutrition is settled science, and we look forward to becoming a multi-billion dollar corporation so we can improve the state of knowledge with our research department. :P

On the topic of longevity in general, you can read some of my research here: [http://lesswrong.com/lw/jrt/lifestyle_interventions_that_aff...](http://lesswrong.com/lw/jrt/lifestyle_interventions_that_affect_longevity/).

[1] [http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/08/130814101429.ht...](http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/08/130814101429.htm)

[2] [http://jama.jamanetwork.com/article.aspx?articleID=205797](http://jama.jamanetwork.com/article.aspx?articleID=205797)

[3] [http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/12848287](http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/12848287)

<comment><USER18> Hi Romeo, something to keep in mind. Most "Meal replacement" type bars (cliff, power bar) etc.. are super sweet, lots of sugar. I'm actually not a fan of sugar in general and would love an alternative that is more neutral or even on the salty side. I see on your site what look like chocolate chip cookie chunks and that turns me off. Maybe you can come up with something that has flavor but is not sweet?

<comment><USER19> +1 to this.

I would be very much in the market for meal replacements like MealSquares or Soylent, but they both have lots of sugar and carbs. I try to follow a paleo diet, I don't always succeed at following it closely, but the most important thing that I try to do is avoid sugar, sugar substitutes, and artificial sweeteners, and second I try to avoid carbs from grains. This pretty much means that I have to buy free range eggs, grass fed beef, grass fed butter, and make my own meals, or I have to eat at restaurants, but buying meal replacements is out of the question. There is nothing out there yet that eliminates sweeteners and carbs.

I know that there are people who want the carbs and the sugar, so here is a suggestion. Why not refactor the current MealSquare into two parts, one that is salty and paleo, and one that is vegan and low fat? That way people who like them as they are now can eat one of each and get the same result, but those of us who are paleo can get the sugar/grain free square separately, and people who are vegan can get the animal free square separately as well.

<comment><USER20> +1 on this, i have lived on a light lchf diet (60g carb per day) for more than a year and would never go back to a sugary carby diet again, since if i do, i start to feel really bad in just a few days.

And just as you describe, it takes a lot of hard work!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I think you guys have an edge over Soylent in that this actually looks somewhat appealing, as opposed to a generic beige liquid.

</comment><comment><USER22> Feedback on the website. It's too much text and the "action" is not well defined or prominent. Do a video. Give just links to the extra info, prominent not hidden in the link list (mobile). Make your call to action the focus. The images look stock, need improvement.

I'd be glad to elaborate on any of these points. Email me

</comment><comment><USER23> Is there any reason that your compare page adds the qualifier "not from soy/rice"? I get the soy part, even if I don't agree about its significance. But why does rice as a source matter?

<comment><AUTHOR> bioavailability of plant proteins is much lower than from milk/eggs/whey.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> I like this idea a lot, but honestly what are you showing us here? The campaign hasn't started yet and there doesn't appear to be any actual product created.

<comment><AUTHOR> MealSquares exist and myself and beta testers are getting significant portions of our calories from them.

<comment><USER24> Ok great, but you posted a "Show HN" pointing to your product's web page. The only thing that web page does is collect emails to notify when your crowd funding campaign starts.

I just don't understand what you're showing us.

<comment><USER6> (Other MealSquares cofounder here)

The reason we haven't started our crowdfunding campaign yet is because our following isn't big enough yet. Soylent hit its target within the first 24 hours because the DIY recipe already had a huge following, and the general wisdom for kickstarters seems to be that you need at least 30-40% of your funding nailed down _before_ you hit the "go" button. So in addition to feedback on the product itself, we are curious if HN has any thoughts for things like slogans and other product messaging, and customer verticals that we might be able to market the product to.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> I like the concept, but unfortunately people like me cannot eat it because of food allergies (eggs and tree nuts).

Why is <50% of carbs listed as an advantage?

<comment><AUTHOR> While it's true that studies have repeatedly shown that macro splits don't matter much for body composition, we felt that the existing options were way too sweet. So much so that eating more than one was actually unpleasant. Also, quite a lot of people try to limit their carbs to something reasonable.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> Very interested. If there is a way for me to buy some early samples for beta testing, I would love to know.

</comment><comment><USER27> "Nutrient deficiencies are common, and supplements don't always work."

*Citation needed

<comment><AUTHOR> [http://www.ars.usda.gov/Services/docs.htm?docid=15672](http://www.ars.usda.gov/Services/docs.htm?docid=15672)

Magnesium, calcium, potassium, fiber, vitamin C, D, and E. Potassium is a good example, as supplementation is impossible, supplements are limited to 99mg by law. Vitamin E supplements have shown harm in clinical trials.</comment></comment>


America is finally coming around to Starship Troopers - <AUTHOR> https://www.theverge.com/21319886/starship-troopers-movie-yesterdays-future <comment><USER2> This is kind of a stupid take on the movie. The main message of the movie is that citizenship carries with it not only privileges but also responsibilities. Granted the action is so over-the-top it's sometimes comical, but if the director intended it as a satire, it just goes to show once again that leftists can't do satire. This was supposed to equate American liberty with fascism or something? Give me a break.

</comment><comment><USER3> The author obviously did not read the (Heinlein) book.</comment>


Enjoying that 25Mbps internet speed, America? - <AUTHOR> https://www.theregister.co.uk/2019/07/19/slow_internet_georgia/ <comment><USER2> The article is comparing apples and oranges. The 25 Mbps "FCC" figure is reporting the fastest speeds offered in each census block. This is a really dumb measure for broadband speeds. In particular, every area served by DSL will have close-in customers who can get 25 Mbps, but many who can get only a fraction of that. But that's the measure the FCC asks for, and has used since long before the current administration.

The 6.3 Mbps figure, by contrast, appears to be an average of 380,000 consumer-initiated Google speed test runs, geo-located to census blocks by IP address. It's not reporting maximums, and it's also not clear whether any attempt was made to narrow the results to exclude wireless internet connections from the average.

According to Akamai, as of 2017 25 Mbps average speed would put you as the #2 fastest internet in the world, just after South Korea: [https://www.akamai.com/us/en/multimedia/documents/state- of-t...](https://www.akamai.com/us/en/multimedia/documents/state-of-the- internet/q1-2017-state-of-the-internet-connectivity-report.pdf). I don't think anyone is claiming Georgia has the fastest internet in the world.

The article's sweeping claims about "America" as a whole don't seem justified based on a study done in Georgia. Ookla has the US at #7 worldwide for fixed broadband speeds: [https://www.speedtest.net/global- index#fixed](https://www.speedtest.net/global-index#fixed). Akamai has it in the top 10 (see above). The Ookla data probably is skewed upward, assuming people doing speed tests probably have faster than average Internet, but the Akamai data should be very reliable, being based on way more data points than this Google speeds test survey.

</comment><comment><USER3> I mean considering the US is 2,959,064.44 square miles and UK is 93,628, I'd say we're doing pretty good for having 30x the area and only 5x the population.

I'm greatly enjoying posting this from my Google Fiber gigabit connection, thanks.

<comment><USER4> How about NY? or even just Manhattan? lets say 1st Ave. Pretty dense, populated area right? Wanna guess your ISP and speeds availability there?

<comment><USER5> Both Verizon and Spectum and possibly RCN offer Gigabit up/down speeds in the NYC area now and have done so for the last 3 years

<comment><USER4> what area of NYC exactly? because 1st Ave you have a "choice" of DSL or Spectrum Business _Cable_. Heart of industrialized USA, world finance center, and lets not forget

"Manhattan's population density is 66,940 people per square mile (25,846/km²), highest of any county in the United States."

"New York Votes to Kick Spectrum Cable Out of the State" [https://fortune.com/2018/07/29/spectrum-communications- kicke...](https://fortune.com/2018/07/29/spectrum-communications-kicked-out- new-york/)

"New York City sues Verizon for not completing citywide fiber network" [https://techcrunch.com/2017/03/14/nyc-sues- verizon/](https://techcrunch.com/2017/03/14/nyc-sues-verizon/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> > The official US government definition of broadband is 25Mbps down and 3Mbps > up.

Seriously? That's a broadband definition of 20 years ago. When ADSL was introduced. But now is the optic fiber era. My guts feeling definition is at least 100Mbps both way simultaneously.

I'm enjoying consistent 400Mbps at daylight, 300Mbps at night.

