Exercise 'keeps the mind sharp' in over-50s, study finds - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-39693462 <comment><USER2> Looking at the funnel plot in fig. 3 in the linked meta-analysis [1], the high precision studies (standard error < 0.268) are clustered around an effect size of 0. The overall positive effect derives exclusively from the medium and low- precision studies, with several visible outliers well to the right influencing the mean significantly. The medium and low-precision studies had problems with one or more of the following:

"randomisation; allocation concealment; blinding of therapists (intervention supervisors); blinding of participants; blinding of outcome assessors; handling of incomplete data (use of intention-to-treat analysis); selective reporting and any other risk of bias." [1]

Also, the result was only statistically significant for poor quality control groups that didn't engage in any shared activity:

"When the control group involved either no contact (eg, waiting list, usual care; p<0.01) or education (eg, computer course, health lectures; p=0.01) the estimate was statistically significant. Where the control condition was exposed to an active control (eg, stretching; p=0.17) or social group (p=0.62), the effect size was still positive but no longer statistically significant." [1]

In summary, a few poor quality studies with large bias account for most if not all of the effect reported in this meta-analysis.

[1] [http://bjsm.bmj.com/content/early/2017/03/30/bjsports-2016-0...](http://bjsm.bmj.com/content/early/2017/03/30/bjsports-2016-096587)

<comment><USER3> If people used their time to study and learn new things instead of fretting about their exercise, they'd be able to interpret the results of studies like these.

<comment><USER4> If people used their time to exercise instead of watch TV/Netflix/Hulu, they'd be able to think more clearly and better absorb the results of studies like these.

<comment><USER5> Maybe they would, see above.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Do not say you're too busy to exercise. Your productivity is much higher when you exercise. Do not say you're too old to exercise. The older you are, the more crucial it is. Get in the habit. Start with even just 2 intense minutes a day. Once you're in the habit, you'll work out longer.

<comment><USER7> Precisely, one should quit all excuses!

My father was prescribed to storvas (for cholesterol) over a decade ago... luckily he is an avid reader and soon found out what road the permanent meds lead to.

He quit the meds and started working out consistently (never mind spondylitis which he combatted with bed rest) for 10 years (and still continuing).

Today, he's over 50 and is killing it in every aspect in life. His mind is sharp, business is good and best of all he can run over 6kms in 30 minutes (plus all the weights and stuff)! He's now reducing running for his knees and cycles out youngsters half his age 3 times a week (with 3 times weight training).

This could've been a very different picture if he continued with prescribed meds. After experiencing this, he's purchased workout plans for everyone in the family for 9 years straight and wants us to treat workouts like we brush our teeth (nevermind if we don't get competitive).

I work way better if I exercise, it's like the clock for my life even in my 20s. Never want to lose the habit.

<comment><USER8> I just hate it. Not that I haven't tried. I've tried running, weights, walking. It's boring, and makes me feel tired and irritable. I just want to go to bed after exercise. Not my thing.

<comment><USER9> Not meaning to be snarky at all, but have you tried reading about mindfulness first? I found that in my 20s running was awful and I was almost literally counting the steps until I got to the end. But as I've gotten older and embraced a more mindful worldview running, walking, swimming or any of the traditional "slog" activities has become a really nice quiet time where I can appreciate all the little motions and sensations of being awake.

Sorry if that comes off as patronizing or hokey, but if you can stay in shape "enough" early, I've found that it becomes it's own reward as I've gotten older.

<comment><USER10> Meditation does help a lot with appreciating using one's body, and in many other aspects of life.

But it's a lot of work and take some time to get benefits. Plus the benefits don't arrive in the same order for everybody.

So while this is probably a good advice, I don't think it should be the only solution applied. It's more like a long term advice.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> My problem with exercise is simply time. There are a million things I want to do and with a 10-7 work shift, I just can't do much.

Staying 30 minutes longer happens easily so it's 7:30. Commuting to the gym would take another 20-30. 1h in the gym and it's 9 (or later). Commuting an hour home and it's 10. Go to supermarket, maybe cook something up and it could easily be 11 already. This leaves 1-2h max to do anything else, given I am not dead from the gym. Now spinning up the brain to focus on something creative also needs a bit of time.

Morning gym is hard as well. All gyms around my home open from 9:30/10:00 which is when I have to be on the way to the office already.

So the time slots that are free are very competitive. Pick one: Do I go to the gym? Do I watch a movie with the gf? Do I program? Do I learn the next grammar chapter? Do I work on other hobbies that I've been putting off too long? Do I meet friends and catch up on social life?

To be honest, this 'problem' makes me currently think of switching into a part time job, just so I have more time for the things I actually care about. (Part time remote for optimum happiness but that might be impossible to come by)

<comment><USER12> If you can't find the time for the gym and don't want or don't have the space to buy and build a whole homegym, can I suggest to buy a good but simple in- home rowing machine? It is, imho, the perfect combination between aerobic and anaerobic exercises and it really works out every of your muscles in a good way, the only downside is that you have to be careful and learn the correct movements else you are just going to get pain in your whole back.

A good one, with a good variety of (high) resistance and a quality rope would cost about 400/500$, double it if you want agonist-level equipment.

<comment><USER13> Agreed - if you have the space, get a Concept2 rowing machine. Do 2km on that every day (<15min), you have covered a lot of bases.

I'd also say, get a door-frame pull up bar and a set of adjustable dumb bells, and you can do an extremely effective workout in minimal time.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Does anyone else worry about staying fit as an office worker? As much as I enjoy my career, I might give serious consideration to moving into something more physical in future. While you can easily fit in a decent amount of exercise outside of work if you only work 40 hours, it strikes me as much more efficient to make your work exercise in and off itself. I spent one summer working as a software engineer intern with 6 weeks in between working at a summer camp where I was on my feet all day every day. When I got back to the office my mood and focus were sky high compared to before but I never had to try to do exercise at summer camp, the job itself just was exercise.

<comment><USER13> I have mentioned this in previous threads, but here goes:

See if there are squash courts in your area. If so, take lessons (commit to 5-10 lessons), and ask the instructor to introduce you to other novice players. The game is exhilerating, easy to learn, low-inpact, high cardio, and has a huge supportive world wide community.

In one year, I went from doing no gym / physical activity, to playing squash 3x a week (or more). Additionally, since I'm at the gym anyway, I am now doing gym routine alongside playing squash (something that during my 34 years of living, I'd never managed to keep up as a routine). A funny aside - I've never been a morning person, but I've been trying to "fix" that by scheduling squash games with people at 05:30 am. It "stings" in the morning, but it's incredible how awake you are at 6:30 after having battled it out on the court at full blast. I might flake out on myself to get to the gym that early, but I won't flake out on another person I committed to. Your mileage may vary, but just sharing something which (finally) worked for me. Good luck!

(Just played an hour of squash, 2km rowing machine, full workout - all before breakfast)

<comment><USER15> I have similar experiences with hockey. It's obviously not as cheap as squash, but most of the pickup in my area is 6:30am or so. The rink is also walkable from my office, so sometimes I bring my skates to work and skate during lunch just to get myself moving. The best part is, it's never too late to start! I took lessons starting at 22, but I was easily the youngest person in the class. Lots of people in their 40s learning to ice skate for the first time.

This is coming from a person who you couldn't pay to exercise two years ago. Recreational sports don't feel like exercise, they feels like playing a game. Also with something like ice skating all your improvements are very noticeable and it feels really good to master a new skill or pull off a deke or score a goal in a game.

Obviously also not for everyone, but these kind of stories are true for every sport. Find something you like, it's never too late to try something new.

<comment><USER13> That does sound really fun!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Nothing helps me tackle a tough programming problem like a nice, long bike ride. Is it grueling at times? Of course. Are my legs burning by the end? Usually. But, hard physical activity is the perfect way to clear my mind.

Plus, the fact that your body will go to shit if you don't exercise. Before I started lifting weights approx 10 years ago, I had back aches from sitting in an office chair all day. After regular, challenging, weight training, those problems vanished. Why? Because my muscles are strong now.

If you don't use your muscles, they soon because worthless, and painful. It's amazing how much stronger you get in a short amount of time as a beginner in weight training.

You don't like exercising? Boo hoo, no one does. I'd much rather eat pizza and drink beer than put 30 miles on my bike. But, I know it's important, so I suck it up and go. Even when I absolutely don't want to.

</comment><comment><USER17> Saying that exercise keeps the mind sharp normalizes not exercising.

I prefer to think of exercise as normal and sitting around as the mind-dulling deviation. I would say:

 _Not exercising can dull the mind._

or

 _A sedentary lifestyle instead of getting your heart pumping can dull the mind._

</comment><comment><USER18> "Mens sana in corpore sano", says 10000th study :)

The real question: is there anyone out there that really debates that exercising constantly = better, longer life?

