Ask HN: How to contribute to Open Source projects without feeling overwhelmed? - <AUTHOR>

I've looked at a number of Python open source projects to contribute, but it always feels daunting to start contributing. How do I overcome that? I know some obvious strategies are to read the code, hang out on the IRC channel or fix documentation issues. Have you done anything different?<p>Thanks! <comment><USER2> The best way to start contributing is by using an open source project and open issues on any problems you find. Or for features that you would like. Then see if you can fix one of those small issues yourself. Fork, fix, and submit your pull request.

Documentation issues are also a great place to start and can have you digging in the code to truly understand what an API or method are suppose to do.

</comment><comment><USER3> I can help you with getting started, using some open source projects I have. This one def. needs help -> [https://github.com/mjhea0/Scrapy- Samples](https://github.com/mjhea0/Scrapy-Samples)

Fork, and then clone it down. Test it out. Then see if you can debug. :)</comment>


As above, so below, part 2. Bare metal Rust generics - <AUTHOR> https://www.ecorax.net/as-above-so-below-2/ <comment><USER2> > We want our driver a bit smarter than that; it should first check whether > it's possible to write the bytes directly. In other words, we want to ensure > that every 1 in our intended write is also a 1 in the target space.

Is this standard practice? Everyone knows that one should write only on previously erased units (sectors/blocks/pages/whatever). Maybe it's just for the sake of the example, but I think it's kind of insane to produce a routine to check for EVERY BIT and see if it's 1 AND if we can fit whatever we want to write. What are the chances one can overwrite (for example) a string TWICE?

<comment><USER3> I didn't read enough of the post to get the context, but...

You might often want to write less than a full block. In that case, if you always erase, you have to read the full block to ram, make your change, then erase, then write the full block. If you write byte by byte, that's a lot of erase cycles. So you add a check to see if the bytes you want to write are already in the erased state. But it's not much more work to check if the desired state is attainable instead of just if the current state is erased. Isn't it just if Current & New == New?

<comment><USER4> That area full of 1s might not be really erased, though, if power was removed or the device reset during an erase cycle before.

Those would be partially-charged cells, and should be erased properly before writing, lest you start getting temperamental read errors later.

But repeatedly erasing blocks just to add a byte will wear out the block, as well as take a long time as you point out.

I think the solution to these two constraints is filesystem-like book-keeping of which regions are in which states.

<comment><USER5> That's a risk, yes. For our use case, there is very strict error checking/firmware signature verification on every process involving the flash, so the corruption case is always handled gracefully, leading to a full erase anyway.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> NH discussion of part 1 here: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24254048](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24254048)

</comment><comment><USER6> Interesting use of the Hermetic Axiom, there. Raised an eyebrow.

</comment><comment><USER7> Anyone out there used Rust on an ATSAML21 MCU? How viable is it these days?

<comment><USER8> Still reasonably early days like the rest of the ecosystem, but there is good support for a lot of ATSAMD and ATSAME devices here ([https://github.com/atsamd-rs/atsamd](https://github.com/atsamd-rs/atsamd)).

I'm not very familiar with the ATSAM* series so compatibility-wise this might be wrong, but you could likely add ATSAML support to that repo reasonably easily.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Why are comments by the author (__cuervo) showing up as [dead]?

<comment><USER5> I ran into some restrictions for newer accounts, apparently, but a moderator fixed it quickly. Should be all good now!</comment></comment>


How to vertically center a clipped image with CSS - <AUTHOR> http://jonrohan.codes/fieldnotes/vertically-center-clipped-image <comment><USER2> An entire article on how to clip an image with a bunch of ugly hacks makes it to the front page of HN. Nothing wrong with the article, but I can't say the same for html and css.

</comment><comment><USER3> CSS already supports this natively via 'clip-path' (or the legacy 'clip').

</comment><comment><USER4> doesn't work in safari though he talks about adding the safari prefix at the end.</comment>


Ask HN: How do you stop being a toxic employee? - <AUTHOR> I've seen it happen.  For whatever reason, an employee starts to get frustrated.  Fatigue, burnout, mounting responsibilities, etc.  They start to become visibly discontent, turning down happy hours, pushing back hard on anything not within the scope of their job, maybe even dropping off-the-cuff remarks about other employees or managers.  This type of negative attitude feeds upon itself as they look at the world through shit-colored glasses.<p>Have you ever been here and successfully lifted out of it?  How do you stop the burning and begin to heal?  Without quitting or being fired.  How do you repair your relationships with other co-workers at the organization? <comment><USER2> Assuming you are talking for another employee, I would recommend giving them either a Sabbatical or a very long vacation. If neither of those are options, I would recommend fundamentally changing their role so they are handling things in a completely different way.

However, it might be worth understanding _why_ they are burnt out. Is your organization is set up so they have to be the "super hero" all the time? Are they not getting the recognition they deserve? Burn out happens, most of us have been there. Sometimes it is worth burning out employees for a short term goal, but you have to accept that there is a real long term cost to recover.

Note: If you _are_ that burned out employee, you need to first recognize _why_ you are burned out. Was it because of a big push, or is this structural in your organization? Then you need to ask, is it worth it to stay? If it truly is worth it, try to give yourself a "mental break". Either through a sabbatical/long vacation, or by doing a completely different job for awhile. If neither is possible, maybe it _is_ time for a new opportunity.

</comment><comment><USER3> In theory you should take a sabbatical but your company doesn't allow that so you should just quit.</comment>


A Data-Driven Guide to Becoming a Consistent Billionaire - <AUTHOR> https://theartandscienceofdata.wordpress.com/2017/06/01/the-billionaire-clusters/ <comment><USER2> I had a month long heated debate in a eco/alternative economy political party I was a member of a few years back (I'm Danish so we're talking really liberal), about the value of education. The majority didn't value it, and as such didn't want our political program to support it. It eventually led me to leaving the party because it was just too silly for my blood.

I specifically remember when I used a good friend of mine. A dyslexic CS major, as an example of how you could still have a brilliant career through education, disability training and really hard work - and it was put off by arguments like "well if he had dropped out he might've been bill gates, instead of just running an RND department at IBM". I pointed out that the likelihood of severely dyslexic Danes with no education (his age), even having a job was very low statistically, but they would hear none of it, because "most billionaires were dropouts".

It would've been nice to have this data back then.

<comment><USER3> In countries were top education is essentially free, i really see no reason anyone should forego it, even if they don't value it as much as others. Sure, there is the off chance you might do better without that degree because you can start earlier, but statistically that chance is slim and the benefits of good education will serve you all your life. I understand the anti movement in the US, because of their state of top education in return for lots of money which might never pay off, but this really should not inspire people in europe to drop studies.

<comment><USER4> Then again, while I agree with the value of studying for a degree, young people see the vast majority of their slightly older peers with a degree in their hands who can't get a job, so I can see why the young can decide to forego college.

This is Italy I'm talking about, I don't know enough about other European countries. While the average youth unemployment rate for Europe is ~19%, ours got as high as 37%. That is a lot, only better than Greece and Spain.

There are many more factors to keep into account, such as the undeniable fact that a lot of current youngsters feel entitled just because they have a degree, or flat-out refuse jobs because that's not what they studied for, as if it was _beneath_ them. They don't seem to realize that it's no longer like it was in the past decades, when very few people could access higher education, and were of course preferred in job interviews to people who just went to high school.

On the other hand, taxation is extremely high and heavy on entrepreneurs (employees cost ~2x their salary), who then hire under shitty one-off contracts because it costs less, so the whole job market is very hard to get into and very easy to drop off of.

Another issue is that there are a bunch of useless degrees, such as this thing called "Political sciences", which makes you pretty much unemployable, and sadly a lot of people choose it, and wonder why they can't find a job.

There are also many other factors at play here. It's a shitshow, really.

Higher education does have a lot of value in terms of teaching how to solve problems and hopefully teaching you how to network, but there _are_ reasons to either drop out or don't even get into college in the first place.

<comment><USER5> Don't forget about the entitlements of the business owners. Many, many, many believe they are entitled to highly skilled and highly educated workers without paying them enough to afford the shittiest house/condo within an unreasonable commute to the office.

So at some point it isn't the workers that are being unreasonable. And I'm really curious what you think that point is? What defines who is being unreasonable among the business owner or worker? Or is that just dictated by which socioeconomic class you fall into?

<comment><USER6> Before landing my first job out of college I had to refuse quite a few offers because I would effectively have to pay to work on them. And that was in a growing economy in a much more young-accepting climate, besides, rent was cheaper by the time.

The way you phrased it, it sounds entitled. But I guess the people downvoting your comment have no idea what it is to enter the workforce nowadays.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I think the idea to evaluate yourself or other people as Millionaire or Billionaire is crap.

Being middle class has value, being upper class has value, being rich has value, having a degree has value, having provided a meaningful recognisable addition to human development has value. It's so easy to have such a number drop to 50% or to zero even, without changing anything about your value, your opportunities etc. For instance if Elon Musk lost all his money tomorrow you bet he would still be able to attempt another huge project next week. But if I give you one billion dollar, you might still not be able to start a project of the same size, because you miss the skill, connections, track record etc.