<comment><USER7> Honest question:

What...on...earth...could you possibly do with that? I have 50Mbps and feel like that's kind of absurd.

Netflix recommends 25Mbps for streaming 4K video. [1]

So....streaming a dozen 4K movies simultaneously?

Sub-minute downloads of entire OS images? [2]

[1] [https://help.netflix.com/en/node/13444](https://help.netflix.com/en/node/13444)

[2] [https://www.osboxes.org/ubuntu/#ubuntu-19-04-vbox](https://www.osboxes.org/ubuntu/#ubuntu-19-04-vbox)

<comment><AUTHOR> It depends on how many people are in your household. Even with really good traffic shaping, 100mb/s can be a problem if there are 3+ people these days. Game downloads/updates, movies, file transfers, combine that with game consoles moving away from storing data locally, cloud services, real time coms such as ssh/rdp. One person can chew up that bw at times and affect others in the household trying to do voice chat or gaming.

In addition to this, not everyone is doing bbr+fq_codel or cake traffic shaping, so they need the burst overhead capacity. Even those using fq_codel seldom have the right options set. And even then, most consumer routers have low end cpu's and barely any L1/L2 cache. HTB adds a lot of context switching on the router. If you hit the buffer on your cable modem or CMTS, then real time applications get a lot of jitter.

The other issue is the mix of operating systems in the household. Not every OS may be doing fair congestion control or even support/enable ECN. Not every consumer modem supports ECN properly.

<comment><USER7> Traffic shaping, congestion control, etc. is irrelevant to my question though.

My question was not how well a full pipe is handled, but _What can you even possibly fill it up with?_</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Archimedes: large-scale simulation model of people in healthcare systems  - <AUTHOR> http://archimedesmodel.com/archimedesmodel.html

<comment><AUTHOR> from <http://archimedesmodel.com/applications-and-value.html> page:

       The Model addresses the full range of variables and outcomes that
       are important in making healthcare decisions:
       o Populations
       o Clinical physiology, biomarkers, signs and symptoms, clinical outcomes
       o Prevention, screening, diagnosis, treatment, follow-up care
       o Physician and patient behaviors, performance, and compliance
       o Protocols, guidelines, practice variations
       o Delivery systems, logistics and utilization
       o Quality of life
       o Financial costs

It's an extremely interesting effort to model the impact of different organizational practices and interventions on hypothetical populations. They have good calibration with clinical trials which should allow them to tune new screening and treatment models in silico instead of having to run 5-10 years of testing. It's similar to techniques used to maintain Moore's Law in chip design, where a chip's performance, behavior, and operating characteristics are simulated prior to fabrication.</comment>


New Battery Design Can Charge an Electric Car in 10 Minutes - <AUTHOR> https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/7x5jwd/new-battery-design-can-charge-an-electric-car-in-10-minutes <comment><USER2> I don't own an electric car, but I own an electric scooter. It is a Ninebot ES4, and something that I really enjoy riding.

However, on a very cold day, my range had dropped from 45KM to less than 30KM. This happens a lot with batteries.

I am sure that rapid charging is a great thing, but we also need batteries to perform better under all weather conditions.</comment>


Show HN: SmartSERP – A Rank Tracker that can auto finds keywords and track them - <AUTHOR> http://smartserp.com/

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi HN,

I made this, here's some data on SmartSERP.

Conventional Rank Trackers require users to find the keywords manually and add them, which can be a bit dauntin. Since you have to always keep an eye out for new ranking keywords and often than data is hard to find.

That is where SmartSERP comes in, SmartSERP finds keyword a website is ranking for, so that the user can track the ones thats important to you. These new keywords and rankings also gives users an insight to websites potential.

Please let me know, if you have any queries/feedbacks/suggetions. Thanks.</comment>


Chinese companies building numerous overseas coal plants - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/01/climate/china-energy-companies-coal-plants-climate-change.html <comment><AUTHOR> The article also says:

"Over all, 1,600 coal plants are planned or under construction in 62 countries, according to Urgewald's tally, which uses data from the Global Coal Plant Tracker portal. The new plants would expand the world's coal-fired power capacity by 43 percent. "The fleet of new coal plants would make it virtually impossible to meet the goals set in the Paris climate accord, which aims to keep the increase in global temperatures from preindustrial levels below 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit."

<comment><USER2> So the Paris climate accord will have the same impact as all previous international climate agreements: zero. That is shocking, positively shocking.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> "The fleet of new coal plants would make it virtually impossible to meet the goals set in the Paris climate accord, which aims to keep the increase in global temperatures from preindustrial levels below 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit."

I've been watching some lectures on climate change recently, all of the climatologist I've seen in the lectures were claiming that staying below 2℃ is impossible to achieve anyway. Staying at 2℃ or less, requires around 2050 the world going into negative carbon emissions, which nobody know yet how to do exactly.

<comment><USER4> Don't believe everything you hear from talking heads on TV.

We could put the earth into an ice age for under 1% of global GDP. Discussing geo-engineering is generally seen as a moral hazard, though, so western commentators act like no such possibility exists.

The real threat is ecosystem collapse.

<comment><USER5> The only way to do it that cheap is with sulfate aerosols. We don't have the data to use the right amount yet but that's fixable. A larger problem is it would make ocean acidification even worse. That might end up being better than the alternative but its not a step to take casually.

<comment><USER4> Thus the moral hazard. If geo-engineering were a major point in climate change discussions, some would feel a false sense of security. Ultimately, this could increase the odds of such drastic measures would be needed. The other thing is that we just can't know how much acidity it would take to cause an ecosystem collapse until it's too late.

That said, sulfate aerosols are one of the oldest proposed plans and our technology has advanced considerably since then. Perhaps some people working on or funding work on a better solution are on reading this thread.

I sure hope someone is quietly tackling it because the political efforts around CO2 emmissions agreements of the past 50 years are not working very well despite a great deal of activism.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Come on. Pakistan has an energy crisis which is ruining the country. You want to hold them back economically in the name of the environment? This really is on western countries to pay for them to get clean energy if that's what they really want.

Malawi? Don't develop electricity generation in Africa! You might make them less poor!

<comment><USER7> Totally agree. As a citizen of a not (so) developed country I saw all this complains as hypocritical thinking from the developed nations that for centuries did the same but now that the rest of the world tries to catch up start crying.

<comment><USER8> This is where inequality and different stages of society are going to make environmentalism and nature conservation a pain in the ass.

As you said, the developed nations did the exact same thing (including to less developed ones they also stole resources from), and now they expect the rest of the world not to do the same?

People won't give up on a 'modern' lifestyle or better conditions just because it's bad for the environment. Even less so because a bunch of people living in better conditions say it could be bad for them in the distant future.

The only fix is to figure out how to make renewable energy cheaper and easier than non renewable energy worldwide. So it wins on a financial level rather than a moral feel good one.

<comment><USER7> I believe that renewable is the solution, more so now that the price has become viable. My country for example went from being oil dependant to produce energy to be almos 100% renewable in less than 5 years by building hundreds of eolic turbines.

But we have a small population and our economy is stable, there are other places where we can not expect to do this.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Fuck our grandkids, they can spit on our graves all they want, we need to keep the GDP growth rate positive.

<comment><USER10> At least the shareholders and party leaders will be happy!

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Coal should be gasified then the gas product used. This releases something like 75% more energy than burning coal directly and it is a cleaner process once produced.

<comment><USER12> you mean Nazi oil? [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oil_campaign_of_World_War_II](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oil_campaign_of_World_War_II)

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> So, the US denies climate change, is not a signatory to the Paris accord, is the biggest fossil fuel user, and is now the biggest oil producer thanks to ita fracking programme. They can't exactly be pointing fingers.</comment>


Why is subtracting these two times (in 1927) giving a strange result? - jor-el https://stackoverflow.com/questions/6841333/why-is-subtracting-these-two-times-in-1927-giving-a-strange-result?newsletter=1&nlcode=13041%7c315c

<comment><AUTHOR> I have seen this same point being posted on HN many times. Just a simple search on 1927 gives the following results on the first page -

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5537601](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5537601) [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2824973](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2824973) [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7427110](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7427110) [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5292612](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5292612) [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7366504](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7366504) [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7023598](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7023598) [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4601633](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4601633)

Is there any way to eliminate these reposts?