<comment><USER19> I'm 63 and a bit overweight. But I have lost 50 lbs in the last 2 years. Wife and I try to exercise for 50 to 70 minutes a day Monday-Friday. We are up at 4:30 am and at the gym at 5:10.

We feel better doing this for ourselves. Some weekends we go to the gym and usually, when we do we stay longer.

I'm a believer.

<comment><USER20> I'm with you but why so insanely early? 6:00am is early; at 4:30 you're waking up before the crack of dawn!

Heck, I'm lucky if I can be asleep by 4:30am...

<comment><USER19> The gym I go to is open 24x7 and there are people leaving when we arrive and I thought we were early.

<comment><USER21> I remember going to gold's gym in austin (this would have been in the 90's, no idea if gold's is still there) at 5am, and some of the people there were already well into their workouts, if not also leaving for the day(!).

<comment><USER22> We still have a number of Gold's in Austin, but the one by my office is 5AM–10PM on weekdays, so no one is finishing up at 5am.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> On one side of my family retirement for my grandparents meant long days vegetating in front of the television with little dogs to pet. Church on Sundays were really their only time out. This brought dementia by age 80 and a host of other issues and they are on their way out. On the other side my grandfather plays basketball, golfs, runs, reads a book every few days, even drinks at a bar. No dementia. Sharp as a tack. Dare I say... no church.

<comment><USER24> Both my grandfathers where professors who kept working up until their irrespective colleges forced them retire due to their alzheimers. One ran marathons up until his 70s and the other one did moderate exercise. Both did everything you are supposed to do, both got alzheimers. 80 isn't going to be a party no matter how healthy you are, it's 80.

<comment><USER25> The guy who ran my white water raft guide course was 74.

He did a backflip out of the raft in a 3+ rapid, into a glacier melt river North of 60. He laughed when I was given control of the raft for the first time and I flipped it with him and five others in it within 30 seconds.

I'm willing to bet he will still be having a ball at age 80.

<comment><USER26> in your 70s you age much faster than you think. 5 years do a lot more damage than you expect from 75 to 80.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Somewhat related, today I read

"Researchers found that the foot's impact during walking sends pressure waves through the arteries that significantly modify and can increase the supply of blood to the brain."

[https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2017/04/170424141340.h...](https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2017/04/170424141340.htm)

<comment><USER28> What is the evolutionary explanation for this?

<comment> aaron-lebo Does there have to be? Doesn't evolution produce a lot of things which are side-effects not goals?

<comment><USER29> yep. the biological term is "spandrel"

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spandrel_(biology)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spandrel_\(biology\))

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Or - there is a confounding factor that makes people both sharp and willing to exercise.

<comment><USER31> This is the most common one line reply to any study, and it's a pet peeve of mine. If you actually read past the headline, you'd see this was not a population study, but a review of experimental ones, where your "confounding factor" is literally the fact that experimenters asked people to exercise.

Please, be skeptical of studies, but don't be so arrogant to presume authors aren't capable of the most elementary scientific reasoning.

<comment><USER28>
      that experimenters asked people to exercise.

Where are you reading this? The article is about the meta review here [http://bjsm.bmj.com/content/early/2017/03/30/bjsports-2016-0...](http://bjsm.bmj.com/content/early/2017/03/30/bjsports-2016-096587)

Even if you're right, it still doesn't remove the confounding factors. Let's assume you're right and each study has a control group that doesn't exercise (for.... x years...? seems ridiculous) and an experimental group which exercises regularly. But then...unhealthy people wouldn't be able to be in the latter group because they can't exercise regularly.

I humbly submit "healthiness" as a possible confounding factor contributing to both "sharp mind" and "ability to exercise" (and thus be in the experimental group). Not sure where healthiness would come from - genetics? Diet? Less stress?

<comment><USER31> I'm reading this in the same place you linked. It's a meta study of experimental studies, where experimenters ask otherwise sedentary people to be subject to "exercise interventions" (it's in the title...). Observations weren't for years AFAIK, studies over 4 weeks were eligible and an effect was observed.

Edit: as for your confounding effect, it doesn't strike at the heart of the study. The study finds that actually doing exercise improves your cognitive function. Not that there are "sharp" people and "active" people and these tend to go together. Whether or not you're sharp or healthy to begin with, doing "exercise intervention" will improve your cognition.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> As someone who is in his fifties, and just took my first real break from the gym in 40 years (2 months off) I can easily say I don't miss it. I still walk to/from work, which is about a 12km round trip, 5 times a week.

And although I have considered never picking up a weight again, I know the benefits of weight bearing exercise and so, sometime this year, will go back to they gym, but less frequently and for a shorter duration.

And never forget that 50% of your health is nutrition.

<comment><USER33> People are so very emotionally tied to food they get blinded when it comes to "proper" nutrition. For technical folk, I think if we start phrasing nutrition alongside "limiting chemical reagents" all of a sudden the mind starts thinking about making sure all the proper reagents are available in abundant supply for the body.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> I hate direct exercising, ie running around my local area or going to the gym. However what I do love is participating in activities which require exercising; mountain biking, table tennis, football, hiking and badminton. I love all of these sports for its social benefits and most of the time I forget I'm exercising :)

</comment><comment><USER35> I found "Spark! How exercise will improve the performance of your brain" (Ratey/Hagerman) to be a good popular summary of research in this field. (No connection with the authors!).

</comment><comment><USER36> Recent study ("Running as a Key Lifestyle Medicine for Longevity"):

Abstract: _Running is a popular and convenient leisure-time physical activity (PA) with a significant impact on longevity. In general, runners have a 25%–40% reduced risk of premature mortality and live approximately 3 years longer than non-runners. Recently, specific questions have emerged regarding the extent of the health benefits of running versus other types of PA, and perhaps more critically, whether there are diminishing returns on health and mortality outcomes with higher amounts of running. This review details the findings surrounding the impact of running on various health outcomes and premature mortality, highlights plausible underlying mechanisms linking running with chronic disease prevention and longevity, identifies the estimated additional life expectancy among runners and other active individuals, and discusses whether there is adequate evidence to suggest that longevity benefits are attenuated with higher doses of running._

Conclusion: _There is compelling evidence that running provides significant health benefits for the prevention of chronic diseases and premature mortality regardless of sex, age, body weight, and health conditions. There are strong plausible physiological mechanisms underlying how running can improve health and increase longevity. Running may be the most cost-effective lifestyle medicine from public health perspective, more important than other lifestyle and health risk factors such as smoking, obesity, HTN, and DM. It is not clear, however, how much running is safe and efficacious and whether it is possible to perform an excessive amount of exercise. Also, running may have the most public health benefits, but is not the best exercise for everyone since orthopedic or other medical conditions can restrict its use by many individuals._

[http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0033062017...](http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0033062017300488)

NYT reporting on the study ("An Hour of Running May Add 7 Hours to Your Life"):

[https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/12/well/move/an-hour-of- runn...](https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/12/well/move/an-hour-of-running-may- add-seven-hours-to-your-life.html)

</comment><comment><USER37> I'm 39 and I can't do anything with my brain nowadays after exercising, so I'm looking forward to that changing when I get to 50.

</comment><comment><USER38> Can a person overcome lack of exercise by eating healthy?

Can a person overcome lack of good nutrition by exercising regularly ?

Exercise goes hand in hand with nutrition IMO. People who exercise tend to eat better and healthier foods.

If someone did not exercise routinely - they could easily improve their health by eating properly!

What is more important? healthy nutrition or regular physical activity or both?!

* And dont forget about about sleep!!!

<comment><USER33> It's probably around 70-80% nutrition and 20-30% exercise/activity.

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> So that's why Taleb deadlifts like a madman.

<comment><USER21> TIL (!). I deadlift (amongst other things), as I believe it's a fundamental movement (what Dan John calls "pick heavy stuff off the floor").

Here's a writeup Taleb did about strength training (whether I agree or disagree in totality is a separate issue, but we can all agree to 80% and disagree on the rest):

[https://medium.com/@nntaleb/strength-training-is-learning- fr...](https://medium.com/@nntaleb/strength-training-is-learning-from-tail- events-7aa2c074569d)

<comment><USER40> I'm not sure that I agree with a lot of that article, but one piece really resonates with me. I had a chronic hamstring injury from sprinting (tendinitis, with a couple recurring minor pulls over the years) and physical therapy was a complete waste of time. The first physical therapist I went to told me that it would take over a year of sessions to recover from a grade 1 tear (which is absolute bullshit). She had me doing a bunch of different weird balancing exercises and working with elastic bands. I dealt with this injury for years until I started doing 1) foam rolling and myofascial release, and more importantly 2) squatting, deadlifting, and olympic lifts. The difference was almost overnight, and I haven't had a single issue with my hamstring in years now.