The most important thing to worry about is actually doing something valuable for the people around you. The more people you can influence positively the better your life will become as well.

Example: In my country there's a start-up that tries to revolutionize the train system. All they achieved was to repair one second-hand train, rent the railway slots to drive once up south to north and once down north to south, a few days a week. Then they ran out of money.

But! It really influenced a lot of people positively, made great press, showed strong customer engagement. So even after going broke they were able to continue after a short break, because someone bought them. No money, no profit, loads of way-too-hard-work nobody else wants to do. And still they are able to get this working, because they provide something provably valuable.

<comment><USER8> This is non sense, the life for the rich is far better than for the poor. If you don't believe that is true, then you haven't been exposed to it enough. Having high status in any society can have massive advantages. More leisure time, better mates, ability to purchase expensive health care and therapy, organic food, the freedom to go anywhere in the world, the list goes on and on

<comment><USER7> I totally agree. But the set of rich people and the set of billionaires are only overlapping. They are not the same. And funnily it's not even true that one would be a subset of the other. It's possible to be a billionaire on paper and starve to death. But at least I personally would say if you are starving you are certainly not rich. Rich means having the ability to get what you need and a lot of things you want, including things that are unavailable to most. Would you agree?

It can be considered a subtle difference, but it's the point I'm trying to make. Stop worrying about the number "one billion US dollars" and instead start worrying about becoming rich.

<comment><USER9> I honestly cannot understand the point you're trying to make.

Also,

> It's possible to be a billionaire on paper and starve to death.

Can you provide an example?

<comment><USER7> It's also hard for me to see where our experiences diverge so much that we can't understand each other. Maybe you don't know that billionaires are not having this billion dollars on their bank account, but instead it's a calculation of assumed ownership of stock, houses, derivates etc?

If you have a billion dollar on a bank account with a bank that would cash that amount of money, then I'd say yes you are rich. But the Forbes list is mostly guessed values that are used in calculations, based on real but unknown values that may change a lot between one day and another.

I hope that was the point. If not give me some hints or explain your point of view more detailed. I wouldn't be surprised if we find out that we actually share the same view but express it differently.

<comment><USER9> Please tell me how many on the Forbes list are starving. Hell, give me an example of _any_ billionaire ever that ended up starving. The point you're trying to make has no basis in reality.

<comment><USER7> You talk about correlation, statistics. I talk about logical conclusion.

<comment><USER9> No you don't!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> More concise version here:

[http://longorshortcapital.com/four-simple-steps-to- becoming-...](http://longorshortcapital.com/four-simple-steps-to-becoming-a- billionaire.htm)

<comment><USER11> _) Take outrageous risks

_ ) Be the 1 out of 500 million for whom it pans out. This one is key so focus on it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Isn't "consistent billionaire" a surrogate for "way over a billion" whereas the "non-consistent billoinaire" is someone who makes about a billion? And, does any of this mean anything? who cares?

<comment><USER13> "Silicon Valley" S02E07, where Ross Hanneman finds out his net worth drops slightly below $1,000,000,000.

<comment><USER14> My personal favorite: Richard: (referring to the McLaren) You got this for me?

Russ: What? No, I It's for me. I bought this for myself to celebrate you guys helping me get back to a billion. That's why I came here, to show it to you. To say thank you. I'm not an * * * * * * *.

Dinesh: You drove here with a bow on it?

Russ: No, I put it on after I parked.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Erm. Bayes might have some trouble with this kind of analysis. There are around 2,000 billionaires in the world, and over a billion people living in Africa. Anyone moving to Africa with the hopes of becoming a billionaire is going to be disappointed.

</comment><comment><USER16> Thanks Rosebud! This is a cool analysis, and I really appreciate you sharing the code. There are a ton of ways to pick apart the interpretations, but I feel that you were pretty up front about the difficulties of inferring much. I can empathize with the level of data cleaning fatigue you must have felt. Here's an analysis of VC backed enterprise startups that I did for a stats class: [http://robterrin.com/MissingData/index#1](http://robterrin.com/MissingData/index#1)

By the end, I was pretty much burnt out on this data set to draw many strong conclusions. Still, you busted some myths and flagged some interesting observations for further research. Thank you!

P.S. Oops, I realize the OP is not the author, but cool nonetheless.

<comment><USER17> Interesting! Would you like to offer the slides as a pdf, the html version is broken, most slides have their content cut off by a big black frame. Thanks!

<comment><USER16> Thanks for your interest! Press w for widescreen mode and f to go full screen. Sorry it was a presentation for class so it wasn't designed to be super user friendly.

I also reknit and uploaded a pdf version, it just doesn't look as pretty. [http://robterrin.com/MissingData/Final_Project.pdf](http://robterrin.com/MissingData/Final_Project.pdf)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Is this supposed to be taken seriously?

This looks like a regular degree distribution: [https://theartandscienceofdata.files.wordpress.com/2017/06/b...](https://theartandscienceofdata.files.wordpress.com/2017/06/billionaire- degree.png)

<comment><USER19> I think it is. There is a persistent myth that rich people drop out of school at larger rates than average. That "fact" is often used to suggest that education might be the opportunity cost that prevents one from getting rich.

It looks to me like the distribution of degrees among the billionaires skews higher than the general population, according to this: [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Educational_attainment_in_th...](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Educational_attainment_in_the_United_States)

Your point is super important too, because it's extremely unlikely that level of education has anything to do with being in the top 0.01% of the income distribution.

The article's "AI data" that says a bachelor's degree is 6% important is sort of meaningless. He's measured the relative correlation of variables, among only billionaires. It's still true that only 0.01% of bachelor degree educated people get there, just like only 0.01% of dropouts get there. We can't talk about how important education is to getting there until this analysis is done on the general population.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Most of the rich became that way by engaging in unethical/immoral acts. Misrepresentation, fraud, financial elder abuse, serial bankruptcies, creating environmental disasters in third world countries without a blink of an eye. They just happen to not get caught or to not engage in activity that is outright illegal. Yes, there are innovators and inventors. They deserve our admiration. But most of the Wall Street and Real Estate billionaires are just people who are less reluctant to engage in certain behavior that is deemed by most as immoral. You can become very rich by selling financial alchemy to old ladies with dementia. Society will deem you as "successful" and a "role model" if it's not exposed.

<comment><USER21> > Most of the rich became that way by engaging in unethical/immoral acts.

Citation?

<comment><USER20> Admittedly, I don't have data to provide you. I can only tell you my observations based on a rather large social circle I'm exposed to and just the sheer frequency that the wealthy engage in white collar crime. Do you honestly believe that corporate raiders such as Nelson Peltz, Carl Icahn, Henry Kravis provided billions in value added, you are naive at best. Do you also believe the Russian oligarchs made their money in a moral way? Insider trading, market manipulation, Bribery (aka lobbying), fraud, etc..... That's how most people become billionaires.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Hello Everyone,

Rosebud here!

I am overwhelmed by all the responses. I never expected the blog post to garner this much engagement! Thank you so much for all your comments and all the reads.

Let's keep talking.

</comment><comment><USER19> > "founding_year" is intriguing. It could mean that it may be getting easier > or harder to build a sustainable business.

It could mean that. It could also mean inflation. The threshold of 1B is worth less and less every year, so the number of billionaires is expected to go up every year, skewing all data toward today.

</comment><comment><USER23> > when no one wants to be a Hajime?

I understand the author is using hyperbole here, but it's a little ridiculous to write that no one wants to have vacillated between billionaire and near- billionaire.

<comment><USER24> If you're not in the three comma club, what's the point?

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> I would love to see the same analysis for millionaires. A lot bigger sample size to draw conclusions on and more relevant for many people who's goal is to become rich one day.

</comment><comment><USER26> Since founding year seems to be of some importance, I would really like to see a plot over time of the number of founders per year and possibly extrapolate founding year + sector to predict what a good time to enter a sector would be. Could yield some interesting results.

</comment><comment><USER27> Its a small point - but its a shame JK Rowling is used as an example of "the ghost" since the main reason she has dropped off is she is giving away her money

</comment><comment><USER28> All I could think about was Russ Hanneman.

</comment><comment><USER29> Well, I'll be sure to keep this in mind.

</comment><comment><USER30> TL;DR be an african 30 something male with a PhD and start a business in telecom

</comment><comment><USER31> >. It's not shocking that Country and Sector are important variables but "founding_year" is intriguing. It could mean that it may be getting easier or harder to build a sustainable business.

It should be pretty obvious that LUCK is a huge factor.

It's that age old saying... how does it go? "Success is when preparation meets opportunity." Bill Gates got rich because he was the right guy, at the right time, with the right (completely unfinished vaporware) product when IBM needed an OS.

Most of the new billionaires are techies. Techies that happened simply because the world became tech oriented. Surprising... nobody. There are entire billionaire families from previous "Rushes". The gold rush, oil rushes, wall street, RAIL ROAD TYCOONS, etc.