</comment><comment><USER2> I could have bet on my grandmother that Skeet would be the one answering it.

</comment><comment><USER3> This is why we need to abolish DST. It's just a source of pain.</comment>


Agile as a full-featured religious dogma (2016) - <AUTHOR> https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/agile-full-featured-religious-dogma-darius-blasband/ <comment><USER3> Agile is fine, but I believe it was born as an overreaction to Waterfall and excessive processes, the generation that followed blindly adopted it as a dogma, even when the project at hand doesn't benefit from it (also because "agile" is a great marketing word w/ positive meaning, and leaders suffer from FoMo.). People who've been at the trenches long enough seem to be waking up to this fact, and we must be careful to not overreact on our own.

Agile seems great when both you and the customer have zero idea what you're doing, but not all projects are creating something completely new. I've seen enough projects fall into the trap of reinventing the (square) wheel by 1. not trying to state the problem correctly 2. doing zero research 3. not even interviewing more experienced people. Creating something that nobody asked for and failing fast is supposed to be agile, but agile says nothing about how to calculate risk/reward, or just assumes prototype are super cheap. That's rarely the case in practice - I've never see a prototype being tossed away, just turning into technical debt.

Nowadays I much prefer the Cynefin framework [1] to reason about problems and projects, even if it's not super clear on how to apply, because it at least makes you consider two degrees of freedom.

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

<comment><USER4> Has any software or creative company ever actually adopted "waterfall"? It seems like a straw man used to criticize inefficient processes and promote Agile, but has it ever been implemented in the way that it's described?

More importantly, is there any actual evidence that Agile is works better than alternatives?

<comment><USER5> I was on a team at Microsoft that was strictly Waterfall; our business reps wanted to release functionality in six month cycles, so Waterfall was a good fit.

We eventually moved to Lean (a type of Agile) which worked well with this six- month requirement. It gave engineers the ability to work on different pieces and in whatever order they pleased, as long as everything landed in the six- month block.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Another way in which agile is like religion: its evangelists always have a jargon-loaded answer to every possible criticism of it.

They really remind me of being a kid in Sunday school and asking the teacher questions like "but if god created all of us, who created god?" or "what if somebody was born and raised in the middle of the amazon and never even heard of Christianity - will he go to hell?". There was always some bizarre logic- twisting response to those questions which didn't really answer them but was enough to try and shut you up.

Similarly, if you say "Agile doesn't work because X" \- they will say "thats not REAL Agile...". But if you say "Agile is dogmatic" they will say "Agile lets you do what you want, its not a dogmatic rule based approach".

So there is simultaneously one "real" way of doing Agile and also no real way because it is not dogmatic.

<comment> UK-Al05 You sure your not getting these answers from different people?

Someone new to agile might go on a scrum course and think this is the one way of doing agile.

People who've been around awhile know you have inspect and adapt your process to specific implementations. There is no agile 'process' for this reason. It's also the reason agile mostly relies on having good people who can inspect and adapt. Agile is basically means creating a process that has been shown empirically work in your situation.

<comment><USER6> Its true the examples I gave are probably a bit exaggerated but I think the general point still stands. I think you have even demonstrated that contradiction yourself although in a much more eloquent way?

If Agile lets you inspect and adapt freely, then at what point does Agile does stop being Agile?

<comment><USER7> I definitely fall strongly on the anti-dogmatic side.

Agile is built around the simple value proposition that shipping products earlier, more often, and with more direct feedback from customers creates better products. We might even call this "The Golden Rule" of Agile. (This certainly verges on being a philosophy.)

If you believe that, and always act in accordance with that idea, and your team and stakeholders and users do so as well, there's no need for dogma. You will deliver great products and life will be good.

But the sad truth is a significant fraction of people are skeptics and cynics and doggerels and hairsplitters and technocrats and incompetents and martinets and apathetics and fusspots; in simple terms, they're only human.

So instead of one Golden Rule we have law after law after law and with law comes lawyers on both sides (or pharisees if you like.)

But if you inspect and adapt according to the Golden Rule, you'll always be doing Agile because you focus on the outcome and not the process.

Either you ship or you don't. Either you add value or you don't. Either you talk to users or you dont.

<comment><USER6> I'm not trying to be antagonistic but you sound exactly like the religious people we're talking about. And your response still doesn't answer the question - at what point does Agile stop being Agile?

Are you saying that any team that "ships products earlier, more often, and with more direct feedback" is following Agile? If thats all that Agile is then why do we need whole books on Agile, coaches, training seminars etc. if it can be summed up in one short sentence?

EDIT: Your definitions is also a tautology - nobody is going to argue that you should ship products late and with little feedback from customers.

<comment><USER8> > at what point does Agile stop being Agile?

When you make it a procedure - especially when you make it a rigid one. "Let us take this rigid approach to become agile" is just as stupid as it sounds.

> nobody is going to argue that you should ship products late and with little > feedback from customers.

No. But some approaches result in more customer feedback than others do. So _in practice_ , people do in fact choose to ship with less customer feedback.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> compiler-guy I'm pretty sure the author's exposure to agile wasn't agile done right. Rather it was surely just someone who read a few books and didn't implement it correctly.

Is the above paragraph satire, or real?

<comment><USER9> I don't know if it's satire or real, but I would say it's definitely religious.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> "Proper" (haha, yes I know) agile is anti-dogma.

You throw out the rituals ("processes and tools", "plans") when they don't work. That's called a retro.

How do you know if you're doing it right? You'll have "working software". That's a pretty subjective idea, so you'd better have someone to help you judge that, i.e. a "customer".

<comment><USER11> > How do you know if you're doing it right? You'll have "working software".

This is _exactly_ the problem - agile is never defined by itself, it is defined in terms of some desirable outcomes. Project was on time and succesful? Great victory for agile. Project failed? Need more agile in the future.

In my experience, all this is used as a smoke screen by management types who have no real idea what they are doing to externalize their own accountability.

<comment> UK-Al05 Agile = reflect and adapt.

Replace agile word with that in your paragraph and it makes sense without sounding silly.

If you've done well you've probably learned and adapted.

If you havent done well, you probably need to reflect and work how to do it better next time.

Things arnt 'proper' agile when they are not about adapting but instead following a specific process your team cant change.

<comment><AUTHOR> So we as developers have the power to throw out things like daily stand-ups and sprints? And if we don't have that power, we're not being agile?

Cool, tell that to your "scrum master" next time you see him.

<comment> UK-Al05 Yes, as a team you should be able to make that decision. A good scrum master would want you experiment and improve if there is reason behind it.

The key thing is that the changes have to make things better. You should be able try those things and see if they improve things.

Lots of teams use kanban, and some teams mob. If you mob as a team what's the point in standups?

What's the point in sprints, if your continously improving, continously releasing, continously getting feedback and able to forecast well without them? Your better than scrum in my opinion then.

Scrum is a bit basic these days, but it's a good baseline start from. Thats the problem with a lot scrum purists. They will never get beyond a fairly basic level of performance.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I don't think "religious dogma" is narrow enough terminology to describe what is going on. The real distinction is between system-based and teacher-based ideas and practices.

With a system-based idea (such as Newtonian mechanics), you can learn it and use it correctly merely by reading some set of canonical works. Everything you need to know is in a book, and if you understand the book correctly you get the right results out of it.

Agile, on the other hand, seems to me to be much more teacher-based. If you want to know if you're doing Agile right, you have to talk with an Agile expert, and your own understanding is always under threat of being declared "not Agile" by the experts.

The choice between approaches is a tradeoff, IMO, there's not one best way. Interactive teaching is better at accurately providing the state-of-the-art opinions and practices of experts, while systematic ideas are _much_ more testable and falsifiable. If you want to copy what a successful expert does, go talk with the expert; if you want to know whether the expert is _right_ or not, read their book.

<comment><USER7> I'd divide it differently: waterfall is process based, Agile is outcome based.

You know you're doing Agile right when you have code in front of a user and they're telling you what they like and don't like and what they wish they could do but can't and are connecting your product to their goals and stories.

Agile gives you some structure and best practices around shipping early and often, communicating ina particular way with stakeholders and your team, and measuring progress.

But ultimately everything - ceremonies, comms, management, PM software - <USER2> subordinate to the idea of "a user using your product to do the things the product is designed to do."

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Very anecdotal, but in my experience the higher employee turnover is, the more dogmatic a place tends to be about being "agile".