<comment><USER21> Thumbs up on this, we can agree on the basics and disagree on the minutiae; after all, as individuals, we are different to some degree.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> Purely anecdotal: I'm in my early 30s and find a brisk run to have a huge positive effect on my mental function and general energy levels for the rest of my day (I work in biotech and spend half my day in the lab, half behind a screen). In fact, I noticed this difference my very first (pitiful) day of running.

</comment><comment><USER42> I wonder about travel too. My mind buzzes whenever I'm a new environment.

I now wonder about walking far...

</comment><comment><USER43> correlation causation fallicy anyone?

</comment><comment><USER44> Meh. I'll take the shitty brain.</comment>


Learning to Represent Edits - <AUTHOR> https://openreview.net/pdf?id=BJl6AjC5F7 <comment><USER2> Someone should add [PDF] to the title. It would also provide better context by including "within the context of AI / ML" (not sure which term would be most appropriate) at the end of the title.

Under the Tasks section they talk about building assistive coding tools. The given example is to consume the huge GitHub commit stream in order to identify patterns for certain kinds of bug fixes and "best practices". You'd always want to have a human review all changes, but this sounds like it could be used to help you migrate and modernize old code.

</comment><comment><USER3> > ABSTRACT > > We introduce the problem of learning distributed > representations of edits. By combining a "neural editor" with an "edit > encoder", our models learn to represent the salient information of an edit > and can be used to apply edits to new inputs. We experiment on natural > language and source code edit data. Our evaluation yields promising results > that suggest that our neural network models learn to capture the structure > and semantics of edits. We hope that this interesting task and data source > will inspire other researchers to work further on this problem.

</comment><comment><USER4> Better link [https://openreview.net/forum?id=BJl6AjC5F7](https://openreview.net/forum?id=BJl6AjC5F7)</comment>


Ask HN: How do you make productive friendships? - <AUTHOR>

I'm hitting a wall here.
I tend to find friendships based on relaxation or wasting time easy to make.  I also find friendships based on conversation (especially negative ones) also easy to make.  However, the friendship I want to make is a profitable one.  I'm stumped on how to do this.
I find people tend to bail faster than I can count to 3 if I suggest an activity which requires tedious work.  I would love to one day say "look, this charity needs a website, how about we create a small site to help them?" to my friends and seeing us make it happen instead of seeing a everyone's jaw drop in horror to completely change the conversation to involve only fun things. <comment><USER2> Most of us are self-oriented to such an extent that we can say that everything we do is for some selfish reason. It's natural. You and your prospective friends both have their own selfish reasons to be friends. You want their friendship so that you get a partner in doing things that you value(creating a website for a charity) and they do the same (watching a movie or hanging out together for fun).

So, you need to meet with people who have values/interests similar to yours. Now, most people want to do fun things so it is easy to find such friends. Not many want to WASTE their time in things such as building a site for charity, so it is difficult to find such friends.

Personally, I have different groups of friends - friends to hang out with, friends to discuss ideas with, friends who are always available when needed in emergency, etc.

My suggestion : meet with people having similar interests. Attend meetups, events etc.

</comment><comment><USER3> Hang out at top universities. People there are ambitious and always looking to work on stuff - and there's usually an event or club or two that you can attend where you can meet like-minded, action-biased individuals, even of you're not a student.

Hack-a-thons are also good.

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm beginning to think a lot of my problems will be solved if I just moved ;)

Top universities are few and far in this area. There's a major regional university nearby but......

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Try finding friends among like-minded people, rather than turning existing friends into like-minded people? Join a group that does something productive, then cunningly manipulate people into forming lasting and meaningful friendships with you.

</comment><comment><USER5> You;ve typed out the story of my life. Looking forward to great answers

I found myself with a different set of friends for my multiple personalites

party people girl chasers volunteer motocycle riders</comment>


What should Paul Graham write? - <AUTHOR>

Suggest what topics Paul Graham should focus on in his upcoming essays. <comment><USER2> Based on the post title, I was going to answer "Checks."

Since you're talking about essays...I dunno.

But, seriously, aren't you being a bit presumptuous? I mean, are you his agent or something? ;-)

Writing is a very personal thing, especially when you are really into it and not just doing it for the grades or money. I imagine that pg has more ideas than time at this point, since he obviously spends quite a bit of time crafting each essay and soliciting input from his friends. I'm not comfortable giving essay ideas for pg when it is not him soliciting the ideas...

Sorry to be a party pooper.

Maybe you should try to solicit ideas for yourself to write about, and then YOU can be a "thought leader," too.

</comment><comment><USER3> I'd like to see pg provide more info about Arc.

In particular, I want to know how Arc handles concurrency, e.g. native threads, Erlang-style concurrency, etc.

</comment><comment><USER4> How to make decisions

</comment><comment><USER5> A follow-on to Writing, Briefly

<http://www.paulgraham.com/writing44.html>

Expand on "develop a nose for bad writing." What are some signs of bad writing that might not be obvious to hackers? What have you discovered as you write new essays and see how they work on your audience?

</comment><comment><USER6> A country tune, about lost love, what a rotten woman can do to a man and his faithful dog and truck, deep in the heart of Texas.

<comment><USER6> Oh come off it... I think it's kind of a funny image, PG with a cowboy hat and "gi-tar". Silly thread, silly suggestion. Shooter's answer is sensible.</comment></comment>


Show HN: We made a tool – Scrumie – that keeps your team in the loop - <AUTHOR> https://www.scrumie.com <comment><AUTHOR> Hey Show HN,

We'd love some feedback on Scrumie - a tool that keeps your team in sync no matter where your teammates are working.

Initially, we developed Scrumie for our internal needs at Webscope.io because we couldn't find a suitable tool on the market. After we had some discussions with companies about team management, we found out that Scrumie might be helpful for other enterprises as well. So we decided to make Scrumie public.

What features Scrumie has?

Detailed teamwork overview - see what your teammates have done and what they plan to do

Daily virtual stand-ups - briefly inform your colleagues about your work progress

Team's availability - check the working hours + availability status (working, WFH, vacation,…) of your teammates

Time zones overview - see when there's an overlap between your and your remote colleagues' working hours.

Integration - Slack, more are coming soon (probably Jira, Github, Trello)

Custom native apps - Reporting, Accounting

Right now, Scrumie is in beta and free to use for everyone. Let us know if there's anything that we can do better in Scrumie.

We are ready to listen to your feedback.

Thanks a lot!</comment>


Amazon Prime is on pace to become more popular than cable TV - <AUTHOR> https://www.recode.net/2017/7/9/15938658/amazon-prime-numbers-members-us-households-cable-tv <comment><USER2> I continue to feel as though the primary reason I would subscribe to Cable Television would be sporting events. This remains the main televised event where I can see the value in following along in realtime, and for which the advertising is already inescapable, making it feel like less of a slap in the face that I'm being advertised to in addition to also paying for the rights to view the content stream.

Fortunately, I don't actually care about sports broadcasting, so I ditched cable years ago and haven't looked back. (The other realtime argument I hear frequently is news, but I find a wide variety of online sources to be better at delivering this content anyway. I prefer to read my news.)

<comment><USER3> Youtube TV ($35/mo) seems like the best place for getting a variety of sports TV right now, and unlike cable you can watch it outside your home.

Unfortunately it's only available in a few markets right now. I assume it'll expand if it's successful.

[https://support.google.com/youtubetv/answer/7068923?hl=en&re...](https://support.google.com/youtubetv/answer/7068923?hl=en&ref_topic=7071745)

<comment><USER4> I'd say the exact opposite. If it's successful, it's competitors (the vastly powerful Telco/Cable/ISP hybrid monstrosities that significantly grew from the scattered bits of Ma Bell) will move to squash it - Making deals with sports broadcasters, simply cutting off the deals with Google, or putting pressure on Google in other ways - They're gearing up to silently disrupt Google in a variety of ways, many of them underhanded (Which is what the Net Neutrality debate is actually about - They're negotiating for rents from Google, and the question isn't if they will, but how much).

It's only if it manages to gather steam slowly that it has a chance of really disrupting the networks.

(Of course, I still really wish Google had simply starved the beast in the early tens; In 2010 or 2011, Google could simply have put less effort into copyright protection and more into original programming, and utterly rewritten the Movie and TV industries in one fell swoop)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I don't think Prime users have a particularly high utilization rate of the video service, though this might change with time. If you look at how many ratings on IMDB any of their originals have gotten, I see just tiny fractions of shows on broadcast or Netflix. The Man in the High Castle is perhaps their most popular show and it has ~50k ratings which isn't bad, but say, House of Cards has 365k. Stranger Things has 315k in a year. Fargo has 210k.

Mozart in the Jungle and Transparent have won major awards, and they both have ~16k ratings.