There is no scientific way to guarantee billion-dollar wealth, only correlations. And the only data I see from the article is: 1) There's more than one way to skin a cat. Some dropped out, some got Ph'ds, many stayed in the middle. That doesn't matter. Wherever you are now, you can start working. 2) Luck matters. You can be successful but the chances of you exploding is fractions of a fraction.

</comment><comment><USER32> There is no such thing as a self-made billionaire. Luck is such a huge factor that it makes the other characteristics irrelevant.

I think that there is more to learn about life from a bum on the streets than from a billionaire.

<comment><USER33> "luck favours the prepared mind"

<comment><USER32> Yeah but just because you have two legs, it doesn't mean that you're going to win the 400m relay in the Olympics if you keep trying... Having two legs barely scratches the surface; even in the extremely unlikely case that you actually make it to the Olympics, you have to account for the fact that your personal success depends more on your team's performance than on your own performance.

Everybody and everybody's mum has a 'prepared mind'. The kind of basic level of intelligence that's required for earning a billion dollars is extremely common among the general population. Billionaires are not geniuses; they have slightly above average intelligence and/or skill.

The pool of people who have 'slightly above average intelligence and/or skill' is massive. Hundreds of millions of people. On the other hand, the pool of people who are billionaires is tiny in the thousands. It's easy to see why it's a lottery.

<comment><USER33> I'm glad that I don't have this limiting mindset.

<comment><USER32> I don't know who you are or what you do but I know for sure that you're not a USD billionaire and I can also predict that you will never become a billionaire. The fact that I can make this prediction has nothing to do with who you are as a person and everything to do with probability.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Seeing Theory: A visual introduction to probability and statistics - <AUTHOR> http://students.brown.edu/seeing-theory/ <comment><USER2> In that spirit (simple explanations of statistics in D3.js) there is also Visually Explained: [http://setosa.io/ev/](http://setosa.io/ev/)

\- Ordinary Least Squares Regression

\- Principal Component Analysis

\- Image Kernels

\- Eigenvectors and Eigenvalues

\- Markov Chains

\- etc

And if you want to learn a bit of D3.js, I collected some materials here: [http://p.migdal.pl/2016/02/09/d3js-icm- kfnrd.html](http://p.migdal.pl/2016/02/09/d3js-icm-kfnrd.html)

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Related: "A visual intro to machine learning": [http://www.r2d3.us/visual- intro-to-machine-learning-part-1/](http://www.r2d3.us/visual-intro-to-machine- learning-part-1/)

</comment><comment><USER3> Link to recent discussion : [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13735714](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13735714)

</comment><comment><USER4> As someone learning ML thank you so much ! I hit wall trying to deeply understand the concepts of statistical inference and their relation to Neural Networks and other ML tools.

As I kept reading papers and heavy math material I was hoping an "explorable explanation" existed for this, and I even considered doing it myself. It seems I don't have to anymore. Your series is exactly what was missing.

Not sure if OP is the author but if I may ask, how long did it take you to create all this content ?

Thanks again for this beautiful resource.

<comment><AUTHOR> OP is not the author

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I made this [1] not so long back to visualize a bunch of statistical distributions. [1]: [https://jeffreyjose.com/stats/dist/](https://jeffreyjose.com/stats/dist/)

</comment><comment><USER6> The "theoretical" curve on the CLT page at low sample count (like 2) doesn't seem right. I know that CLT is pretty strong, it doesn't converge this fast though. I love the visualizations though, really nice site.

[http://students.brown.edu/seeing- theory/distributions/index....](http://students.brown.edu/seeing- theory/distributions/index.html#third)

[http://imgur.com/a/MN6zv](http://imgur.com/a/MN6zv)

</comment><comment><USER7> Be mobile friendly rather than saying you aren't.</comment>


We Analysed The Homepages Of 20 Awesome Startups And Here Is What We Learnt - <AUTHOR> http://outside.hotjar.com/2014/08/07/we-analyzed-the-homepages-of-30-successful-startups-and-here-is-what-we-learnt/

<comment><USER2> Love to be able to read this. But a huge full screen non dismissable "share this content" box is blocking the entire thing. The lunacy of asking someone to share an article before they've even read it combines well with the fact that it probably wasn't tested on mobile.

<comment><USER3> It's not non-dismissable - there's a faint (X) at the top right of the box.

Why do people do this? Do they not measure their bounce rate?

<comment><USER2> I saw it. I clicked it on Firefox on Android and it did absolutely nothing. I even gave the page full time to load first. Multiple clicks. No response.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> There's a smell of survivorship bias to this. The author picked 20 _already successful_ startups and looked for commonality between them. Arguably the 20 that they chose could do _anything_ to their homepages and still soldier on successfully - the fact they all follow the same trends doesn't give any insight in to what works and what doesn't. Take the 'they all have a slogan' lesson as an example: having a slogan might have killed 50,000 startups and these 20 are the set that were lucky enough to have done everything right to survive in spite of that huge error.

If you're going to examine homepages to learn what works, you have to look at the failed startups as well as the successful ones. You can't learn anything just looking at one side.

<comment><AUTHOR> I agree - but my article isn't about what works or doesn't. It's about getting ideas to test. In fact, as I mentioned in the article, what works for one site definitely might not work for yours - so testing is always the answer. Having said that, I think that it's good to look at what the successful startups are doing to get ideas for testing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> [http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://outside.hotjar.com/2014/08/07/we- analyzed-the-homepages-of-30-successful-startups-and-here-is-what-we-learnt/)

Nothing worth visiting, just marketing for their service.

</comment><comment><USER6> I guess 10 got lost between creating the URL slug and writing the rest of the article.

</comment><comment><USER7> "404: File Not Found" Is that the joke or is it down?

<comment><AUTHOR> Unfortunately, our host had serious issues the moment the article trended on HackerNews... very bad timing! We've actually moved server quickly so it should soon be back to normal.</comment></comment>


How I Hacked Amazon's $5 WiFi Button to Track Baby Data - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@edwardbenson/how-i-hacked-amazon-s-5-wifi-button-to-track-baby-data-794214b0bdd8

<comment><USER2> Much better use for these buttons than ordering crap from amazon!</comment>


Independent TrueCrypt implementation imported into DragonFly BSD - <AUTHOR> http://leaf.dragonflybsd.org/mailarchive/commits/2011-07/msg00066.html <comment><USER2> Very nice work, especially given status of the TrueCrypt license, which may not be acceptable for most open source operating systems:

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TrueCrypt#Licensing>

Hopefully, this will provide a good basis for others to bring TrueCrypt support to other BSDs and Linux.

<comment><USER3> The licence isn't the only weird thing about truecrypt, the fact that they've been known to change their binaries (as I believe was reported on HN a while back) without posting a changelog, the fact that no one knows who the devs really are etc... all somewhat suspicious for such a high profile tool. But maybe I'm too paranoid in my paranoia.

I for one welcome our new overlords!

<comment><USER4> > the fact that they've been known to change their binaries

It was shown that the change was only to the license embedded in the installer, the actual executables were unchanged.

Link to the TC forum admin explaining it: <http://forums.truecrypt.org/viewtopic.php?p=95255#95255>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> a little more explanation: [http://permalink.gmane.org/gmane.os.dragonfly- bsd.kernel/142...](http://permalink.gmane.org/gmane.os.dragonfly- bsd.kernel/14287)

EDIT: from early point in development

</comment><comment><USER6> Really exciting stuff. I kind of missed TrueCrypt when I switched to FreeBSD, because I had a lot of things saved to a TC volume on my network drive. I eventually figured out how to mimic TC volumes using FreeBSD's native geli encryption tool. If anyone is interested in how to do it:

<http://forums.freebsd.org/showthread.php?t=20382>

</comment><comment><USER7> Neat. The code's even pretty readable. Fantastic news for the OSS crowd, and multiple implementations are _critical_ for robustness's sake - no single point of failure.

/me adds to my ever-growing to-read list

</comment><comment><USER8> Very cool! It's good to see this. Will boost and support the TrueCrypt community.</comment>


Machine Learning Trick of the Day: Instrumental Thinking - <AUTHOR> http://blog.shakirm.com/2018/10/machine-learning-trick-of-the-day-8-instrumental-thinking/ <comment><USER2> Shakir is a force of nature. He is one of the organizers of the Deep Learning Indaba - an incredible effort to strengthen machine learning in Africa. Unfortunately the 2018 videos aren't out yet (Shakir gave an amazing talk on deep learning fundamentals and some of the tricks from his blog) but everyone should be aware of Shakir and the Deep Learning Indaba: [http://www.deeplearningindaba.com/](http://www.deeplearningindaba.com/)

</comment><comment><USER3> Seems related to noisy-input Gaussian Process [1] that I applied in my thesis with moderate success some years ago.

[1] [http://mlg.eng.cam.ac.uk/pub/pdf/MchRas11.pdf](http://mlg.eng.cam.ac.uk/pub/pdf/MchRas11.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER4> Excellent post about potential flaws of your typical linear regression model and how to address with causal methods. As a self-taught practitioner, these posts are priceless in letting me know what I don't know...