</comment><comment><USER14> We had "agile coach" come in 5 months ago.

Upper management completely changed all the processes.

all teams were broken into scrum teams without consulting developers or other members.

Everyone I have talked to is unhappy. Any random decisions are justified as agile.

Is this normal process of adapting agile in the company?

</comment><comment><USER9> The person is actually talking about a broad range of things that don't just apply to agile. It's a little bad to compare this area to religion but, for agile, the analogy is apt because people feel it's the "only" way to do things.

What this person is talking about is a part of engineering where no theory or science applies. Take these two examples:

1\. Solving the problem of the shortest distance between A and B involves a line... this is covered by mathematical geometric theory.

2\. The best way to travel from point A to point B in the United States is not covered by theory.

The two examples illustrate a dichotomy:

1\. Problems that can be solved with mathematical theory or science.

2\. Problems that can be solved with "Design"

Problem space 2 is the umbrella that agile falls under. Usually when we hit a problem related to 2 we employ the word "design." The design of a house, Object oriented design, the design of a bridge, the architecture design of the program, UX design... etc. etc. "Design" is a method to find a solution to a problem space that is either too complex or we have little theoretical understanding. Designing something is akin to guesstimating a solution. We do not have any proof that a "design" solution we arrived at is the "best" solution, we only know that it is "a" solution (after verification of correctness).

Agile is like object oriented programming because both are methods created by guesstimation aka "design." There is no theory or proof (though there could be correlations) that either is the best possible solution.

Agile is especially religious because of the specificness of it: A series of random rules to manage a project out of a solution set where trillions of rules and external factors apply. Intuitively, there is literally no way agile is the "best" solution. Until we can quantify the effectiveness of a project and until we experimentally employ other structures and methods for project management and SCIENTIFICALLY compare the effectiveness of all these methods can we begin to iterate toward a solution that is closer to "best."

</comment><comment><USER15> I went to the Denver Agile conference a few months back and I mentioned to my boss that I felt the way they were presenting was very cultish. Instead of saying: if you follow this practice it has these benefits, I just felt the entire conference was a presentation on dogmatic adherence for the sake of holistic enlightenment. You must do this or condemn you entire project to the ninth level of programmer hell. If I wanted dogma I would go to church. I came here for a logical application of a standardized practices based on axioms not holistic bullshit.

</comment><comment><USER16> Agile Coach here. This is spot on. The field of Agile coaching, books, conferences, and personalities is the most self referential circus of bullshit anyone could dream up.

Not to be a Talmudist but the vast majority of people who advise others on Agile haven't even read the foundational texts behind the prevailing theories.

The truth is Agile in all its forms is merely a reaction to what came before it and has precious little basis in any sort of proven first principles. For all the ink spilled on Agile it has failed to produce a unified field theory. Instead it is a collection of camp fire stories, post hoc assertions, and petty disagreements over style.

It's a bunch of fucking muppets. I hate most of my colleagues, I really do.

</comment><comment><USER17> This analogy is starting to feel older than religion.

<comment><USER18> It's telling that one of the early popular essays on the topic, "Extreme Deprogramming" (2003) is itself now a lost text.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> See: [https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/03/25/is-everything-a- religi...](https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/03/25/is-everything-a-religion/)

<comment><USER9> Yeah most things are isomorphic to religion. It's better to ask what isn't religious?

Mathematics and science and all things isomorphic to either.

<comment><USER20> When everything is a religion the word no longer holds any meaning. Maybe we should attempt to distinguish between a ritual and a habit? What is the distinction? I think the amount of emotion people attach to it. To me religion is like a hamster wheel for the emotional life of people. Too much activity with no observable gain. A habit is more reassuring and only lightly emotional in a lightly soothing sort of way.

Agile could be a religion if it comes with lots of worry whether we are doing it the right way. It can also be a set of habits if you just do some practical things regularly.

You all do understand that you cannot really be working together if you never talk in some kind of lightly structured way about what is to be done, right?

<comment><USER9> The article poses the question, is the agile structure the best way? Is it the only way?

Also, people do not need formal "structure" to communicate concepts. Is strict formal structure over projects better or less strict?

The closest way of knowing is to run scientific experiments. However, this is akin to running experiments to determine whether communism or capitalism is better. It's brutally hard to come up with an experiment or even the resources to run such a thing.

This is the article's point. If there's no science or theory backing agile or OOP up.... why do we, by default, consider it the "best" way and make it so ubiquitous? His answer is religion. OOP and agile are religions.

<comment><USER7> I guess I disagree that agile is defined by its structure.

I think it's defined by its value proposition - that shipping early and often and getting direct feedback from users produces better products than not doing so.

Which itself rests on the assumption that a product's value cannot be objectively asserted and is only the sum of its users' perceptions.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Concern about racism and sexism in Supertuxkart 0.9 - <AUTHOR> https://lists.debian.org/debian-women/2015/04/msg00008.html <comment><USER2> 1) In my opinion it's privileging a male gaze position.

I'm surprised I see very little fuss from LGBT groups when people try to raise this "catering to male gaze" point as it pretends that homosexuals don't exist or aren't sexual.

2) Quetzacoalt (according to Wikipedia, it is an aztec god) figure is used in several places without any concern about its religious meaning

I don't think anyone from the 15th century is still around to care.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Closed here: [https://lists.debian.org/debian- women/2015/05/msg00024.html](https://lists.debian.org/debian- women/2015/05/msg00024.html)

But it looks like there is some noise around it in other places.</comment>


The Most Ambitious Environmental Lawsuit Ever - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2014/10/02/magazine/mag-oil-lawsuit.html <comment><USER2> What's tough and utterly ignored by this article is that it's not just the lobbyists who oppose you, it's ordinary people. There is a sincere and deep seated belief that it's morally objectionable to ask companies to answer for their actions in a court of law, that there are no alternatives to destroying the environment, and that such lawsuits threaten the existence of economies like that in Lousiana.

That's why these politicians can take actions in favor of the industry with impunity.

> Jones figured there would be a period of quiescence while the industry > decided how to respond. Within hours, Jindal, who was in Aspen, Colo., at a > meeting of the Republican Governors Association, released a statement. "This > is nothing but a windfall for a handful of trial lawyers," Jindal said, > arguing that the suit came "at the expense of our coast and thousands of > hardworking Louisianians who help fuel America by working in the energy > industry."

85% of people in Louisiana buy this stuff up. They'll buy it up until all the oil is gone, and when the companies leave they'll have no jobs and their state will be a wasteland unfit for any other sort of economy.

To be fair, it's not just Louisiana. During the last Presidential election, Obama and Romney literally fought during one debate to show who was more pro- coal. There's no point in doing that if you're just after campaign donations-- the coal companies can do their own advertising. No, such theatrics are to get votes in places like West Virginia, Pennsylvania, southeastern Illinois, etc.

<comment><USER3> There's a deeper and equally sincere and deep-seated belief behind said beliefs:

It's objectively true that increasing the cost of energy amounts to something like a regressive tax: it will harm the poor and the middle class considerably more than it will harm the wealthy. Among causes for our current middle class woes, some have cited the peaking of domestic conventional oil in the 1970s and the general end of _extremely_ cheap energy around that era.

The very existence of a middle class and a diamond-shaped social order is probably in part an artifact of cheap and available energy. People do understand this. They understand that an end to cheap energy will return themselves and their children to serfdom. (Unless they happen to be members of the tiny <1% financial elite that would probably become the new nobility.)

What people don't believe is that renewable energy can provide cheap energy. They fear a world powered by renewable energy might be one resembling The Hunger Games: tiny stratospherically rich technological enclaves served vast impoverished precincts of serfs.

Meanwhile they're also either against nuclear outright, or are at the very least suspicious of it.

So if the choice is between fossil fuels and a return to abject poverty, people choose fossil fuels. I'm not sure they're really ignoring climate change-- rather they're making a cost/benefit analysis to the effect that climate change is better than a return to feudal serfdom.

They're probably right. It is demonstrably better to reign in hell than to serve in heaven. Poverty is worse than any natural disaster I'm aware of; I'll take a few million dollars and a hurricane every week over poverty and blue skies.

This also explains why the "developing" world has shown no interest in moving on carbon reduction. Cheap available energy is lifting billions out of poverty. Their response is pretty much "screw you, we're poor." For them to choose any different would be an act of huge-scale unilateral self-sacrifice.