<comment><USER6> Agree that Prime video's catalog is highly limited. I treat it as a bonus perk that you get for subscribing to Amazon prime. Netflix's library is vast compared to it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I actually just ditched my Comcast cable subscription for Google YouTube TV ([https://tv.youtube.com](https://tv.youtube.com)) and loving it. Paired it with a Google Chromecast Ultra and Samsung TV.

Saved $60 a month and only missing History and Discovery channels. They have nearly all major US sporting networks and events as well.

</comment><comment><USER8> This is an interesting look at how many people read beyond the headline. Most of the comments are references to Amazon Prime Video streaming versus cable TV and/or Netflix. The article itself states that Amazon Prime is used mostly for its shopping and shipping benefits and not for video streaming. The comparison to cable TV subscribers is purely to show the level of market penetration of Amazon Prime in US households.

</comment><comment><USER9> For streaming, I still prefer Netflix. I don't like the interface of Amazon on the firestick or the phone app, though I do like a lot of the options Prime has that Netflix lacks.

<comment><USER6> For me Netflix is unusable of mobile because I simply cannot stream on LTE. I have a 1GB/day cap which gets blown away in 20 minutes. Prime lets me download shows on wifi and watch later.

<comment><USER9> I can see the frustration on that. I don't use mobile for Prime or Netflix, always wifi. But, I use Amazon Prime Music, and it seems to be much better designed for mobile than other streaming services I've used.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I don't understand why this is so shocking or surprising. Amazon Prime offers on-demand viewing (on top of the free shipping and all that) which is something cable TV doesn't offer, at least not to the degree that Prime does. Prime is a much better service and a much better value. Why would anyone be surprised?</comment>


Ask HN: Best personal firewall - <AUTHOR>

Hi,
I was wondering what's the best and most light personal firewall one could have on W7, the kind of program that would let you know that program X is trying to access the net or that host Y is trying to connect and so on and so forth. Any suggestions ?
Regards. <comment><USER2> The best one would be the default Firewall already included and turned on by Microsoft. It monitors both in/outbound traffic.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Good point, but can you set that to interact with you when stuff tries to go across ? Not just to set exceptions for programs to be able to listen on ports and stuff that is ?</comment>


Why Is It So Hard to Put Data Science in Production? - <AUTHOR> https://www.datascience.com/blog/why-is-it-so-hard-to-put-data-science-in-production <comment><USER2> Have a look at the Valohai.com that offer both a cloud agnostic orchestration and an audit functionality for deep learning workflows.</comment>


$150k Tesla Model X Crash Saved My Life [video] - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xFMfxUqOH0E <comment><USER2> Freaking moron driving 60mph on ice. How did "Tesla" save you? Any Toyota would have been fine too, and $120K cheaper. Oh, right... Telsa captured the video to prove it...

<comment><USER3> The behavior was reckless and the crash seems nothing out of the ordinary, this seems to be about telling everyone they have a tesla and they got in a crash... as if it's something novel. This video will be used against the driver to raise their insurance rates.</comment></comment>


SilkJS, a synchronous JavaScript shell using V8 - <AUTHOR>

http://silkjs.org/ <comment><USER2> Probably meant to post the link, so here it is:

<http://silkjs.org/>

</comment><comment><USER3> SilkJS includes a lot of libraries that have different licenses. The idea is to allow anyone to download and use SilkJS and live up to those licenses as they see fit.

If you want to sell SilkJS, you have to pay Oracle a license fee because SilkJS uses libmysql.

Make sense?

</comment><comment><USER4> I've never seen software with a 'Pick whichever license, as long as it's OSS' licensing before.

I'm not really sure what the implications are, but it could make things hairy if people are releasing modules or extensions to this that use various licenses.

</comment><comment><USER5> The site looks good, but a few prominent TLDR use cases and/or call-to-actions would be useful.

I already use Linux and am not sure how I would use this, and am too brain- tired at the end of a long day to dig into the site and figure it out.</comment>


When the Desire for Learning Hit Winston Churchill - <AUTHOR> http://conversableeconomist.blogspot.com/2019/08/when-desire-for-learning-hit-winston.html <comment><USER2> Churchill is absolutely worth reading and reading about. I recently finished "Churchill: Walking with Destiny" and highly encourage you to pick it up!

In other news: does anyone have a history reading list, akin to the one Churchill references, for getting "up to speed" on "major" topics? (In quotes because obviously "history" is an almost unfathomably broad topic).

</comment><comment><USER3> What a joy! That I also didn't get a real fire for learning until around age 20 makes this relatable. That it's Churchill makes it fun to read.</comment>


Ask HN: Do you use project management software, which one? - <AUTHOR>

-Do you use prosject management software, which one? <comment><USER2> The only one I've ever willingly used is Trac[1], which is a simple but extensible system that does as much as I would want. Its "out of the box" setup is pretty reasonable.

[1] <http://trac.edgewall.org/>

</comment><comment><USER3> I use PivotalTracker. I didn't like it at first, but then it grew on me.

</comment><comment><USER4> Redmine.

</comment><comment><USER5> I use 5pmweb.com - they give you 14 day free trial

</comment><comment><USER6> MS Project. Actually a very useful tool.

</comment><comment><USER7> Gnote.</comment>


7 Qualities of a Good Client - <AUTHOR> http://www.sitepoint.com/7-qualities-good-client/

<comment><AUTHOR> Penny Wise, Pound Foolish = Difficult Client</comment>


What if GitHub Actions is just Microsoft TFS? - <AUTHOR> https://www.liatrio.com/blog/github-actions <comment><USER2> the question is, if it works, does it matter what it is? Github is owned by Microsoft, after all... kind of makes sense that the two companies would share some skills... Microsoft are using Git for internal projects (Office and Windows both are built and stored in Git) and they built tools for making that easier... If github need a build system, Azure has it, and it supports a load of languages and options... just extend that and use that...</comment>


C#: Program Entirely with Static Methods - <AUTHOR> http://blog.debugme.eu/c-static-methods/ <comment><USER2> Why not choose a language you don't have to fight against if you want to do a purely functional program?

<comment><USER3> Sometimes you don't get to choose. Sometimes someone higher up in the company gets to choose for you.

<comment><USER4> If that's the case, then using a style that is completely counter to the mainstream usage of said language will probably make them even more unhappy than challenging their language choice.

Code review is real, and when you leave and they hire a new developer, they will be even more upset when the new dev can't understand your code because it's bending the language in ways it wasn't meant for.

I heavily advise against trying to fight your battle here, it's only going to cause more friction later.

<comment><USER5> C# supports functional programming so what's the problem? It is not 'completely counter to the mainstream usage'. I write mostly in VB.Net (not by choice) but I write a lot of code in functional style, no one complains.

<comment><USER4> Some functional constructs isn't really what I was talking about. The premise of the article (full disclosure, I only made it partially in, so correct me if I'm wrong) seemed to be "here's how you can program with almost nothing but static methods". That's definitely counter to mainstream usage, it's attempting to use C# as if it were a non-OOP language, and that's going to frustrate anyone new to the codebase.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Increasing available memory - beware of the Cobra Effect - <AUTHOR> http://plumbr.eu/blog/increasing-heap-size-beware-of-the-cobra-effect

<comment><USER2> The actual point of the article related to garbage collection is interesting, but the cobra analogy in the title just feels wrong. The cobra story (and there are many others like it) is about _incentives_ , and how you have to be very careful when you want to change incentives, because there may be unintended loopholes.

</comment><comment><USER3> This claim about gc seems pretty dubious since gc algorithms tend to take time proportional to the number of allocated objects, not the amount of available heap. So adding heap doesn't slow things down unless you use it. Also, using 10x more heap ought to only make your gc pauses 10x longer.</comment>


Intel Set To Acquire Wind River Systems For Approximately $884 Million - <AUTHOR> http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/06/04/intel-to-acquire-wind-river-systems-for-approximately-884-million/ <comment><USER2> VxWorks alone should be earning that much annually in license fees from government, defense and aero industry.

Linux must have cut into them hard.

<comment><USER3> I think they're getting cut up on both ends of the market.

We do a fair bit of reversing, and my unscientific survey result is that 1/3rd of what we see is Linux/NetBSD, 1/3rd of it is VxWorks, and 1/3rd of it is ThreadX-style custom RTOS. And that's by platform, not by shipped units.</comment></comment>


7,000 varieties of apples and the 18 you actually need to know about - <AUTHOR> https://www.weldonowen.com/2013/09/10/7000-varieties-of-apples-and-the-18-you-actually-need-to-know-about-2/ <comment><USER2> What about the Jazz apple? That's the trademark term for 'Scifresh', which is a cross between Royal Gala and Braeburn.

While Jazz is relatively new as a commercial apple (2004), Braeburn isn't on the list.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Braeburn](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Braeburn) says "According to the US Apple Association website [Braeburn] is one of the fifteen most popular apple cultivars in the United States."