</comment><comment><USER5> Does the machine learning field have different nomenclature for this sort of thing than, say, econometrics?

I recognize all the math, but the verbiage used is different.

<comment><USER6> I'm a trained a econometrician and a data scientist. Have you found people to be apprehensive with you since 'our' verbiage is different?

<comment><USER5> Is that what I asked?

I'm asking about why the usage of the mathematics that you and I are apparently both familiar with could be described in different ways depending on which field is referencing it. This is a linguistic question - not a mathematical one.

No need to be rude.

<comment><USER7> Is that what they asked?

Nomenclature is different in different fields all the time, or even different areas of the same field. It all depends on what practitioners feel is most intuitive.

No need to call someone rude for not answering your question and asking their own instead.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Shakir is a fantastic technical writer. I love that he also traces modern ideas back to their older roots and includes the references.</comment>


Pandora Reports Quarterly Revenue Short of Analysts' Estimates - <AUTHOR> http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-07-21/pandora-reports-quarterly-revenue-short-of-analysts-estimates <comment><USER2> With Apple Music and Spotify succeeding, where does it leave Pandora?

<comment><USER3> In a good place I would think. I still prefer their service model over the others. Plus with the Music Genome (arguably their secret sauce) maybe they have value above simply streaming music?</comment></comment>


Russian central bank to ban websites offering crypto-currencies - <AUTHOR> http://www.reuters.com/article/us-russia-cenbank-bitcoin/russian-central-bank-to-ban-websites-offering-crypto-currencies-idUSKBN1CF0RF?utm_campaign=Newsletter%20-%20Mi5M%20-%20Q3%202017&utm_source=hs_email&utm_medium=email&utm_content=57189261&_hsenc=p2ANqtz-_df-EsYDT4DdBnon3fv6jucdrNnC8ueal1joi_OdamMiXu4WkQYYUyDiz_hfsqaTenWhvtJSinQyreFmoIAd2pOdunsg&_hsmi=57189261 <comment><USER2> Their central banker called these sites "dubious."</comment>


Join the DCOS Public Beta on Microsoft Azure and AWS - <AUTHOR> https://mesosphere.com/blog/2015/04/29/join-the-dcos-public-beta-on-microsoft-azure-and-aws/ <comment><USER2> very cool!</comment>


Why wasn't this page found? - <AUTHOR> https://www.ft.com/content/a67df690-8def-11e9- <comment><USER2> I chuckled the first time I saw Texas Instruments' 404 page.

[http://www.ti.com/product/XYZLMZM23601](http://www.ti.com/product/XYZLMZM23601)

edit: noticed Analog also has a cute one

[https://www.analog.com/en/products/xyzad5423.html](https://www.analog.com/en/products/xyzad5423.html)

<comment><USER3> The circuit is not a circuit :'(

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Neat!

There have been some entertaining 404 pages that came up on HN in the past.

1\. Bernie Sanders [https://berniesanders.com/sdfw](https://berniesanders.com/sdfw) 2\. [https://hn.algolia.com/?query=404&sort=byPopularity&prefix&p...](https://hn.algolia.com/?query=404&sort=byPopularity&prefix&page=0&dateRange=all&type=story)

<comment><USER5> I love this so much

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Sometimes governments have a sense of humour: [https://www.govt.nz/404](https://www.govt.nz/404)

<comment><USER7> lol, New Zealand is missing from the map.

<comment><USER8> The page was revised in April, so it may be a reference to Ikea leaving the country off of a map: [https://www.cnbc.com/2019/02/11/ikea-reportedly- apologizes-f...](https://www.cnbc.com/2019/02/11/ikea-reportedly-apologizes- for-leaving-new-zealand-off-a-world-map.html)

<comment><USER9> IKEA is a special case for New Zealand, the story goes that NZ slighted IKEA in some way a long time ago, something like being unwilling to provide favorable zoning for a flagship store, and this resulted in IKEA leadership blacklisting NZ. This is often given as the reason that no store exists even today.

Quite possibly not true, more likely is that the small population and logistics complexity makes it uneconomical to service, especially for a brand that depends on scale.

Apparently they're launching a store soon anyway.

<comment><USER10> IKEA-type shops were literally illegal in Ireland until recently (the law was changed in 2005 to allow limited types of shops, including IKEA, to have more than 6k sqm) and I don't think they ever left us off their maps.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> On the early web, mit.edu had this:

        I ate your web page.
        Forgive me, it was juicy
        and tart on my tongue.

<comment><USER12> I guess that counts as a haiku, no? Very cool.

<comment><USER13> It's also an homage to a very short but non-haiku poem by William Carlos Williams:

[http://famouspoetsandpoems.com/poets/william_carlos_williams...](http://famouspoetsandpoems.com/poets/william_carlos_williams/poems/16997)

<comment><USER14> That was not featured on Paterson.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> That's brilliant - Funny without being unusable. But I wouldn't want to be the person monitoring their 404 errors right now.

<comment><USER16> Hopefully they're m monitoring system knows the difference between direct 404 access and legitimately not found pages.

<comment><USER17> The URL provided is just a page UUID with some parts deleted, not "404.html" or whatever. So it really is a "legitimately not found page", but would be hopefully be flagged as "spike in 404 errors due to dead link [...] on news.ycombinator.com" by a reasonable CMS.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I guess I'm easily entertained, but I always liked Amazon's "dogs of Amazon" 404 pages: [https://www.amazon.com/404](https://www.amazon.com/404)

<comment><USER19> Of all the 36 dogs. Soju is in an ad: [https://www.amazon.co.uk/Animal-Plush- Squeaky-Christmas-East...](https://www.amazon.co.uk/Animal-Plush-Squeaky- Christmas-Easter/dp/B07CK3X4TQ)

</comment></comment><comment><USER2> This got me thinking. Instead of a fixed 404 page, using something like what the Post-modernism Generator[1] uses[2] to generate a web-page, kinda best- effort style.

Could be fun :)

[1]: [http://www.elsewhere.org/journal/pomo/](http://www.elsewhere.org/journal/pomo/)

[2]: [http://dev.null.org/dadaengine/](http://dev.null.org/dadaengine/)

<comment><USER19> Post modernism generator reminds me of a 9 year old trying to impress me with big words but all in all clever but schizo jumping from topic to topic.

Postmodern philosophy should explain simply and most of them do: [https://m.youtube.com/channel/UCSkzHxIcfoEr69MWBdo0ppg](https://m.youtube.com/channel/UCSkzHxIcfoEr69MWBdo0ppg)

<comment><USER20> > Postmodern philosophy should explain simply

It's not always possible when precisely what is being attempted is to sketch ideas inexpressible with simple denotational language and concepts. What late Heidegger & much of Derrida write is outside the limits of 'commonsense'.

Of course one can contest whether the whole enterprise is meaningful at all, or whether their specific attempts succeed, but 'explaining simply' just isn't relevant to what they are trying to do. It's like claiming you're asking a poet to be more prosaic, which amounts to asking them not to write poetry at all.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> "Mercantilism The page is hosted by a foreign web server and is therefore banned to ensure the supremacy of our own software."

Isnt that protectionism?

Wouldn't mercantilism suggest the article was better being supplied from a different website.

</comment><comment><USER22> Did HN just hug a 404 page to death? That is pretty surreal!

<comment><USER23> Even more so, the page offers a theory to explain that:

> Speculative bubble

> The page never actually existed and was fundamentally impossible, but > everyone bought into it in a frenzy and it's all now ending in tears.

<comment><USER24> This one fits even better:

>Tragedy of the Commons

>Everyone wanted to view this page, but no-one was willing to maintain it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> I wonder if this thread will cause an alarm on one the linked pages due to too high number of bad requests (and will make some poor employee investigate it on Sunday).

</comment><comment><USER26> I actually followed the link and was entertained. +1 would read again.

</comment><comment><USER27> The Liberal Democrats (Britain's centrist, pro-European party) have a nice line in 404s: [https://www.libdems.org.uk/aaaa](https://www.libdems.org.uk/aaaa)

I recycled an ancient found image for my own site (OpenStreetMap-powered bike directions on quiet roads/trails): [https://cycle.travel/aaaa](https://cycle.travel/aaaa)

<comment><USER28> For those not in the UK, the older man on the LibDem site is Jeremy Corbyn, leader of Labour, the official opposition party. The breast slapping was an awkward missed high five during the last general election where Labour unexpectedly won far more seats than predicted. He is not seen as a "handsy" politician - this incident is far more "awks" than "yuks"

The 404 joke is that Labour has for several years being trying to avoid having a clear official policy opposing or supporting Brexit

<comment><USER29> The even bigger joke is that when asked, Labour always say "look, we've been very clear on Brexit"

<comment><USER21> What are you talking about? All the parties have been crystal clear on Brexit. "Brexit means Brexit", what's unclear about that?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> It seems to be becoming more of a problem on stackoverflow.

Organizations change their documentation site and then everything that links to the old one is irrelevant.