The burden is on advocates of renewable energy to show that it can provide cheap, abundant energy sufficient to sustain a diamond-shaped social order. If it can't, it is politically dead and climate change is a foregone conclusion. The burden is also on nuclear advocates to show that they can engineer reactors that _cannot_ fail like Fukushima or Chernobyl. (I mean _cannot fail_ , not "low probability of failure," since anyone who understand entry-level stats knows that small probabilities become large when you scale things up. Think about what hard drive and RAM failures look like at data center scales for example.) Neither of these milestones has been reached.

Renewable energy remains a favorite political option among the inhabitants of uber-rich cities that resemble The Capital in The Hunger Games, like San Francisco. It's viewed as a luxury feel-good toy for rich people. Meanwhile the nuclear industry continues to iterate on the fundamentally flawed 1950s submarine reactor design instead of rethinking the problem from first principles and producing something truly engineered for civilian power production. IMHO the situation is worse in the nuclear domain... nobody is even trying, and the response to incidents like Fukushima is to double down on PR instead of doubling down on engineering.

Over time I've become more and more skeptical of the "people are stupid" answer to things like this. The reality is that people are _not_ as stupid as you think they are. They just might be viewing things very differently or conceptualizing the problem from the perspective of different needs and goals.

In AI terminology they have a different goal function. Understand their goal function(s) and you understand their choices.

Another bugaboo in places like Louisiana is religious fundamentalism and opposition to evolution, etc. I've started to doubt "people are stupid" there as well. In that culture, the church is the center of social life. So you're basically asking people to choose between friendship, camaraderie, and the moral basis of cooperation and some esoteric scientific theory that does nothing to help them in their daily lives. Which would you choose? Insulting people and calling them idiots doesn't accomplish anything except to polarize them and reinforce the underlying social pathologies responsible for the problem. Poverty might also have some explanatory power here as well. Social cohesion -- here provided by the church -- is more of a necessity if you are poor than if you are rich. The poor do not have the luxury of choosing a certain amount of social alienation in order to be right about scientific precepts.

"People are stupid" is one of the great intellectually lazy answers of our times. Dig deeper.

<comment><USER4> > It's objectively true that increasing the cost of energy amounts to > something like a regressive tax.

No, this is not (automatically) true, it matters how the increase is implemented. See, for example: [http://www.theguardian.com/environment/climate- consensus-97-...](http://www.theguardian.com/environment/climate- consensus-97-per-cent/2014/jun/13/how-revenue-neutral-carbon-tax-creates-jobs- grows-economy)

<comment><USER3> I'm skeptical given the direct physical link between energy and wealth.

But it's also true that this link decouples at a certain level of energy consumption. Thankfully so... But it hasn't been shown that this minimum level can be achieved economically and safely at scale without fossil fuels.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Lobbying and what seems to me to be unchecked flouting of the law is utterly disgusting.

</comment><comment><USER6> I saw John Barry speak; had no idea he had a doctorate. Brought down the house, a real barnstormer.

</comment><comment><USER7> I think that articles about lawsuits should allow readers to actually see the lawsuits themselves, and should always at least mention the case number. So, in that spirit, here it is:

[http://www.plainsite.org/dockets/1zzhdj2de/louisiana- eastern...](http://www.plainsite.org/dockets/1zzhdj2de/louisiana-eastern- district-court/board-of-commissioners-of-the-southeast-louisiana-flood-/)

</comment><comment><USER8> One of the things that attracts me to libertarianism is how environmental disasters are handled. _Shocker_ but under a more libertarian system, there would not be laws that protect wealthy corporations specifically allowing them to get away with pollution. Public and private land owners would be able to rightfully sue culprits for property damage.

In fact, some of the worst polluters are nations where the state owns the majority of land and/or production like Soviet Union and China. I was both dumbfounded and sad to see the amount of trash in the Black Sea along the Russian coast that was dumped there or floated into it via the danube river during soviet rule.

It's especially sad to see this sort of thing happening in the United States, which is a relativity environmentally conscious country with large swaths of protected land. I wouldn't take it as far is the following article details, but some of the ideas here would be better than the current system: [https://mises.org/daily/5978/The-Libertarian-Manifesto-on- Po...](https://mises.org/daily/5978/The-Libertarian-Manifesto-on-Pollution)

<comment><USER2> As a litigator, I appreciate the sentiment, but litigation is ineffective at enforcing the rights of large numbers of people. Say there are no bank regulations, and a bank skims $100 of the accounts of ten million customers. The bank makes a lot of money, but it's not worthwhile for any given individual to sue. Your only recourse is the class action lawsuit, with all the limitations that entails.

The situation is even more problematic when the injured parties are not in contractual privity with the wrongdoer. If a coal plant in Chicago causes $1,000 of health damage to each resident, that's a multi-billion wrong. But unlike with a bank, the residents can't simply decide to do business with a different company.

There's a lot of money to be made doing two things: 1) selling people more risk than they think you're selling them; 2) foisting risk and costs onto third parties that aren't in a contractual relationship with you. So long as you do these things to a large number of people with a relatively small dollar value for each injury, you'll make a lot of money at it, and the legal system isn't great at stopping such behavior.

<comment><USER9> What you are describing about banks is outright theft, which under any system would be punished.

Even if courts did not exist, very few business would be that dumb to steal from their customers, because once details of it were known to the public, all rational customers would take their money out of the bank and it would eventually go out of business.

<comment><USER2> There's lots of ways to steal a little bit from people in ways they don't realize or can't do anything about. Stealing $5 bucks outright is of course the obvious thing; disproportionate overdraft fees or ordering transactions to maximize overdrafts is another; selling something with apparent X% risk and real X+Y% risk is more subtle still.

Information asymmetry isn't a theoretical construct--it's the basis of a lot of different ways to steal from people without their knowing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> "Writing is pretty isolated," Barry said. "I enjoy the action. I like to fight." // More coders should feel this way when it comes to issues about which they're passionate. In other words, more of us should consider becoming hacktivists -- at least on the side. As hacktivists, a wise first step towards making a difference is to treat political science as continuing education. Yes, articles like this should pique your interest. Read them. But also pick up some books and get serious.

To that end, as an alternative to "Rising Tide" by John Barry (from the linked article): I highly recommend reading (as did Aaron Swartz)[0][1] "The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York". It is a brilliant, Pulitzer- prize-winning case study of the forces at play in broken/corrupt governments (and how opaque the processes which formulate and execute the policies of governance truly are).

In Aaron's own words: "For nearly forty years, Robert Moses controlled New York. Controlled it almost absolutely, overruling every mayor, governor, president, and public pressure group. He did it all without anyone ever knowing: the press, when it did cover him, covered him only in the most glowing, reverent terms. He did it all without winning a single election: the two times he did dare run for office, he was defeated so soundly as to become a joke.

"_The Power Broker_ is the story of how our "democracy" really works. How men gain power and how it corrupts them. How cities get built and how real people suffer for it. How we became a nation desperately dependent on the car."

I will add that Robert Moses was the pioneer of eminent domain (a massive blow to the philosophical underpinnings of property rights in the USA) and modern public authorities (highly insular entities which are hybrids bodies corporate & politic -- receiving money from the public with zero effective accountability to taxpayers -- hard to summarize implications, but they have been enormous).

[0] - [http://www.amazon.com/review/RXOVNQ3JLY6GF](http://www.amazon.com/review/RXOVNQ3JLY6GF)

[1] - [https://zolabooks.com/list/aaron-swartz-reading- list/1](https://zolabooks.com/list/aaron-swartz-reading-list/1)

[2] - for those who'd prefer to listen, an excellent narration is available on Audible -- [http://www.audible.com/pd/Bios-Memoirs/The-Power-Broker- Audi...](http://www.audible.com/pd/Bios-Memoirs/The-Power-Broker- Audiobook/B0051JH67K)

Next I'd consider: "Hacking Politics" (about SOPA/PIPA) or "Understanding Power" \- a collection of talks by Noam Chomsky -- not for his ideological insights but for his manner of making observations and thought-provoking perspectives.