A check of [http://usapple.org/all-about-apples/apple- varieties/](http://usapple.org/all-about-apples/apple-varieties/) shows that Fiji, Crispin, Cameo, Macoun, and others are in the top-15 which are not on this list of 18 that I "actually need to know about."

</comment><comment><USER3> When I first tried a Honeycrisp about 15 years ago it knocked my socks off! But over time the taste lost its way. Now I don't think twice passing them up in the store.

I think perhaps the same thing happened to it as the Red Delicious: Breeding for better profit (longevity in storage, appearance, etc.) ruined the taste.

An interesting story on the Red Delicious: [https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2014/09/the- evil-...](https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2014/09/the-evil-reign- of-the-red-delicious/379892/)

<comment><USER4> I agree - honeycrisp are just not the same as they were.

Have you tried zestar? It is patent encumbered like honeycrisp use to be, but quite nice! Like the honeycrisp of old.

<comment><USER3> Never heard of it, don't know where to get it.

But at least I'm not alone thinking the HoneyCrisp has lost its touch :-)

<comment><USER4> Might still be a Minnesota / Midwest exclusive. It's another University of Minnesota varietal.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Walkthrough for Systemd Portable Services - <AUTHOR> http://0pointer.net/blog/walkthrough-for-portable-services.html <comment><USER2> It's astonishing to me that people would argue that docker is some how a simpler solution. Some would happily maintain a container registry, constantly worry about the order of operations in your docker file, create a build pipeline in a format incompatible with non docker use cases, spend time understanding how dockers bridge interacts with multiple Network controllers over learning how your operating system works.

<comment><USER3> >It's astonishing to me that people would argue that docker is some how a simpler solution.

Some say docker is the new "curl|bash" ;)

<comment><USER4> Really now? Here's a docker container with a shell you can type anything in to: [https://contained.af/](https://contained.af/)

If you manage to tell me what's in /etc/os-release on the machine (not inside the container), I'll eat my lunch.

<comment><USER5> The issue with curl|bash is not just the security (you can run curl|bash as an unprivileged user).

It's also the fact that it generally doesn't do anything to integrate well with your system, and just pull all its dependencies in a folder and never update it afterward.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Oh yeah. Systemd and containers. Two technologies certain militant technical users love to complaint about :-)

Do we really need a non-OCi image format and tool chain here?! I get immutability benefits, district benefits, and isolation. having a completely separate toolchain makes no sense to me...

Containers will be in this role, but fragmentation will only make that process slower and more painful.

I for one salute our future k8s kubelet overlords.

<comment><USER4> > Do we really need a non-OCi image format and tool chain here?

This doesn't use a new competing image format, but rather uses disk images or tarballs, which have existed longer than OCI has.

The toolchain also predates OCI since the underlying technology is really basically nspawn (and various other systemd.service options), which have been a part of systemd since before OCI stabilized. This is simply a new coat of paint on something that has been there for a while.

> Containers will be in this role, but fragmentation will only make that > process slower and more painful.

Sure, so we shouldn't have let docker do anything and instead used LXC, since LXC already did containers, already had its own format and toolchain, etc. That's the exact same argument you're making now.

OCI is also not really a good standard. It has exactly one usable implementation (and only in Go, not even C where it's easy to link against and use it from other languages), and since systemd has already defined various things for services (such as seccomp filters etc) which overlap with what OCI does, it makes almost no sense for systemd to begin using it.

<comment><USER7> I actually think more people should have adopted LXC. The engineering behind LXC is beyond remarkable and it's a shame that it got such a bad wrap in the early days of Docker. I've worked with some of the LXC folks and they're all incredibly sharp and have a much wider breadth of work than just LXC.

With regards to image formats, I actually think that we do need to improve the image format significantly and not just stick to tried and tested stuff. Tarballs are (quite frankly) simply the most awful format to use for container images (disk images are a close second). It's a shame that everyone uses them. I am working on a blog post to better explain what I mean by this.

And yeah, runc being written in Go is probably one of the most frustrating things about working on it. I often say that one of the worst things you could decide to write in Go is a container runtime -- it's a little bit odd that people keep doing exactly that. runc actually isn't entirely written in Go -- it has to have a fairly substantial amount of C because the Go runtime cannot play well with the delicate dance required to set up a container properly.

All of that being said, containers really did need to be standardised otherwise the container wars wouldn't have ended as nicely as they did. But that's not to say that the OCI doesn't have issues. It definitely does, but I'm hoping they can be fixed over time.

[ I am one of the maintainers of the "exactly one usable" OCI implementation, and have been working on OCI stuff since its inception. ]

<comment><USER8> Something to note about LXC developers: they don't just provide a wide array of usable interfaces to containers (daemon with a RESTful API, command line tools, and a library with many language bindings). They also are some of the most active contributors to the underlying container technology in the kernel, including namespaces and cgroups.

<comment><USER7> > They also are some of the most active contributors to the underlying > container technology in the kernel, including namespaces and cgroups.

This is what I was referring to when talking about their breadth of work. I've collaborated with them quite a bit, and it's always amazing working with them on a hard problem.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Yet another tool for containerization technology :-)

While this is interesting, the containers that I'd appreciate, are: multiple versions of programming languages & packages to be installed by each user without affecting the system globally. Every language has their own separate answer (virtualenv/venv, rbenv, node version manager etc).

Just today I struggled with "brew install python3" which complained with "Error: python 2.7.14_2 is already installed" and the only option offered was to upgrade. Whereas what I wanted was parallel installations of python 2.7 and python3. :-/

<comment><USER10> That's exactly what Nix does! Nix is wonderful tech that unfortunately seems doomed to low adoption due to poor usability. My belief is that this stems the fact that maintaining the package tree is obscenely costly of contributor time, leaving almost no time or energy to make progress on "niceties" like improving the core CLI experience and the continuous integration system.

<comment><USER11> The Nix team (in particular grahamc with [https://github.com/NixOS/ofborg](https://github.com/NixOS/ofborg)) is working hard on making CI better . But it's true that the on-boarding experience and CLI could be much improved.

It's quite frustrating to me, because after I've been using Nix & NixOS for about 3 years now, there's no way I'd go back to the insanity out there. I never had the amount of stability, control, and predictability on any other platform, from configuring my OS, editors, WM, shell, random ricing, or building VMs, Servers, Docker containers, production deploys, development environments, there's really not much Nix can't handle. But getting familiar with Nix took some serious effort I'm sure not many people can afford. I begin to understand how frustrated people in the Lisp and Smalltalk communities must feel while people slowly reinvent everything they've enjoyed for decades (and Nix is still in its teens).

Teaching people about the value of having just a single package manager, no matter what OS or language they're using, is mostly futile because there's so much value attributed to being "mainstream" that now we have hundreds of mainstream package managers with varying degrees of sophistication, security, predictability, and ability to _not_ try and take over your system.

I use it to build and develop Go, Ruby, JS, Crystal, Elm, Mint, Haskell, Perl, Bash, VimL, Elisp, Guile, and whatever else comes my way. All I have to do to get a working and isolated dev env is go into that directory and let nix-shell do the rest. On NixOS you also get nixos-container with all its benefits, so I can test whole networks or just spin up some DBs, all behaving exactly the same they'll be once deployed by simply reusing that configuration.

Of course it also manages Systemd, so I guess we'll just write yet another function to slap a checksum on those containers and control them as well, it's just a shame that humanity loses so much time reinventing the wheel every few months.

On the other hand, there's still a lot of opportunities for start-ups in that space, like [https://nixcloud.io](https://nixcloud.io), [https://www.tweag.io](https://www.tweag.io) (they just hired Eelco Dolstra so he can work full-time on the Nix core), [https://www.packet.net](https://www.packet.net) (they sponsor almost all our new CI infrastructure), or [https://vpsfree.org/](https://vpsfree.org/) (first one to offer their own NixOS based distro specifically made for VPSs), which are all doing well.

<comment><USER12> i spent a lot of time trying to make nix the 'standard build environment' for an open source project. it was going really really well, even on top of standard distros like ubunutu, redhat, etc.

the problem is OpenGL and Nvidia. NiX doesnt want to deal with NVidia's closed source drivers, and i can't blame them, i got so depressed working on the issue, that i gave up looking into it. there is no good solution. there are only kludges and kludges of kludges.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> This is cool. I'm betting hard on k8s at $dayjob, but I often think of how much _less_ I could be happy with. A simple daemon that used some gossip/broadcast protocol to work out a list of systemd service states would be juuust enough.

<comment><USER14> You mean exactly like CoreOS Fleet ?

<comment> irq-1 > fleet is no longer actively developed or maintained by CoreOS. CoreOS > instead recommends Kubernetes for cluster orchestration.