</comment><comment><USER31> Try clicking on the narwhal... [https://www.dremio.com/xyz](https://www.dremio.com/xyz)

</comment><comment><USER32> One of the most interesting parts of this is, at least on my computer, the link doesn't change to the "visited" color no matter how many times I click it. I guess since it 404s, Chrome doesn't want to make me think that I successfully visited it?

</comment><comment><USER33> I did the old Douglas Adams Marvin 404: [http://cmarshall.net/Error_404.html](http://cmarshall.net/Error_404.html)

</comment><comment><USER34> Courtesy of my employer, we have a tailored 404 as well :-)

[https://www.linn.co.uk/foo](https://www.linn.co.uk/foo)

</comment><comment><USER35> Good laugh and a good summary of FT branding ! Any other ideas to create fun easter eggs ?

First lazy search for a good starter : [https://www.bryanbraun.com/2018/04/01/several-ways-to- hide-e...](https://www.bryanbraun.com/2018/04/01/several-ways-to-hide-easter- eggs-on-your-website/)

</comment><comment><USER36> One of my favourites: [https://gymbox.com/404](https://gymbox.com/404)

</comment><comment><USER37> This is brilliant but the old 404 on Bloomberg is probably still my favorite: [https://imgur.com/gallery/9Es6Z82](https://imgur.com/gallery/9Es6Z82)

<comment><USER38> imgur too : [https://imgur.com/ghdhgf](https://imgur.com/ghdhgf)

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> When I first loaded this page, the post had exactly 404 points. :-)

</comment><comment><USER40> [https://www.androidpolice.com/404fjfjfjd](https://www.androidpolice.com/404fjfjfjd)

Refresh a bunch of times, as they change.

</comment><comment><USER41> Boating related, boating failure:

[https://floathub.com/foobar](https://floathub.com/foobar)

</comment><comment><USER42> This is a blank page with uBlock/uMatrix. Fitting. And also the reason I haven't read a single FT page in over a year.

</comment><comment><USER43> I had to open a second browser to see what was so funny — in Brave, it just gives a normal-looking 404 error.

<comment><USER44> You have the option to intercept web page errors on (perhaps by default). Microsoft was famous for doing that in IE.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> This is absolutely amazing

</comment><comment><USER45> I remember a 404 page that was a Brickles game you could play. It was in flash, so if it is still around somewhere, and was never ported to Javascript, it's not easily viewable.

</comment><comment><USER46> Personally these special 404 just waste time and create confusion. Just a blank page with 404 and standard "Page Not Found" would be much better.

<comment><USER47> Yeah, I'd say it looks too much like a content page.

</comment></comment><comment><USER48> I like this one.

OperationCode.org/pageoops

</comment><comment><USER49> You can see how well they understand the theory by how funny the joke is. The marxist one is the least funny.

</comment><comment><USER50> Quite amazingly neither of these pages work without JS.

How difficult is it to make a page saying 'not found' using static HTML, perhaps with a GIF if you want minor animation.

I mean, how difficult is it to not use tech that you don't need?

Edit: loved the FT 404 though

<comment><USER51> You need JavaScript to use the web in 2019. It has nothing to do with difficulty. You also need an ID to get into the boarding area of an airport and you can't smoke in restaurants. It's never going to be 1995 again. It's time to stop complaining about this.

<comment><USER52> Those are not remotely the same. A web _page_ can function without JS. It's not something you need to display some text and some images. And it's not harmful to others. Smoking in a closed space is.

Also, I can't believe every time this refrain pops up we need to be reminded that js not loading is not only a problem for those deactivating it explicitly but also in those cases when it didn't load for any number of reasons (like a bad connection). You're doing your visitors a disservice if you need js to load static text and pictures.

<comment><USER53> A web page can function without JS, but a lot of things seriously aren't doable with just HTML5, no matter how hard you try.

<comment><USER54> Nobody complains that Google Maps are using JS. People are complaining that developers abusing JS just to show simple page or video which is perfectly doable with HTML 5.

<comment><USER53> Showing a simple video isn't simple without JS, it's just clunky in all aspects.

<comment><USER55> I think you're mistaking simple for something else. Simple can easily be clunky. I would even say simple is _often_ clunky.

Making something elegant, and full of features, and pretty is often complex.

<comment><USER53> It's not simple even for the developer to use the video tag if you want a thing that works.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER56> Trumponomics:

\--

We will make this page

Great again with excellent

Negotiations

<comment><USER56> Woe to emperors

Who are parading smartly

And have their buff called

<comment><USER56> Amusing it is

To see comments carpet bombed

Or applauded. Why?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER57> One thing that annoys me about funny 404 pages is that they tend to assume that either a) the content referenced by the URL was deleted intentionally, or b) the user mistyped the URL. While in practise, the majority of the time I hit a 404 page, it is due to malpractise by the webmaster. A 404 page has to be _very_ funny to offset the fact that it often is very unhelpful and blames the user for the webmaster's faults. (Fortunately, I found the FT Page submitted _that_ funny, unlike many of the others in the comments.)

In that light, I find 404 pages like these refreshing for recognising the situation for what it is: [https://two-wrongs.com/404](https://two- wrongs.com/404)

<comment><USER58> Based on your username and [https://xkqr.org/](https://xkqr.org/), it appears that you wrote that 404 page. You might want to state that clearly when you present it as an example to follow.

<comment><USER57> Oh, crap. I skipped proof-reading this one comment, thinking "what's the worst that can happen?" Apparently I can forget to mention that I'm linking to my own page!

I'm very glad you puzzled together the domain name and my username, to make this more transparent. I'm also terribly sorry you had to do what was my job in the first place. Thank you.</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Want to do something for Animals I am a devops engineer - <AUTHOR>

I've been a Linux/Windows Admin for years and now I am a DevOps Infrastructure engineer working in NY.   I love animals, I want to donate my time to help organizations that help animals that my have a need for a sysadmin to help them with their cloud needs/ datacenter needs/ deployments, and automating their environments.  I am looking to offer my services for free. I just want to make a difference on the lives of animals.  Where can I find organizations with those needs? <comment><USER2> First a search engine for animal related non profits near you. Then get out of the computer, take your car, drive there and talk to them.

These folks are usually not very well connected to the internet. Even if they are and you can email them, don't.

Go talk to them in-person. We as computer scientists, ops engineers, designers, etc. think the world turns around the internet and that one can solve anything with it. That's wrong. Or at least it's not completely true. But it can help.

I've been looking into making an impact to non-profit for a while now and I my professional (technical) skills are surprisingly useless for 'most' of these non profits.

But there are some and I know it is possible to go talk to them and show them that technology can make their life much easier.

The non-profits you will visit most likely have more urgent needs like finding placements for their animals, buying blankets, etc. Things that technology can barely help. They more likely need advocates, people who know how to raise fundraising more than someone who can revamp their website or make sure it has SSL and is deployed automatically.

However, don't feel down. I am absolutely convinced you can make their life easier and you should. Especially since you seem really motivated by this. However, expect to work a bit with them before: cleaning cages, walking the animals, etc.

Then maybe you'll have an idea that can bring technology in their life to empower them and make them much more efficient.

Technology is a tool to help humans achieve a goal it is not an end by itself.

Well, I digressed a bit :D I hope you'll forgive me ;)</comment>


Our Link Between Autism Therapy and Discovery Commerce UI - <AUTHOR> http://fashioningchange.com/blog/our-link-between-autism-therapy-and-discovery-comme

<comment><AUTHOR> tl;dr Fashioning Change just launched a super-cool customized profile that uses proven autism therapy principles to give you a great discovery commerce experience</comment>


Under Construction - A novel way to design your stealth startup's landing page - <AUTHOR> http://www.textfiles.com/underconstruction/

<comment><USER2> Since the Geocities 1TB Reocities caught on here again the whole "Under Construction" meme got me thinking. It is kid of retro-cool. Really, is any other pre-launch page doing anything more? And isn't a "Beta" nothing more than an "Under Construction 2.0"?

Now, I wouldn't use any of those old graphics. I'd get something much more hip and modern. But the message could very well be the same. And toss in the lead capture and invite sign-ups to boot.</comment>


A startup is so much like a bank heist - <AUTHOR> http://ujjwalgrover.blogspot.com/2008/09/startup-is-so-much-like-bank-heist.html

<comment><USER2> Pretty clever analogy lol</comment>


You Are Old, Father William - <AUTHOR> https://www.firstthings.com/web-exclusives/2019/05/you-are-old-father-william <comment><USER2> It's odd that the article didn't just reproduce the (short) poem. Was he worried about being sued for copyright on an 1865 work? And why not at least link directly to the poem rather than giving an affiliate Amazon link?

In any case: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/You_Are_Old,_Father_William](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/You_Are_Old,_Father_William)

      "You are old, Father William," the young man said,
      "And your hair has become very white;
      And yet you incessantly stand on your head—
      Do you think, at your age, it is right?"

      "In my youth," Father William replied to his son,
      "I feared it might injure the brain;
      But now that I'm perfectly sure I have none,
      Why, I do it again and again."