<comment><USER11> I'm 3/4ths through the audio book of the Power Broker and second your recommendation. I started it while doing the 100 mile NYC Century last month (the only all-urban century), and it has changed the way I think about New York City, democracy, power, and journalism.</comment></comment>


Soviet Space Dogs - <AUTHOR> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_space_dogs <comment><USER2> This article always makes me sad. These dogs have an affinity for and trust their humans only to be sent off and get exploded, crashed onto the surface of the Earth, or starved of oxygen. I can't imagine what's going through their minds when they head out.

<comment><USER3> Wait until you read about what the military and CIA did to humans without their consent.

<comment><USER4> hmm you mean LSD?

<comment><USER5> Worse.

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

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

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This Chemical Brothers video parallels some of Laika's story: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mRfSM- lv55I](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mRfSM-lv55I)

There's also an excellent comic about Laika: [https://www.amazon.com/Laika- Nick-Abadzis/dp/1596431016](https://www.amazon.com/Laika-Nick- Abadzis/dp/1596431016)

</comment><comment><USER7> There is a great exhibit of portraits of these dogs at the Museum of Jurassic Technology in Los Angeles ("The Lives of Perfect Creatures"):

[http://mjt.org/recentaddtions/creatures.html](http://mjt.org/recentaddtions/creatures.html)

<comment><USER8> When I went there was a dog lying on the floor which I assumed was stuffed. While I was looking at the exhibit it got up and started walking around which scared the shit out of me.

The MJT is a bizarre place but 100% worth visiting.

"All the Universe is full of the life of perfect creatures"

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> If you're interested in this, there's a really amazing book with this same title that has tons of info and a huge amount of great imagery as well.

[http://fuel-design.com/publishing/soviet-space-dogs/](http://fuel- design.com/publishing/soviet-space-dogs/)

Highly recommended, though also as others have pointed out quite sad.

</comment><comment><USER10> Those two pictures of Belka and Strelka are really of those two dogs, taxidermied and placed in the space museum in Moscow with their capsule between them. The crate or living quarters they rode in is also in the museum, in a different room.

Amazing museum by the way, housed in the base of a sculpture of a soaring rocket!

</comment><comment><USER11> I named my dog 'Laika'.

Just last week, I was looking for Belka and Strelka t-shirts.

</comment><comment><USER12> Will this be a primary source for hipster dog names in the next few years?

<comment><USER13> One of my astrophysics professor's named her dog Laika, so it's already begun.

<comment><USER10> My ex (German) had a dog named Laika when she was small and I knew a couple of Laikas in India as a kid -- presumably they were born around the time of Sputnik 2 (I was born after humans had already made the trip so these dogs were my elders).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Great name for a band!

</comment><comment><USER15> >Dogs were the preferred animal for the experiments because scientists felt dogs were well suited to endure long periods of inactivity.

Wow, 2 plus 2 really did equal 5 for Soviet apparatchiks!

<comment><USER16> Well an English bulldog I know thinks that 20 meters are exhausting and fulfilling walk. Good enough for a whole day. The only time that dog spends some energy is when he has to chew some expensive item into kindling.</comment></comment>


The 10 most useless graduate degrees: #9, Computer Science - T-A http://www.msn.com/en-us/money/personalfinance/the-10-most-useless-graduate-degrees/ar-BBi0x3S#page=3

<comment><AUTHOR> Throwing in my anectodata point.

Graduated with Masters. 1) Even after shopping multiple offers I earned less at the start than my friends who went straight to work. 2) Hard to catch up because they were ahead on industry experience and professional connections.

Edit: At least I didn't get a PhD. I've had multiple PhD grads tell me I was smart for getting out early. Most of the time, an advanced degree just does not pay off.

<comment><USER2> You have it backwards.

With regards to the US at least, in research, whether it's big company IR&D, government contracts, university or government labs, a Ph.D. opens the door to being hired directly as senior scientist and advancement to PI. Lack of a Ph.D. closes a lot of doors to advancement in research. It's harder to apply for research funding if the principals don't have Dr. before their name, and that's a fact.

Granted, this is only a slice of industry, and not always the best paying slice, but within it, a Ph.D. from a good institution is an extremely bankable asset.

A masters, on the other hand, is foolish unless you need it either for immigration purposes to get your foot in the U.S. or if you don't have a relevant undergraduate qualification; in either case, it's for catch-up purposes when you are behind to start. Plus, a good master's degree is generally very expensive, whereas you are getting paid a stipend in a good Ph.D. program.

<comment><USER3> The articles basis of "useless" was how well/poorly a graduate position paid relative to an undergraduate position.

Doesn't research pay fairly poorly on average? How much longer does it take to get a PhD? How much much more money does a PhD position need to pay than a graduate (or even undergraduate) position before it makes up for the years of lost wages?

<comment><USER3> I did a little digging on Glass door and found average salaries at Microsoft:

Researcher Phd (6 samples): Avg $123,922 (the highest researcher phd salary on GlassDoor)

Software Engineer I (5100 samples): Avg $104,547

Software Engineer II (1812 samples): Avg $144,443

Unless you write off the opportunity cost while getting a Phd, I'm not seeing the _financial_ advantages of getting one.

I don't know what the starting salary is for someone at Microsoft but to make the #'s easy, say it averages out to $100K over 5 years. That's $(1/2 million - grad student stipend) in lost wages.

<comment><USER2> Glassdoor isn't a great microscope. Do you notice "6 samples" for "Researcher Phd"? And how many of them are doing research relevant to the software industry? Also, the "Software Engineer I" is not reflective of average entry- level salary, it's reflective of everyone reporting with that title, many of whom have worked for many years as developers.

And a Ph.D. is not just a vanilla qualification to the extent that an undergraduate degree is. There are plenty of worthless and failed Ph.D's out there. Institutional affiliation and prestige and network of the PI matters even more.

It's not a golden ticket, and most people can't simply succeed in a Ph.D. program and make it pay off, but there are plenty of folks with extremely lucrative research careers, which they simply could not have achieved without the credential and connections they got from their Ph.D. program. Could they have succeeded in something else? Maybe, maybe not, but you could say that about any career choice.

Computer science Ph.D's can also often negotiate substantial consulting income on the side in addition to their stipends or fellowships.

Another bonus about research is that the really good jobs are not chained to the Bay area. Government contract money is diligently spread across all 50 states. So you can start with that six figure salary somewhere outside SF/NYC/Redmond where it goes a hell of a lot further.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


The World, Built by China - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/11/18/world/asia/world-built-by-china.html <comment><USER2> >Beijing is heavily focused on its neighbors, lending them money for extensive road-building projects. Pakistan is running out of money to repay the loans, part of a broader pattern of what critics call China's "debt trap" diplomacy.

If you've read "Confessions of an Economic Hitman", you know that the US has been following this strategy for years now. China is just copying a very workable model that the US pioneered. You have your banks giving loans to pay your companies to build projects that another country can't pay for (and you know it). Should they for some reason pay for it you made your bank some money and a lot of money for your construction company. Should they not be able to repay it your company has earned the same money and your bank is sitting on some pretty low risk long term loans which will pay out multiple times in interest. You make even more money.

<comment><USER3> > Should they not be able to repay it your company has earned the same money > and your bank is sitting on some pretty low risk long term loans which will > pay out multiple times in interest. You make even more money.

Or, the country defaults (like Poland in the eighties), and negotiates a partial cancellation of the debt, in exchange for adopting some of the recommended economic policies (in case of Poland, these were the Chicago- school liberal policies).

<comment><USER2> True, that's a third case, but rare, and still gives you some degree of influence for your money.

<comment><USER4> Or you ask the country to surrender land over to the lending company.

As seen with Srilanka handing over a port to China.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Have they ever not been? I think through history China always have been a superpower (with some short exceptions).

Edit: this might have been the longest time China was not a superpower: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Century_of_humiliation](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Century_of_humiliation)

<comment><USER6> Really good point.

The industrial revolution pushed "the west" pretty far in terms of power/economics but there were thousands of years of human history prior to it. In that longer view of history, China has always been a major player, and the last 150-ish years have been a fluke that's being corrected.

But western journalism really treats everything prior to the industrial revolution as caveman times, meaning they'll be equally surprized seeing Iran (Persia), India, Turkey and others 'rise' up in the coming decades as well.

<comment><USER7> You could also view it as China blowing a 2,000 year head start and now working to catch up.

<comment><USER8> Well, they didn't discover a whole new continent to exploit for gold and riches and get rid of its inhabitants, or plundered 2/3rds of the world (instead, they were themselves invaded by colonial powers).