[https://coreos.com/fleet/docs/latest/launching-containers- fl...](https://coreos.com/fleet/docs/latest/launching-containers-fleet.html)

<comment><USER15> While they no want to do cluster orchestration, as a distributed systemd it can still be useful. The core functionality is there and well tested.

No longer actively maintained is a problem, but I think it still has a quite a few users.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I just spent a few days trying to navigate all this. Perhaps some one here could enlighten me.

If I just want to download some semi-trusted source code. And Configure; make; run; it in an environment where it can't access anything unless I explicitly white list it (in particular, it should not be allowed to access the internet or any network resources, but I should be able to send http requests to it)

Which variant of all these container stuff would make things simplest to set up?

Docker seems way overkill (and seems to have the wrong defaults for this need anyways) but handcrafting things with iptables or ip netns seems a bit to low level. (And, well, not "contained"... I would prefer something declarative with automatic setup/teardown)

Ubuntu snaps looks like an interesting middle ground. But it also looks completely dead.

Any tips?

Edit: should probably rtfa before asking. it actually looks like a good fit ;)

<comment><USER17> I think the systemd containerization features are worthwhile to explore. Both portable services and nspawn. They will be around on most Linux systems "out of the box" which is a big benefit. It will be like bash, maybe not the best shell, but the one that is around and that you can count on.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Does the portable service run in a PID namespace? Couldn't find the response in the article.

<comment><USER8> I don't know. But if it does the service would need to reap zombies or systemd would need to spawn yet another instance of itself inside the container (like Rocket does).

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> I'll take s8 and some sort of log-structured FS for local buffering of structured messages logged to stderr, TYVM. No pid files, no lock files, no log files to rotate awkwardly and no unstructured log files.

PS: log events shouldn't be perceived of as lines of text but structured data messages, so that they don't need special parsing.

</comment><comment><USER20> The software that is just a better init system continues to not be.

<comment><USER12> "Because the Portable Service concepts introduces zero new metadata and just builds on existing security and resource bundling features of systemd it's implemented in a set of distinct tools, relatively disconnected from the rest of systemd. "

clearly, this is a messy situation. lots of different pieces doing different things in different ways. in order to harmonize this, and simplify it, I believe we need to have systemdd, a daemon for systemd, so that all of it's various pieces can be in one, neat, centralized location.

<comment><USER21> What a ridiculous comment. Keeping these tools relatively decoupled is a _good_ thing.

<comment><USER22> I can't speak for the GP, but I believe their comment is parody. Keeping tools decoupled is, of course, very good -- systemd is the antithesis of that norm.

<comment><USER21> Ah, if it was sarcasm then apologies - it's not something that one can easily pick up through text.

<comment><USER12> That is no problem. We had our comments scattered out into separate pieces, each doing their own thing in a non-standard comment idiom. In order to simplify and organize things better, I have created commentd which will combine them all into one comment. To save valuable disk space I have also compressed them and put them in binary format.

begin 644 - M0F%S:6PZ($QI<W1E;BP@9&]N)W0@;65N=&EO;B!T:&4@=V%R(2!)(&UE;G1I M;VYE9"!I="!O;F-E+"!B=70@22!T:&EN:R!)(&=O="!A=V%Y('=I=&@@:70@ )86QR:6=H="X* ` end

<comment><USER21> Base64 this:

H4sIAAAAAAAA/4vML1UvSlVIVEjJTM7WAwBgPKpvDgAAAA==

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Interestingly, systemd maintainers have consistently refused to make available a Docker compatible version of systemd to run as the init 1.

Everyone brings their own here (e.g. [http://phusion.github.io/baseimage- docker/](http://phusion.github.io/baseimage-docker/)) like supervisord, runit,etc.

What would have been ideal is for a docker-compatible systemd to run inside the container.

IMHO the maintainers are bent on creating a competing standard (like this one) and don't want to build anything that brings the advantages of systemd to the Docker ecosystem.

<comment><USER4> > Interestingly, systemd maintainers have consistently refused to make > available a Docker compatible version of systemd to run as the init 1.

Please provide evidence of that. I will provide counter-evidence, proving that is not the case unless you have very compelling evidence.

1\. [https://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/systemd- devel/2014-Ma...](https://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/systemd- devel/2014-May/019005.html)

Poettering writes: > To say this explicitly: we are really interested in making sure that systemd runs out-of-the-box in containers, and docker is just one implementation of that.

2\. A PR to make systemd-logind work better in a docker container is accepted with no issue: [https://github.com/systemd/systemd/pull/4154](https://github.com/systemd/systemd/pull/4154)

3\. Running systemd as pid1 in docker (privileged or not) works, so clearly the maintainers didn't do a good job of preventing it from happening. (just google, there's plenty of info out there on how to do this)

I'm sure there are many other examples too, but this is with a quick glance around.

I'd be interested in your reference before you spread such strange FUD.

<comment><USER7> I would recommend speaking to someone from the LXC team. I only know of their systemd pains second-hand, but there are many many many things that systemd has done throughout its history that made it a royal pain to run in a container. I also have my own battle-scars from systemd but they are mostly related to systemd on the host rather than inside a container.

Here's one piece of evidence though[1]. Effectively systemd enabled a security feature for the host's /dev/console and when we said it wasn't necessary for containers (because /dev/console is not a real console) and it actually broke runc, Lennart said that we should fix runc.

[1]: [https://github.com/systemd/systemd/pull/4262](https://github.com/systemd/systemd/pull/4262)

<comment><USER24> That discussion does not match your summary of it.

This wasn't a security feature that got enabled. This was an expectation of the long-standing semantics of /dev/console, which as M. Poettering pointed out long pre-date systemd, being broken by a container manager.

So yes, it's right that the container manager be fixed so that it is possible for every open file descriptor for /dev/console to be closed and then the device re-opened again. Such semantics have been around longer than Linux itself has; systemd is written to expect them. /dev/console is not supposed to magically vanish/become inoperable once all currently open file descriptors for it have been closed. Quite a lot of other softwares, including everything that uses openlog() with LOG_CONS, expect this of /dev/console too.

Indeed, /dev/console is one of the very few device files mandated to exist by the Single UNIX Specification (XBD part 10). The container manager was actually setting up an execution environment that is not POSIX conformant.

And I observe that indeed said container manager _did_ get fixed.

* [https://github.com/containerd/console/pull/10](https://github.com/containerd/console/pull/10)

<comment><USER7> GP was arguing that the idea that systemd would refuse to make a change that would benefit running inside containers was ridiculous and required evidence. I have required that evidence -- it is an example of a change in systemd being rejected in favour of fixing it in the container runtime.

Of course we fixed it, and of course you can argue that Lennart was correct (I still think that having SAK protections in a container is nonsensical but that's all water under the bridge). I obviously agree that our /dev/console handling was incorrect. In our defense, /dev/console doesn't actually make much sense in a container since the purpose of /dev/console is to access the physical console not the current PTY -- so anything we put there would still be "wrong" from the standpoint of POSIX. But you can't just ignore /dev/console because then a bunch of programs don't work. I could also go on about how it was also a Go stdlib issue because we'd assumed io.Copy "did the right thing" but it turns out it really doesn't handle any form of interruptions properly. But I'm sure you're not interested in that discussion.

The point is that I agree it was fixed, and I agree that fixing it in the container runtime was overall correct. But that wasn't the point I was making -- it was that there have been examples where systemd has made a change that broke running inside a container and they were not willing to make concessions for container runtimes. Which is what GP was arguing about.

I do have plenty of other examples (cgroups are particularly fruitful for systemd bugs that won't die), but they aren't really related to running inside a container.

[ I'm not a hater of systemd, or Lennart. I actually really like having a declarative service manager. My frustration comes from having to deal with it when developing system tools that don't want to be tightly coupled with it. That's where systemd really starts to get ugly to deal with. ]

> M. Poettering

What does the 'M' stand for? His first name is Lennart.

<comment><USER25> >> M. Poettering > What does the 'M' stand for? His first name is Lennart.

In French, "M." is short for Monsieur.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Zerg: Boot a VM instance per request, all in under 250 ms - <AUTHOR> http://zerg.erlangonxen.org/ <comment><USER2> This is a very interesting development!

But doesn't that mean we are merely reimplementing old concepts on a new level? Almost everything we do on VM level we already did on process level:

\- Read-only VM images are essentially like statically linked binaries, just better encapsulated when they run.

\- Tiny, fast loading VM images are essentially stripped static binaries with dead code elimination.

\- Starting those by incoming network request is just like old "inetd" versions started custom handler programs on each request.

\- Same with CGI, just on HTTP rather than TCP level.

\- Manual maintaining the lifecycle of those VMs like FastCGI in nginx.

\- Maintaining the lifecycle of such a started VM is essentially like FastCGI in Apache (or nginx + auto-spawner).

The only real difference is the improved encapsulation (controlled network access and resource consumption) of the running code, isn't it?