      "You are old," said the youth, "As I mentioned before,
      And have grown most uncommonly fat;
      Yet you turned a back-somersault in at the door—
      Pray, what is the reason of that?"

      "In my youth," said the sage, as he shook his grey locks,
      "I kept all my limbs very supple
      By the use of this ointment—one shilling a box—
      Allow me to sell you a couple?"

      "You are old," said the youth, "And your jaws are too weak
      For anything tougher than suet;
      Yet you finished the goose, with the bones and the beak—
      Pray, how did you manage to do it?"

      "In my youth," said his father, "I took to the law,
      And argued each case with my wife;
      And the muscular strength which it gave to my jaw,
      Has lasted the rest of my life."

      "You are old," said the youth, "one would hardly suppose
      That your eye was as steady as ever;
      Yet you balanced an eel on the end of your nose—
      What made you so awfully clever?"

      "I have answered three questions, and that is enough,"
      Said his father; "don't give yourself airs!
      Do you think I can listen all day to such stuff?
      Be off, or I'll kick you down stairs!"

Or if you'd prefer to hear it sung, here's a rendition by They Might Be Giants: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NA9LP7m2XI8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NA9LP7m2XI8)

</comment><comment><USER3> > Where are the lists of "Hot New Writers Over 70"?

Because most people who want to write will have done so before 70, and a large chunk of them just want to watch TV (or rather, have nothing better to do in their minds, which is sad).

> Why do so few of the expensive, risible fashion ads in the New York Times > Magazine and its equivalent at the Wall Street Journal feature oldsters?

I don't think this is true for many luxury items? Watches, alcohol, cars, and boner pills all associate with ads of refined older men in my mind. Especially in print media.

<comment><USER4> > _Because most people who want to write will have done so before 70, and a > large chunk of them just want to watch TV (or rather, have nothing better to > do in their minds, which is sad)._

Still doesn't answer the question. Just means those that do want to write over 70 are fewer (and they could be writing for decades before too, it's not about writing only after 70, but about becoming a new published writer after 70, or just a new celebrated book writer after 70 -even if you've published other books before too). Besides it's not the "after 70" category missing, where's the "after 40/50/60" lists?

<comment><USER5> If they've been writing for decades they aren't 'hot new writers' over 70.

<comment><USER4> The emphasis is not on the "new" but on the "hot new". You can hone your skills for decades, and even publish, but only become "hot" (based on some nicely selling or award winning work) later in life. You still deserve to be in a list.

<comment><USER3> I think this is pedantic, but whatever. If you include previously popular authors then your article is not look at these new authors who are seventy, its look how old these authors are.

Or at least, that would be my takeaway if number one on the list were Steven King. It's not interesting that he is still a good author. It is noteworthy that he is older than I expect. He is ~72 btw.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> My primary critique of this article is that it sets up a strawman in the first sentence to tear down.

> Everyone who writes about aging "Boomers"—how "they" have ruined "our" > society, and so on, ad nauseum—should be required to memorize Lewis > Carroll's "You Are Old, Father William" (from Alice's Adventures in > Wonderland) and recite it aloud before an audience of men and women age > seventy or older.

There are proper arguments to show how the Boomers were a significant part of dismantling many of the governmental programs and social structures that they themselves benefited from, and then blamed the subsequent generations (GenX, Millennial) for struggling. The key pieces are the comparative cost of housing and education compared to the aforementioned generations, the removal of pensions, and the devolution of health care. While these were set into motion by the generation before them (Reagan, Bush), they were unwilling to put political pressure to change its course.

None of this has to do with dismissing the life experience of the Boomer generation, but rather the simple acknowledgement that their political and social policies didn't work, and it's time to fix that.

<comment><USER7> Yeh, I'm one of those boomers. It was our generation who cooked up the whole "taxation is theft" trope. That has made a terrible mess.

We were born before the invention (1959-1960) of pharma birth control, and were teenagers when it took hold in society. It was the biggest change in human history (I'm not exaggerating). We, generalizing, did an awful job of starting to sort out the moral / ethical / social changes birth control brought.

We lived through the Summer of Love (see the previous paragraph) and some of us didn't get it. To misquote Spiderman, "with great freedom comes great responsibility." Some of us missed that. Hence DJT 45, hence the abuses of celibate clergy, among other notorious members of my generation.

And, fossil carbon release.

We did make the US stop the Vietnam war. That was good.

We made the US get rid of the military draft. That, in hindsight, was bad. Politicians think twice if they have to raise taxes and conscript young women and men before they go to war.

What's going for us? What do we have to offer?

We think in decades, not years.

We made it to the moon.

We invented the internet.

We helped cure the world of sanctimonious horses __t like the poem Lewis Carroll parodied:[https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Old_Man%27s_Comforts_and_...](https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Old_Man%27s_Comforts_and_How_He_Gained_Them)

Maybe it's self-delusion, but I hope we're not finished doing some good.

<comment><USER8> > It was our generation who cooked up the whole "taxation is theft" trope.

I'm sorry but considering the US hasn't existed for very long, and income taxes in the US haven't existed for very long, I don't see what your point is other than to knock down something you dislike.

The idea of taxation being "theft" wasn't an invention of Boomers nor is it a particularly unnatural (or original) thought for any individual to have when encountered with collectivism.

I'm not going to blame Boomers for the current situation because there are so many assumptions I have to make about the current situation for such blame to be effective. I think one has already been thrown around in this thread, something about education costs, where such complaints make big assumptions about the value of education in the status quo or what the entire point of an education is (e.g. being a productive part of the workforce vs. having critical thinking skills vs. knowing the value of learning about being able to discipline yourself into doing it when you want).

The worst thing is, blaming Boomers for our problems makes the assumption that there is something uniquely special about that generation that allowed them to set society on the wrong path, as if every generation before and after has also been uniquely special in not having that ability.

So I find your comment particularly underhanded in taking this hatred for Boomers and lobbing some pet-dislike you have for a certain ideology. _" Oh yeah, us Boomers suck, we ruined everything especially because we don't like taxes,"_ as if Boomers have a monolithic opinion about taxation or anything for that matter.

PS: You may have stopped the Vietnam war, but what do you think paid for it? (Answer: Taxes.)

<comment><USER9> >The idea of taxation being "theft" wasn't an invention of Boomers nor is it a particularly unnatural (or original) thought for any individual to have when encountered with collectivism.

While true, there seems to me to be some merit to the argument that there was a subtle change in the nature of such discourse during this period and (mainly) among a large section of the members of this generation (that many members of subsequent generations have accepted as de facto and default) and that is integration of taxation/government with market-based thinking, that is, that paying taxes is something the individual does to get an individual return, in the same way a person walks in McDonalds and expects to put money on the counter and get _their_ happy meal and not, instead, that the homeless guy in the corner gets a happy meal.

<comment><USER8> Evidence for this (as a generational phenomenon) could include the reduction in the top income tax rate as boomers came of age. So in that sense I agree that they, generationally, may have disliked taxes in comparison to what immediately preceded them.

As far as I know, the Federal income tax (in the US) started out as a way to finance war. So it would be more like going into McDonald's and paying to have someone stand there with a gun and threaten/kill anyone who tried to take your (or anyone else's) Big Mac. There was no homeless, hungry guy in the corner suffering if not for the forced generosity of a third party. My only point here is to say that, in an abstract way, the current income tax was formed on an idea of protection as a transaction, not on being generous towards down-on- their-luck people. I believe that context is important when we talk about generations later rejecting taxation because they don't see what's in it for them.

(But I'll also admit / point out that, in the context of when the current Federal income tax started, young men were being drafted to fight in WWI, which I think is way worse than any tax in terms of the individual vs. collective. As in, there's no clearer way to say that the state _owns_ you than it being able to send you to war potentially against your will.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> It's true that our culture overvalues youth. There have been articles on HN about people over forty struggling to get a programming job. In central Austin it's rare to see anyone over fifty, even at the grocery store. It was jarring when I moved further out and realized how much diversity hadn't existed where I was before.

The politicians and business leaders of that generation may have caused lots of problems, but I don't think it's fair to blame the average "oldster" for those things. There's value to having a range of perspectives and it's very alien, and probably detrimental, the way our culture has seemingly just swept them out of sight like spectral reflections of our own mortality.

<comment><USER11> > In central Austin it's rare to see anyone over fifty, even at the grocery > store. It was jarring when I moved further out and realized how much > diversity hadn't existed where I was before.

I don't see how the preference of older people for the suburbs has anything to do with our culture overvaluing youth.

As for the politicians and business leaders, they _are_ older. The average age of CEOs is 50. In Congress, it's almost 60 - that's 20 years older than the people they represent. Young people may have the attention, but Boomers (and some X'ers) have the Power.

<comment><USER12> In a way, cities eat the young and spit them back into the suburbs as they approach middle age to produce more. It's a cycle. It might not be bad.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I feel like part of the problem is that "boomer" culture remains ubiquitous, but hasn't aged along side the actual people.

So people are still excited about, say, the 50th anniversary of the Grateful Dead (not that the living members themselves are boomers, maybe a touch old for that description), but the promotional images might be from 1978, not even 1995, or today. So the echoes of this energetic youth culture remain youthful as the people themselves age.