So, while they lost their head start, at least they have that...

<comment><USER9> I'm a believer in China dominance in the coming decades.

However, painting the West's ability to heap "unequal treaties" on China cannot reasonably be described as a function of finding and conquering the new word. Firstly: the major conquest of the new world came through Spain, which had little to no involvement in the humiliation of the Middle Kingdom. Second, colonies in North America did not give the British gunboats capable of demolishing the Chinese fleets.

The reasonable conclusion is that the Enlightenment and the scientific advances eminating from that allowed the West to go from isolated, low population minor powers into worldwide empires.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Exceptional piece of research.

I'm still dazzled why the realisation of what China's "grand plan" was, came so late into mainstream political culture in the West.

Few month ago, I wrote a piece saying that China was long preparing (at least since 1991,) an economic war chest in case the country will be hit by sanctions like North Korea was, or even worse. A big portion of all national level economic programs since 1991 were there to aid and act upon that strategy. And they weren't even trying to conceal the original strategy paper, and if one can get access to state archives, they will find a lot of evidence that Chinese state did fully commit to it as early as 1992. The motto of the program is "the primacy of expansionism."

They correctly identified that US domination in 20th century came from how they moulded the world after WW2. Now, when the West wasted itself on two decades of useless "wars on X," they felt that:

1\. "The world was messed up enough" to yield to China's own Marshal plan.

2\. This is the last opportunity to act before US takes action

So, all those impressive t-bill, cash, gold, and FX reserves that the West gave China in the last 30 years, will now be used by China to buy its own Pax Sinica

<comment><USER11> > Now, when the West wasted itself on two decades of useless "wars on X," they > felt that "the world was messed up enough" to yield to China's own Marshal > plan.

That's an awfully Western centric view of things. The West didn't "waste itself" on things, they just plain didn't care about various regions, for various reasons. They babysat Germany and Japan after WW2 but Iraq and Afghanistan were comparatively thrown to the wolves.

China mostly went where the West wouldn't go.

I can't really blame them. Their moves are very rational as an actor on the world stage and in many cases their involvement is also helping the locals (many of which have miserable lives, as-is).

And I'm neither American, nor Western, nor Chinese, so I'd consider myself a reasonably unbiased obverser.

<comment><USER10> >I can't really blame them. Their moves are very rational as an actor on the world stage and in many cases their involvement is also helping the locals (many of which have miserable lives, as-is).

Indeed, as a strategy it is as straightforward and rational as it can be.

When it is a detestable communist party that continuously follows upon plain, and rational strategies, and Western civil states can not despite their best efforts, you begin to question the rationale for living in the West.

This in big part was the reason for my move to China. And the constantly growing expat community in China is the proof that I am not alone having that idea.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> "The dangerous clashes of the future are likely to arise from the interaction of Western arrogance, Islamic intolerance, and Sinic assertiveness."

[https://harvardmagazine.com/1997/01/forum.html](https://harvardmagazine.com/1997/01/forum.html)

<comment><USER8> "Assertiveness is a skill regularly referred to in social and communication skills training. Being assertive means being able to stand up for your own or other people's rights in a calm and positive way, without being either aggressive, or passively accepting 'wrong'."

Sounds about right.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Well - how did China finance all these investments ?!

(start rant)

The simple answer is "China consumed less, and invested more".

The US can tax fuel and SUV, and invest in green energy. The EU can tax London's banks and offshore, it can slash its agriculture subsidies, and invest in tech and innovation.

The Western world simply prefers bigger cars and exotic vacations.

(end rant. Goes online to order Sushi for lunch)

<comment><USER14> I think it's a little more than that. Let's not forget that democracy is a system design to move slow. Whereas China can move fast because it has a strong government that can disregard popular opinion to an extent. With this you create a government that is hyper-rich and very investment heavy. The incredible amount Chinese government spend on building infrastructure would simply not be passed in any democracy

<comment><USER15> Democracy is a system that's maybe slow, yes, but it also leads to stability, peace and balance.

Most dictatorships eventually fall behind because exploitation, the fight for power and the mistakes of an un-checked leader become a burden on the country.

<comment><USER16> Cant say your first assessment about democracy really apllies to current US politics though. The western democracy is at great danger being eaten by populism. It is worthy reminding that Nazi Germany is also a result from, you know, democracy

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> China has every right to provide construction and loans to other countries. Pulling third world countries into the modern world through expensive infrastructure is not the worst thing even if it enriches the Chinese. In fact this kind of economic colonialism has one big benefit, being economic in nature it prefers peace.

The US could learn a thing or two about this flavor of nation building

<comment><USER9> The US did acknowledge this: the Marshall Plan was clearly an effort by the US to dually resore the homeland of many Americans and to bind the broken or beaten powers closely to the US.

The term "Greatest Generation" is a bit passé, but the USA immediately after WWII was legitimately great.

<comment><USER18> Yes. Being German, I'm as critical of the current US policy and government as anyone - but I am incredibly grateful to and mindful of the Marshall plan and what it did for Germany and Europe.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> What worries me the most:

\- Lending for infrastructure ( sometimes not even used/required ones) and they then build it themselves. It's just a method for having extra inflation.

With none of the employment/knowledge advantages for the country involved ( loans through "the bank of china"). It is a death trap.

</comment><comment><USER20> people should actually consider the sinosphere than just china alone and include hk taiwan sg and the koreas already in it

the biggest player not in the sinosphere yet is japan and china is already working on that

japan weakness is apparent and honhai takeover of sharp and attempt at toshiba memory unit should be seen in this light

my guess is once the gdp tables flip within a decade japan too will see the writing on the wall and it will not be a controversial choice for the japanese either

</comment><comment><USER21> NYTimes display the power output as a bubble chart on PC and bar chart on mobile.

I was shocked how misleading the bubble chart could be, The biggest dam is 3x larger than the smallest, but the it looks like only 1.5x larger on the bubble chart.

<comment><USER22> Bubble charts show the value in the _area_ of the circle, not its diameter. The chart is accurate but we're accustomed to seeing inaccurate charts using diameters, usually to sensationalize an article.

<comment><USER23> The difficulty for humans to interpret and compare circular areas is one of the reasons IIRC why Tufte and others are so adamant against pie charts.

<comment><USER18> Surprises me - pie charts are properly used only to display proportions, and in a pie chart the area is proportional to the angle is proportional to the length of the arc, so there should be much less scope for confusion? We should all have good intuitions for our share of the pie or pizza, no...? :-)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Someone changed the title, it's actually "The World, Built by China".

</comment><comment><USER24> Too often this discussion falls into the oft-repeated tropes about how a evil west is "containing" China (he same claims historically were made by Germany, Russia and Japan in 1913, 1917 and 1933 respectively). Or the claims that the West just wants to keep China down, and it's China's duty to grow because racism of west/ greed of Japan / lebensr .. cough... (I mean, one China policy).

While most of the comments here are focused on the economic elements of china's rise - the political implications here are what are really scary to me. China is basically a totalitarian state with a capitalist escape valve. Moral and social decisions are made by a strong central state, and while corporations toe the party line, they are free to do what they want, and the government will pour money into them. The authors seem to think this is a new phenomena, but historically that's not too far off from how many totalitarian states worked - most notably the NSDAP.

The NSDAP led a resurgence in German manfuacturing by backing their corporations, and corporations embraced the kultur promoted by the party. People prospered, and were free to act in their economic self-interest as long as they toed the party line.

The Chinese have developed something that the previous states never had - technology that supresses dissenting voices. The levers and restrictions that they can deploy at will are so much greater now then various fascist and communist governments enjoyed in the past. Let's say that someone in the government decides that the South China Sea is worth killing over. Any voice of dissent in China will be shut down via the "Social Score" and it's built in ability to marginalize people who act in a way inconsistent with the state.

China will claim that this is preferable to the infighting that is rocking the western world. Historically Liberal Democracies have proven that untrue, but it feels like Liberalism itself is under threat.

</comment><comment><USER25> China is a country with more than a billion hard-working people. This should not be a surprise!

<comment><USER23> India's population rivals China's and yet AFAIK is not considered to be the kind of superpower that China and the U.S. are.

<comment><USER26> I think long-term, I would still bet on India over China. Not only does China have an impending demographic crunch, India is a democracy with an enormous English-speaking population and friendlier ties to the West. Look at the Indian space program for some really inspiring examples of doing fantastic things on a (relative) shoestring budget.