What might come next?

\- Multiple VMs could share the same images to save memory, essentially reinventing shared libraries and dynamic linking.

\- Network traffic into and out of a VM is controlled more tightly, reinventing SELinux. (Perhaps followed by noticing that these profiles are hard to maintain, rediscovering the maintenance issues of SELinux systems.)

\- Providing the network traffic shape directly with the image, so these can be maintained at a single place, by the original developers. This would reinvent Pledge.

\- Introducing permissions for network traffic, e.g. such that just one group of application VMs can communicate with the database VMs. Ideally with an ACL system as used for managing file permissions. This would reinvent Unix Sockets.

<comment><USER3> Yes, all this "container per request" or "unikernel per request" stuff is essentially the same as what everyone was doing 20 years ago with basic CGI. But this stuff also has far worse performance than CGI's "process per request", since processes can be started very fast, in microseconds.

It would be more interesting if we just made more sandboxing powers available for traditional processes, though there is already quite a lot of sandboxing available for Linux processes...

<comment><USER4> A process takes multiple milliseconds to start, not microseconds. Creating a process is really expensive.

CGI starts a process per request. fastCGI can reuse processes. Problem already found and solved 20 years ago.

<comment><USER3>
        catern@home ~ $ { timeout 1 sh -c 'while :; do /bin/echo foo; done'; echo; } | wc -l
        1542

So at least sub-millisecond. And this is less efficient than possible because it's also writing to a pipe.

Also, I quite agree that CGI is a bad way to do things, but that's what the original post is proposing. :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The demo might be down for now, but their vision [http://erlangonxen.org/case/a-personal- facebook](http://erlangonxen.org/case/a-personal-facebook) is something I strongly believe in.

Basically, the cost of spinning VMs is coming down drastically (with Hyper.sh and Intel ClearContainers offering 200ms boot) and it is now feasible to run your apps on a personal cloud sandbox. You data resides in that box and runs code you have approved; away from the prying eyes of FB, Google and the government. Everyone's facebook will be an individually hosted app, talking to each other over agreed upon protocols; as opposed to exchanging data within the facebook infra.

Of course, a lot of UX and engineering problems need to be solved along the way. Provisioning a personal sandbox cannot be any harder than creating an account on a Social Network. Beiber's sandbox will need to distribute data to 105M followers efficiently. You'll need to patch vulnerabilities at scale, so there needs to be some trust model for applying patches. You need relays to overcome censorship etc.

<comment><USER6> A personal facebook still needs to talk with others' personal facebooks.

I tried to solve this problem using derivative regular expressions as graph queries

paper: [http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/spe.2226/abstract](http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/spe.2226/abstract)

source code: [https://github.com/amitport/graphpack](https://github.com/amitport/graphpack)

(there are other solutions, I admit this is just a plug, but it will be great if it could gain traction)

<comment><USER7> What you - and the personal facebook case - are really describing is IndieWeb, and already developing movement of home-building your social media and linking with others implementing open protocols.

The main issue just now is that writing (or deploying) IndieWeb platforms and hosting them is the preserve of geeks, and it will not take off and displace current platforms until we can make it trivial for Mom and Dad to join us.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Here's the google cached version - [http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:zerg.er...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:zerg.erlangonxen.org&gws_rd=cr&dcr=0&ei=nnREWvr7BMHrvgTj_KMg)

</comment><comment><USER9> Wouldn't this be good for shutting down unused VMs in order to save money when renting infrastructure? Most website can go "down" during the night and when a user tries to connect to it, it would take 0.2s extra, but after that it would stay on.

Now that I think of it, spiders/bots might activate it beforehand. You could use robots.txt, but not all spiders/bots seem to follow those "rules".

Food for thought!

<comment><USER10> What does a website really do if it does nothing? What money does it consume? What else can you do with the machine it's on? Wouldn't moving VMs around accomplish the same goal?

Sidenote: some customers might use monitoring :)

<comment><USER11> Cloud providers charge for time VMs are active. So it saves money to de- commission them when idle.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> It's definitely impressive, kinda like an own serverless implementation.

However, is there a point in shutting down the VM right away, other than being a cool demo? It seems to me that you could quite easily keep it around if there are more requests queued, and quickly spawn more workers if the queue gets too long. So a regular worker pool, just that the number of workers can be adjusted relatively quickly.

<comment><USER13> > own serverless implementation

Isn't this just cgi-bin, right down to the long startup time and lack of persistence?

<comment><USER14> It's similar in intention, but "serverless is just `cgi-bin`" misses a lot of nuance. Zerg and cgi-bin are solving different problems and with different implementations. It's extremely difficult, if not impossible in some environments, to get the same kind of isolation with cgi-bin that you do out of a VM.

<comment><USER3> You gain on isolation with Zerg (and other "VM per request" things) but you lose on everything else compared to CGI with processes.

But you can reach comparable levels of isolation with processes: just use Linux namespaces.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> It seems I managed to get through right before it went down. Sort of a neat idea. But is it really worth starting up a new VM for each request? That seems to be the majority (380 ms?) of the time spent.

Slightly off-topic: the page lists be time for an android phone to boot as 50 seconds. Is that correct? I remember iPhones used to take forever but I recently realized that they sing to boot extremely fast. I have no idea when that change happened.

<comment><USER16> Just tested my Pixel 1. It takes 24 seconds from button press to lock screen, and another 18 seconds for me to type my password and display everything on the home screen, but I'm a slow mobile typer and my password is 16 characters.

<comment><USER17> Just tested a Pixel 2 XL. 12 seconds to lock screen and 4 more to the home screen including my pattern entry. I think this is the fastest booting phone I've ever had.

Actually I had to do it twice because the first time it installed a system update, but even then it only took 26 seconds to install, finish booting, and show the lock screen. System updates have been seriously optimized in the last few Android releases. They used to take like 5 minutes.

<comment><USER10> Is this from off -> on or a reboot? I think I've noticed huge difference between the two on my Samsung in the past.

<comment><USER17> From off.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Can anyone explain what does this mean? How is it different from regular VMs? Is it not booting an OS? What does it have to do with erlang?

<comment><USER19> It's an implementation of the Erlang VM on top of Xen. Xen is a virtualization hypervisor. Erlang VM is a virtual machine which runs Erlang bytecode. The default implementation is called BEAM and it runs on *nix, Windows and other architectures. This implementation is more lightweight and only runs on top of Xen. One of its main features is a fast boot time.

So to recap instead of the typical stack of:

        Erlang Code | BEAM VM | Linux or other OS | VM or Hardware

You get:

        Erlang Code | Ling | Xen | Hardware

The use cases could be isolation, scaling or what authors calls 0-footprint cloud. That is, only spawn instances as you process requests. When requests are not coming, you don't have any instances running. In more modern terms maybe it could be used for building a serverless architecture used to run cloud "functions"

Yes there is obvious irony here with the demo not handling requests well after the HN frontage hug of death, but I think it is still a beta / experimental product, it has been around for a good number of years and is somewhat abandoned. If anyone knows more please feel free to correct me.

<comment><USER20> I enjoyed your post, it made me think, could you do something similar with say the JVM?

I know loading JVM based applications have horrific startup times on cold boot, but I was just wondering could you run the JVM directly on top of Xen?

<comment><USER21> You might want to look at OSv[0], an extremely lightweight OS for running a singular JVM process on cloud vms. There's a decent list of unikernels (including OSv and LING) here[1].

0\. [http://osv.io/](http://osv.io/) 1\. [http://unikernel.org/projects/](http://unikernel.org/projects/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> It seems like the demo is down from high traffic; here's an archive link for those who can't see it: [https://web.archive.org/web/20171227080115/http://zerg.erlan...](https://web.archive.org/web/20171227080115/http://zerg.erlangonxen.org/)

</comment><comment><USER22> How would this compare to mirageos? It sounds similar to a project called Jitsu.

[http://www.skjegstad.com/blog/2015/03/25/mirageos-vm-per- url...](http://www.skjegstad.com/blog/2015/03/25/mirageos-vm-per-url- experiment/)

<comment><USER22> This post is actually more relevant. [http://www.skjegstad.com/blog/2015/08/17/jitsu-v02/](http://www.skjegstad.com/blog/2015/08/17/jitsu-v02/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> I always thought ZeroVM was a cool idea in this space. The NaCL runtime makes a lot of sense as a base for servers that can take advantage of existing libraries.

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

<comment><USER24> After reading about ZeroVM I was incredibly excited - but then saw the last Git commit was in January 2015 =[

Is it considered "stable" or is it simply abandoned? Are there any successors? Near zero overhead VM acting on data storage is something I'll need for a planned project of my own.