</comment><comment><USER14> The interesting part of the article comes in the 3rd paragraph. The first two paragraphs just hijack the idea with a meme.

> In the last several years, two writer friends of mine have told me the same > story: Their (very savvy) editors advised them to change the age of the > protagonists in their novels-in-progress, making them considerably younger; > otherwise, their books wouldn't be publishable.

The "golden years" is the first time in our lives where we are free to be ourselves. We no longer have to bend to the ideas of others to get funding. If you are a writer then self publish. You no longer has to take ideas from marketing departments who dream up book ideas. You can say what you want to say.

</comment><comment><USER15> Japan is supposedly having a wave of popularity written by elderly featuring older protagonists with the target audience being older generations.

</comment><comment><USER16> This takes me back; I first read this (in pieces) via the Unix fortune(6) program.

</comment><comment><USER17> I created the Wikipedia article on "You Are Old, Father William", about a decade ago. One of my strokes of good fortune is that I had read the original by Southey before reading Lewis Carroll's parody in _Alice_ , so I was able to appreciate it more and found it hilarious!

Original: [https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Old_Man%27s_Comforts_and_...](https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Old_Man%27s_Comforts_and_How_He_Gained_Them)

Parody: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/You_Are_Old,_Father_William](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/You_Are_Old,_Father_William) (current version of article: [https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=You_Are_Old,_Fath...](https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=You_Are_Old,_Father_William&oldid=888080936))

A quote I scoured for the article then (the line about the "idiot questioner") is also in this article. The author of this article may have come across this quote independently rather than via Wikipedia, but this sort of thing has happened often enough that I've come to realize writing for Wikipedia has surprisingly large impact.

\---

As an aside, the article is about changing perceptions of old age: from the "sententious piety about old age" current at the time of Southey/Carroll, to their "invisibility" today. (A general paucity of works featuring old people at their centre, with a few examples collected in this article: I'd add films too, like Pixar's _Up_ , or these: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Films_about_old_age.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Films_about_old_age.)) It ends with "I would like to see more of this salutary belligerence among my fellow oldsters." In short, it's about old age in general, and today's "cult of youth".

But many comments here so far are about taxes, the economy, "Boomers", social security,… none of which is touched on by the article at all, beyond the first clause of the first sentence. I wonder whether there may be a cultural component here; is it the case that people who don't grow up with experiences of highly valuable conversations with them in childhood and youth, are inclined to think of them primarily in economic terms? Or is it that any discussion of "old people" in general is impossible without reference to the entire generation of "old people" one happens to know?

Anyway, here's another "old writer" the article didn't mention: a wonderful interview with P. G. Wodehouse at 91 (and a half): [https://web.archive.org/web/20150814120619/http://www.thepar...](https://web.archive.org/web/20150814120619/http://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/3773/the- art-of-fiction-no-60-p-g-wodehouse)

</comment><comment><USER18> You don't get to freely acknowledge counter-examples and then magically say they "prove the rule" as if they don't contradict your argument. THAT'S NOT WHAT THAT MEANS.

And it's quite all right for me to respect the elderly in general while acknowledging the baby boomers didn't heed environmental collapse, stole all they money from future generations, raised their cost of living/education while keeping their wages stagnant, and concentrated wealth while dismantling unions.

You don't get to cry "respect the elderly!" as a response to say, getting a parking ticket. It's not a valid response to criticism of your generation either.

<comment><USER19> I thought about the same thing when I read that part. The formula "exception proves the rule" is generally misused (people not knowing that it's based on the archaic usage of _prove_ which was "to test") in daily usage but this author, who is listed as a contributing editor for The Englewood Review of Books, making this mistake seems less likely.

Interestingly, Wikipedia has an in-depth article on the usage of this phrase: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exception_that_proves_the_rule](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exception_that_proves_the_rule). It's stated that this phrase is derived from a legal principle of republican Rome: _exceptio probat regulam in casibus non exceptis_ ("the exception confirms the rule in cases not excepted").

So, in this sense, the fact that books with old protagonists are rarely bestsellers proves the "rule" that the author stated.

<comment><USER20> It's not "generally misused", it has acquired another and now more common usage. Anyone with a strong command of the English language would know that usage and would know that the original usage now reads as incorrect to most people, so it's either an accident or a deliberate miscommunication to use it.

<comment><USER21> So, what is the new, more common meaning? That exception to the rule somehow strengthens the rule?

<comment><USER22> > So, what is the new, more common meaning? That exception to the rule somehow > strengthens the rule?

Yes. And the fact this meaning is meaningless, or at least a very dishonest tactic, doesn't really change the fact it's now the most common meaning.

Pragmatically, the lesson here is that "the exception that proves the rule" is a bad phrase to use unless you're deliberately trying to confuse or derail the discussion.

<comment><USER19> It's not meaningless, it's precisely how it was/is used in law, e.g. see [https://english.stackexchange.com/a/14213](https://english.stackexchange.com/a/14213), also see the Snopes answer: [https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/exceptional- proof/](https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/exceptional-proof/).

Two other idiomatic expressions that have similar confused usage are "proof is in the pudding" and "begs the question" ([https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/246664/why- can-i...](https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/246664/why-can-i-not- use-beg-the-question-to-mean-raise-the-question-grammatically))

<comment><USER22> > It's not meaningless, it's precisely how it was/is used in law

I mean the current common meaning is meaningless; to wit: "Exceptions to the rule I just propounded make the rule stronger, as opposed to disproving it."

> Two other idiomatic expressions that have similar confused usage are "proof > is in the pudding" and "begs the question"

The first is misquoted ("The proof of the pudding is in the eating" is immediately obvious) and the second is a horrible translation which would have gotten a failing grade in any school which taught Latin and which should be forgotten.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> I'm trying to avoid the "middle brow dismissal," but I'm not sure the point of this article. OK, you are sick of your generation being painted with an overly broad and negative brush. Well, right back at you.

I think, perhaps, we could call a truce on the generational warfare.

<comment><USER24> Your comment is a hasty generalization combined with a red herring.

You don't _know_ that the author painted _your_ generation with an overly broad and negative brush. And even _if_ he had done so, it wouldn't render the article "pointless".

<comment><USER23> _Your comment is a hasty generalization combined with a red herring._

As is the article. In my opinion, of course. That was sort of my point.

<comment><USER24> Where does the article engage in hasty generalization?

<comment><USER23> Well, the whole article reads like a hasty generalisation to me, but in an effort to avoid being trite . . . The author's generalisation is that society (i.e. everyone) doesn't respect authors over 70 and characters over 70 (and by extension, people over 70). Yet, he goes on to give examples of celebrated authors over 70 and celebrated stories where the main characters are over 70, leaving his argument where, exactly?

I've no doubt that some "young" people disrespect "old" people simply because they are "old." By the same token, some "old" people disrespect "young" people simply because they are "young." This is nuts. Respect people who are worthy of respect regardless of age (conversely, sadly, many people don't do much worthy of respect, again regardless of age). Back to my original comment: can we just stop with this kind of generational pot shots?

<comment><USER24> > The author's generalisation is that society (i.e. everyone) doesn't respect > authors over 70

Nowhere does the author say that. Your whole comment is a strawman.

<comment><USER23> If you say so . . . clearly, we took different meanings away from it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> I mean, excuse me for wanting to dismantle social security because I'll never see a dime from it.

<comment><USER4> That's exactly why we can't have nice things...

How about improving it instead of dismantling it?

<comment><USER26> We need financial literacy taught in high school. Imagine a world where people actually understood the basics of how to build wealth instead of a bunch of blathering financial basket cases complaining about tax money being wasted on the poor.</comment></comment></comment>


Evernote blog: WhySQL? - <AUTHOR> http://blog.evernote.com/tech/2012/02/23/whysql/ <comment><USER4> Does anyone have a link to a decent comparison between MySQL and PostgreSQL? I'm really wondering why so many people use MySQL, even though it supports a lot fewer SQL features than PostgreSQL.

<comment><USER5> Simple reliable replication has been a huge differentiator for a long time; enough so to put up with a lot of the other faults of MySQL. Have not revisited Postgres replication in a long time but I have seen that it has been worked on. Anyone with recent experience in both care to explain how the replication of both stacks up in recent versions?

<comment><USER6> _Simple reliable replication_

I cringe every time I read that. MySQL replication is many things, but _it is not reliable_ (as anyone who has used it at scale will confirm).

I think the only reason this myth prevails is because hardly anyone ever actually verifies if their master/slave are in sync. A table checksum can be a real eye-opener here, especially on a deployment that's been running for while and undergone schema changes, restarts, network splits, etc.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Very interesting to see them bucking the trends, I love his closing line:

"But we're relatively satisfied with sharded MySQL storage for Evernote user account metadata, even though that's not going to win any style points from the cool kids."

Indeed, hipsters beware!