Assuming they aren't completely done in by climate change, I wouldn't be surprised if India became the dominant power in the second half of the 21st century.

<comment><USER27> "I wouldn't be surprised if India became the dominant power in the second half of the 21st century"

I would (Fwiw, I am in Indian, lived for years in the USA, now live in India). Aside from climate change, India has tremendous problems with respect to literacy, religious intolerance, lack of engineering/manufacturing skills (outside the space program) , emigration of its brightest young people etc etc.

Any nation can progress only when it has competent leadership for a few decades. In India, across political parties, we have utterly terrible leaders with little education and less common sense. If anything I (personally) predict India will decline as the century progresses. (imo ime, ymmv, etc, saying this before the super patriots of India(n origin) accuse me of being some kind of traitor to our glorious destiny)

<comment><USER11> > we have utterly terrible leaders with little education and less common sense

I don't want to rain on your parade (I'm not Indian), but from outside, despite their impressive on paper CVs, your past leaders were even worse, based on their results.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> superpower where there are zero children playgrounds even in capital and you can't let your child outside because of toxic air, okay...

glad i moved away from such superpower paradise and my child suffered there only for one year

</comment><comment><USER29> The good news for us is that China is /will be checked by at least India. Japan, S Korea, Vietnam etc also be watching.

Give India a couple of decades of good management and they'll be strong enough

<comment><USER30> India had probably 5 decades head start on China and they started with big pool of western educated statesmen with know how. Also India didn't suffer much in WWII compared to china while china had civil war and Japanese occupation.

The development of China is amazing. I am not sure India will be able to catch up (or be allowed to) - China are probably not keen on having a new superpower next door, so they will do their best to thwart it.

<comment><USER29> China supports Pakistan, a local rival to India. But then USA supports a lot of countries that are scared of China's rise. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Territorial_disputes_in_the_So...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Territorial_disputes_in_the_South_China_Sea)

USA can help India catch up at least when it comes to military and fill in any gaps with allies /US firepower should a war happen meanwhile. China cannot stop India, but India can stop India. If a war starts (not likely,) China will be virtually alone, maybe just NK joins them. At least Taiwan, Japan, South Korea have super-modern weapons and the rest of the countries can tie China's hands.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> Interesting how money is defining the new world</comment>


Common Server Setups for Your Web Application - <AUTHOR> https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/5-common-server-setups-for-your-web-application?utm_source=Customerio&utm_medium=Email_Internal&utm_campaign=Email5.1_ActivateAccount_5CommonServerSetupMistakes&mkt_tok=eyJpIjoiWmprNU16RTFNVE14TnpNeCIsInQiOiJGYVVMSER0NUloRUVVTjJaOHFOR01VXC9YaFVpQlwvUHk4N0d2OCtRMDE4c21SdlNDVkZyb1NkZWlPbjg4VEs1T2h0OWVrMVl6QU9hMHF6dkhjXC9OT1Y5V0s0ODNwRUNtd0haS3pDTkdyMUdTMD0ifQ%3D%3D <comment><USER2> tl;dr Listicle of five service layouts for different horizontal and vertical scaling. Provides a paragraph about each and pros/cons. Useful if you only have five minutes to learn about the following terms; not, if you've already spent five minutes learning about the following terms.

1 Everything On One Server

2 Separate Database Server

3 Load Balancer (Reverse Proxy)

4 HTTP Accelerator (Caching Reverse Proxy)

5 Master-Slave Database Replication

<comment><USER3> where would I learn more about this type of thing? Like a more detailed overview?

<comment><USER4> One good place to start is one of the "Awesome Sysadmin" lists on GitHub like this one:

[https://github.com/kahun/awesome-sysadmin](https://github.com/kahun/awesome- sysadmin)

There are many, those will lead you to some great resources.</comment></comment></comment>


The Little-Known Firm Helping the FBI Crack iPhones - <AUTHOR> http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-03-31/inside-the-little-known-japan-firm-helping-the-fbi-crack-iphones <comment><USER2> Cellebrite is an Israeli company, not Japanese. They are owned by a Japanese parent company, but I'd argue that is not the same.

Volkswagen owning 100% of Lamborghini does not make the latter a german car manufacturer.

<comment><USER3> Yeah, I'd say that this is actually a piece intended to try to prevent any political fallout with a close ally of the US (Israel) at the expense of the nuclear whipping boy (Japan).

<comment><USER2> I'd say this is mainly financial news, where the ownership and stock market representation is actually relevant. But it's a very weak piece to learn much about Cellebrite, and makes it sound like they build pinball machines and games before hacking iPhones.

<comment><USER4> It sounds like Cellebrite employees are largely ex unit 8200 members (Israel's SIGNIT program).[1] The article really doesn't seem to talk about Cellebrite's history much at all.

[1][http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/fbi-cracks-the-locked- iphone-...](http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/fbi-cracks-the-locked-iphone-but- legal-questions-remain-unanswered/#transcript) (he says unit 822 :/, doh)

<comment><USER5> Any tech company in israel is largely ex unit 8200 members, along with other military tech units such as Mamram, Lotem, Matzov, Ofek and more.

The Israeli military enlists every 18 year old in the country, and if you've studied computers in high-school or at home as a hobby, you're more than likely to spend 3-6 years in a technological unit.

<comment><USER6> Is 8200 really considered to be just a "technological unit?" They're one of the most advanced military SIGINT organizations on earth, aren't they?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> > "... built its business on pinball game machines and stumbled into the > mobile phone security business almost by accident." (first paragraph)

Pinball? In Japan? this isn't going to be pinball.

> "has been building pinball-like game machines found in Japan's pachinko > parlors since the 1970s" (third paragraph).

So it isn't pinball at all, it's pachinko. I know this is almost besides the point, but do Bloomberg really have such a low opinion of it's readers they think it's impossible to explain? To me at least it reads like:

"Tiger Woods, who rose to fame playing a football-like game across golf courses in America..."

<comment><USER8> While pachinko is huge in Japan, pinball is also very popular. Source: My Uncle worked for Williams pinball, and Japan is where they made most of their money.

<comment><USER9> Would love to see a non-anecdotal source on this, as my understanding is that pinball sales in the US absolutley dwarfs totals for the rest of the world. Not saying Williams didn't do lots of other sales in Japan, but pinball-as-in- two-ish-flippers pinball sales should be highest in the US.

<comment><USER9> source to my point:

>Yuske believes that Japan's love of video games is part of the reason why pinball has had trouble taking hold—why the game is more of a foreign curiosity for most than a cultural mainstay.

[http://motherboard.vice.com/read/the-silver-ball-planet- insi...](http://motherboard.vice.com/read/the-silver-ball-planet-inside-a- japanese-pinball-arcade)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> So basically the NSA/CIA develop the tech, license it to a contractor, who the FBI can then hire. Got it. I bet they know who to use it on before they even need to through Parallel Construction too. This is what the future looks like.

<comment><USER11> That's just speculation.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Thought exercise/serious question- could the DMCA be used to compel cellbrite to disclose the methodology to apple so that it can be patched?

</comment><comment><USER13> _It's a fairly straightforward method for a researcher to identify what has been changed, and from that reverse-engineer what the flaw was and then build a tool to exploit that flaw_

I'd say this is a bit of an oversimplification.

</comment><comment><USER14> Given Apple's almost unlimited cash they could always make companies like this an offer no intelligent person could turn down (especially if public) and have them explain what they do.

<comment><USER15> When you mix with operative/intelligence crowd - the work is incredibly fun, the access you have to all kinds of info (and people and gear) is unprecedented and the generous compensation is a nice side effect.

Apple can top the compensation, but not the first two parts.

<comment><USER16> Those who know don't say, those who say don't know.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Misleading title - it's a Japanese owned Israeli company.

</comment><comment><USER18> I wonder if their approach only works on iphone5 and not the 6? I thought I read somewhere the 6 has more advanced security features?

<comment><USER8> We will really only know if they release what they did. My assumption is that it will not work with iPhone 5S and later.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> 0-day exploits changing hands for cash is hardly new. Stuxnet alone had 4 according to Symantec.

Israeli army units and companies founded by ex-army elite are highly involved in discovering/buying 0days, iOS or anywhere else</comment>