<comment><USER25> It is abandoned, Rackspace laid them off. NaCl is still stable, although the team is working on Web Assembly now which is a replacement (but less mature). ZeroVM does still work but is a pain to build.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Didn't Rackspace acquire ZeroVM during it's 2010-2013 SaaS buying spree? I'd anticipated seeing ZeroVM as some part of their "cloud" offering but it looks like it was rolled into OpenStack Swift. Has Cloud Files performance improved at all in the past 4 years and how much of this can be attributed to ZeroVM (a lot of ignorance in this question I know).

</comment><comment><USER27> This is the future of computing/software -- pure commodity of CPU+memory. Applications that build on top of these granular interfaces will largely the next wave of successful architectures.

I'm thinking of building something here for static sites as an open source project/spec. If anyone is interested in bouncing ideas on this, please ping me via email (in profile).

<comment><USER28> I agree with your first paragraph. But why would this provide any benefit for a static site where no compute is needed (or all compute is client side)?

<comment><USER27> My bad -- I meant static sites with one additional functionality that all static sites try to outsource: comments.

(it would no longer be strictly static, but the idea is to decouple site from hosting/compute, so it would be easy to port a static/dynamic site between providers at the switch of a DNS entry).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> is Zerg related to Ling? It seems like this project has (sadly) died out. Anyone know the current status?

[https://github.com/cloudozer/ling/issues/141](https://github.com/cloudozer/ling/issues/141)

<comment><USER30> Yes, Zerg is powered by Ling. If you scroll down you can see how it's involved in the request summary. A cached copy of the page is in a sibling comment

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> > _Over capacity_

> _The demo is limited to 16 concurrent instances and 2 libvirt connections. > Due to these limitations we were unable to spawn a new instance to service > your request. Please try again later._

Kool.

<comment><USER32> Did they just inadvertently point out why this is a bad idea for anything general-purpose?

<comment><USER33> Not really; those are exactly the sort of config settings you'd sensibly use to prevent someone from DDoSing your untrusted prototype-level infrastructure.

If your VMs are truly cheap, and you've ironed out the kinks from your proof- of-concept, you'd obviously set up your production system to run more than 16 of them.

<comment><USER34> Right, and who decides that a request coming from a customer ot an attacker? If the attacker can generate enough requests non of the customers have a chance to use your service. This is absolutely not the way to handle DDoS.

<comment><USER33> My point was that it's a sensible strategy for the demo of a technology that's still under development (like this project), where you don't actually have any "customers." In production, you'd let it scale unboundedly, and combine it with some sort of anti-DDoS technology like Cloudflare.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> If it's down, just hit reload a few times.

I see phase A from 126.3 ms to 187ms.

</comment><comment><USER36> Over capacity error

<comment><USER37> Need more overlords

<comment><USER38> You must construct additional Pylons

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> > Server over capacity

Ah, there's the rub.</comment>


Twitter Compressor - <AUTHOR> http://www.vcarrer.com/2009/04/twitter-compressor.html

<comment><USER2> Nifty idea, but I can capitalize words and remove spaces pretty easily on my own without using a web app, especially under a 140-character limit.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes that is the point you can do it yourself or you can use the application.

In this case(You have to remove 15 spaces and capitalize 17 letters total 32, do you still want to do it manually? :) ).

YesThatIsThePointYouCanDoItYourselfOrYouCanUseTheApplication.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Could be a bookmarklet and could offer compressions other than CamelCasing, such as vowl-drppng.

</comment><comment><USER4> Usefull !!</comment>


A new anti-aging therapy is starting its first human trial – it costs $1M - <AUTHOR> https://singularityhub.com/2019/12/16/a-new-anti-aging-therapy-is-starting-its-first-human-trial-and-it-costs-1-million/ <comment><USER2> This article links to one that seems much more compelling.

[https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-02638-w](https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-02638-w)

I've been thinking about aging interventions lately. My grandfather passed this year, and my grandmother is in poor shape. She's confined to a wheel chair and she's very frail.

Recently, while I was visiting her, she asked about where I was living now, and I told her, and she then asked me if I kept up with <My name> who also lived out there. I smiled, and said that I did, since I don't know what else to say. It hurts to remember her though compared to her current state. When she's more lucid, she talks expectantly of her coming death. Her life now is mainly sleeping and eating with occasional car ride or visit.

I wonder about how ethical it would or wouldn't be to treat her with an experimental aging treatment. The linked article mentions HGH, plus DHEA, and metformin, taken together, reduced 6/6 epigenetic age markers for 9/9 participants. That seems really promising.

I know I could get the paper and find more detailed information about the dosage. I know I could talk to doctors about the safety of it. I'm confident I could convince my grandmother's nurse to administer the additional medication...

It's tough to think about, because, on the one hand, I know it's weird and strange and sounds immoral for an unqualified person to run medical experiments on his grandmother. On the other hand, I also know that her current life is bad and she will soon die. It's just hard for me to conclude that waiting for her death is a better answer than experimenting.

<comment><USER3> I recently lost two widow/er grandparents within a week of each other. One committed suicide by starving themselves to death, the other had dementia likely from being sedentary, poor diet and being 96.

Stay as healthy and active as you possibly can and your odds of going senile or in a nursing home can be minimized.

\- Instead of fish oil; very fresh, small, oily fish daily.

\- Japanese diet.

\- Metformin.

\- Significant low-impact, high-extertion exercise.

\- 14hr fasting.

\- Keeping busy, never "retire."

<comment><USER4> > One committed suicide by starving themselves to death

Don't mean to sound insensitive, but how exactly does one starve one self to death? Did this person had no visits, no family and nobody around watching as this happened? It's not exactly a quick or painless death right?

<comment><USER5> My great-grand mother told me stories of her father.

When he was bedridden by old age he decided to stop eating and that he did.

He was cared by his family but he decided to refuse eating and drinking.

Story has it that just before passing, he asked for a glass of water, drank it all and soon after passed.

I think this should also be taken in the context of the times when death was a different kind of subject I guess.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> And then you have them sign a waiver saying the treatment may be fatal and bingo! the perfect business plan.</comment>


Has anyone released software through Cnet.com? Please share your experiences and opinions! - <AUTHOR>

<comment><AUTHOR> I plan to follow everyone's advice posted in the YC comments and to release it at Cnet.com (see http://news.ycombinator.com/comments?id=1945)

Any experiences and opinions good/bad?

1) On my software, distributed via Java Web Start, I plan to add a "Donate" button that clicks to a paypal page. Anyone have any experience with that?

(is paypal the best option? this seems to be a horror story site http://www.aboutpaypal.org/)

2) Is it necessary to have a "dont sue me"/I Agree button? Any recommendation?

LOL, I have never done this before. thanks, Anil

<comment><AUTHOR> http://news.ycombinator.com/comments?id=1945</comment></comment>


Tumblr asks users (via dialog box) to uninstall popular Missing e browser add-on - <AUTHOR> http://thenextweb.com/insider/2011/12/31/tumblr-suggests-that-you-to-stop-using-the-popular-missing-e-chrome-extension/

<comment><USER2> If the add-on is actually causing excessive page requests and erroneous support inquiries, this seems like a very reasonable response. And they didn't ask the users to uninstall the add-on, they notified them of a supplement to the agreement stating that users shouldn't expect support if they wish to continue using it.

</comment><comment><USER3> Rather than jumping on the bandwagon of accusing tumblr for infringing on user's rights ,I think we should give the guys the benefit of doubt which is well deserved for creating an awesome free platform.

There probably are some serious technical reasons why this add-on is creating problems for them and affecting user experience.

</comment><comment><USER4> '....its own official "app store" instead of whining about support and server issues.'

No, you can't just willy nilly suggest that each website have their own App Store.

<comment><USER5> So glad I wasn't alone in that thought.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Whining? Just make an app store? I don't know which is worse the stupid complaint or the absurd solution?

</comment><comment><USER7> Wouldn't be easier for Tumblr to bring the desired features of the addon to Tumblr?

<comment><USER8> That won't magically make people stop running the broken addon. If they went so far as to put this dialog box on Tumblr, the addon must be doing some seriously broken shit that causes them real pain, and it must be creating real support requests.</comment></comment>


Americans' Trust in Mass Media Sinks to New Low - <AUTHOR> http://www.gallup.com/poll/195542/americans-trust-mass-media-sinks-new-low.aspx <comment><USER2> the media's knives are out against trump. things that were hohum under obama or clinton all of a sudden become a huge scandal under trump. the media needs to report the news, not make the news or _be_ the news.</comment>


Ask HN: Now that you have an extra 60 min a day what are you doing with it? - <AUTHOR> The normal US commute is 30 min each way. Since you're not doing that commute... what are you doing instead? <comment><USER2> I put together a small garden and have painted several canvases.

</comment><comment><USER3> Getting more sleep each day.

</comment><comment><USER4> I will browse HN more.

</comment><comment><USER5> More banjo practice.

</comment><comment><USER6> Everyday malakia</comment>