</comment><comment><USER8> There are other reasons to choose NoSQL For example, when Craigslist was using mySql and they had to change their schema, it took MONTHS to facilitate the change across all their slaves. You can also have a mixed strategy of using both RDBMS and NoSQL to achieve consistency while being able to be flexible to architecture changes. Lastly- have you looked at total overal cost? Setting up a large cluster with mySql will have a large operational cost and it may not be partition tolerant so if the wrong servers go down, it may cascade to your whole data store.

<comment><USER9> Doing data migrations up front in a NoSQL system means you've changed the fields around in your document types, then you're done. Now 95% of your documents are wrong, missing those changes. Maybe you have linkages between different types of document (akin to a foreign key) - now a lot of those might be pointing to nothing.

In this model, it's the application's job to anticipate and work around these inconsistencies. Assertions that check for data integrity, if you have them, have to be modified to work around this. For a lot of the web applications we talk about these days, who cares - it's people's lists of friends and TODO notes. It's simple data and some dangling records aren't going to hurt anyone.

In the SQL world, we instead write migration scripts that migrate the structure and data all at once. This is a little more work up front, but as long as you stuck to a mostly normalized form and use great tools (which we now have) this is not a big deal ("MONTHS" to migrate across slaves sounds like they had some very wrong decisions made earlier on). The application can move straight to supporting the new structure and entirely forget that the old one existed. In this world, we can also have really complex relationships between fields, like when we're storing accounting or medical data linked to temporal records of changes. The application can consume this structure without worrying about consistency.

<comment><USER10> I think the problem is that when you change a table structure in MySQL, it takes quite a bit of time to do the actual writes. Adding a column tends to force a rewrite of the table. Braindead I know....

I think the problem is that MySQL isn't really a standard SQL-world db. It has some of the advantages of one, but not all of them and some very annoying gotchas.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> It helps that they have a perfectly shardable product I guess.

<comment><USER12> Yes, if you're Google (where any page can link to any other) or Facebook (where a person can friend any other) you wouldn't have this. But lots of businesses that provide software solutions do usually have something that is very localised.

<comment><USER13> It's a bit funny that you use Facebook as an example since they use sharded MySQL as their primary data store.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> tldr - it works, we don't care about "being cool"

<comment><USER12> The true hacker style

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Can anyone explain the following bit: "They're cleanly partitioned into 20 million data separate data sets, one per user."

Does it mean they have a database per user? That can't be right is it?

<comment><USER16> Why not have a database for each user? Evernote's data is partitioned perfectly for that. Notebooks and notes are accessible to one user or are public. There is no sharing notes between users.

<comment><USER17> There is sharing notes between users though - I have several shared notebooks, each holding shared notes.

<comment><USER18> Actually, his idea of a database for each user could still work, even though there is sharing of data between users. Take each database, and turn it into an executable object, which reads/writes its own data, and which communicates with other objects for sharing. It's like taking the actor model of computation, and orienting it for database use. I don't know of any working example of where this has been done, but I don't see why it wouldn't be feasible.

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

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I get where they're coming from, but I do find this to be a little smug :)

See, they haven't run into problems with their setup, as per, MySql 'just works' for them.

What would be interesting and educational (for me anyway) would be a situation where folks that ran into serious problems with their SQL setup despite doing the 'right things' persevered where conventional knowledge would have them switch to a NoSql solution.

tldr; Dog bites man article, would love to hear from someone that actually struggled with a SQL solution and soldiered on.

</comment><comment><USER20> The notebook/note example is weak - in a nosql database you need to design your data structure appropriately to get the level of atomicity you require.

Storing an entire notebook in a single document would be the most obvious. I use postgres all the time and sql is great, but poo-pooing nosql because it wouldn't work with your relational structure is not the best idea. Also - <USER2> have found a hybrid between nosql (mongodb) and sql (postgres) is ideal - <USER3> says you need to use a single database?

<comment><USER21> What about when you want to find all notes that was made a specific day last month (say for a report)?

Traverse all notebook documents and look at each notes date? Good luck with that.

<comment><USER22> Many nosql databases support queries. If you are using one of these then you are in a better place for features like that than you are with heavily shaded SQL.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> If the replication is asynchronous then SQL databases are not durable. So the most important feature of SQL databases generally isn't one.

</comment><comment><USER23> I can imagine that while Evernote has a lot of data to store, it doesn't have the massive amount of concurrent reads that might occur with an equally large web app. Do they publish numbers on read/write usage?

</comment><comment><USER24> The biggest news to me was that they are using MySQL.

</comment><comment><USER25> It's amazing how when you focus on proven (but supposedly boring or old) technology that just works, and works very well, you can devote a lot of other resources to the actual product and usability.

Maybe it's the 30 year old in me showing, but I'm sticking with the 'it just works' crowd. Until some other approach provides a staggeringly overwhelming reason to switch. I find scaling up with MySQL to be ridiculously easy, allowing me to focus my time elsewhere. Ram, bandwidth, and fast storage have gotten substantially cheaper in the last few years, making it that much easier and cost effective to throw hardware at scaling up. For 99.9% of the Web, those hardware resources are expanding in value much faster than traffic is increasing.

(It's understood other developers find it just as easy to take a different approach)

<comment><USER26> It's amazing how when you use recent technology that has been designed and engineered from the ground up for the demands of modern web apps, you can devote a lot of other resources to the actual product and usability.

<comment><USER27> Modern web apps are applications. Applications, over time, run into many problems that SQL database systems were designed to address:

* The occasional join.

* Complex queries.

* Reporting.

* Schema changes.

* Transactions, with options for trading off strictness and performance.

* Performance problems that are easily addressed using stored procedures.

* Performance tuning with minimal code changes (e.g. adding an index to change the execution plan of a complex query).

* Enforcement of invariants regardless of application code.

Why would you give these up for scalability problems you won't have, with 99.999999% probability?

<comment><USER28> _"Why would you give these up for scalability problems you won't have, with 99.999999% probability?"_

I'm not saying people shouldn't use RDBMS', but there are many reasons for using something else:

      - The new databases/stores have different features and use cases. Many include features RDBMS' do not have.
      - Having to use table/column's for everything can be quite unnatural and tiresome.
      - RDBMS' are battle-tested and their pros & cons are well known. But they might also be based on legacy models and truths that simply no longer holds.
      - At least for me, using & learning something new is a big motivation booster :)

Use whatever is right for the job. But one should at least have a general knowledge of whats out there: features, pros & cons etc..

<comment><USER27> "The new databases/stores have different features and use cases. Many include features RDBMS' do not have."

True. My view is that the tradeoff comes out overwhelmingly on the RDBMS side most of the time.

"Having to use table/column's for everything can be quite unnatural and tiresome."

Unnatural in the sense that it is different from the first language you learn, yes. What I find tiresome is low-level, record-at-a-time programming when doing what could be expressed concisely as, say, a 5-way join with aggregation.

"RDBMS' are battle-tested and their pros & cons are well known. But they might also be based on legacy models and truths that simply no longer holds."

I really think you need to learn something about RDBMS fundamentals. Set theory certainly "holds" to this day, and is certainly not legacy. The relational model is clumsy for some kinds of data ( (e.g. time series), but saying that the foundation is obsolete is just objectively false.

"At least for me, using & learning something new is a big motivation booster"

No argument there. But now take the next step and do an objective comparison between old and new. I have no problem with NoSQL systems. I even built one. But for nearly all applications, when you account for a wide set of requirements, (not just what is needed to get the MVP up and running), I think an RDBMS is the right tool.

<comment><USER28> _"What I find tiresome is low-level, record-at-a-time programming when doing what could be expressed concisely as, say, a 5-way join with aggregation"_

Again, that depends on what you are doing. Converting back and forth between rows/tables and, say, data stored in hashes, is tiresome. It's also unnatural when the data doesn't "fit" in the relational model. Of course it works, but writing all this banal sql is not fun.

 _"I really think you need to learn something about RDBMS fundamentals...."_

Right.. I was talking about the software. Maybe "models" is the wrong word.

 _"But now take the next step and do an objective comparison between old and new"_

Believe it's pretty objective already.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> That was the worst "why we still use mysql"-post ever.

</comment><comment><USER30> This article is very weak, they insist a lot on ACID, but those are completely orthogonal concepts from SQL. Most NoSQL products are ACID.

Also, the example itself is very weak as bitdiffusion below pointed out.

<comment><USER31> Good point about SQL not having a lock on ACID. CouchDB in particular is very proud of its out-of-the-box ACID compliance.

People sometimes conflate the DB access approach (document vs relational) with the storage approach (transactional vs warehouse). This may be because the NoSQL poster child, MongoDB, at one point defaulted to a non ACID mode of operation. But you can have a relational DB that's not ACID (MySQL 3) and an object DB that is (Couch).

I was surprised so much of the original article focused on ACID as though it were the biggest selling point for an RDBMS. It seems like the biggest win (right now) is the sheer number of things a typical RDMBS does for you -- not just ACID but also data integrity (foreign key constraints), automatic index creation (mostly), and automated schema changes across many records (ALTER TABLE). The cost, of course, is the up-front effort of fitting your data and app to the relational model.</comment></comment>