Ask HN: I really need your help (resolved) - <AUTHOR> Hacker News -
I'm working on a mobile application called MinoMonsters.  We are using a Ruby EventMachine backend to track behavior, persist user objects, and handle virtual good transactions.
I'm in a very sticky situation.  Our user numbers are exploding off the charts and our backend is failing.  It's silently crashing without leaving a trace.  It's getting into some hard to reproduce states.  The situation is not looking good.
And I need to get it fixed -tonight-.
I am looking for an experienced Ruby dev on a short term contract basis ASAP.  I've set aside a budget to make this happen truly ASAP.  Deep EventMachine experience is highly preferred, as that's the core source of my issues.  San Francisco would be nice, but I'm willing to talk to anyone with the chops to help me fix this.
If you know someone who can help, please reach out.  If you don't, you can help by sharing this post with someone who might.
I can be contacted at email@example.com or by phone (410) 236 - 2894
EDIT:  This is now resolved! Thanks for your help, HN.  You guys are the best. <comment><AUTHOR> Hey guys, thanks a TON for reaching out and helping me get this fixed. Through the efforts of Aman Gupta and my friend Ryan Stout, we were able to track down the source of the problem.

I really appreciate your help!

I promise to write up a blog post talking about my unique setup and how I fucked it up to lead to this problem.

<comment><USER2> I would just like to say how proud I am of this community, that a fellow hacker gets the help they need, when they most need it. Looking forward to that blog post.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Emailed you, hoping to help out in any way possible!

<comment><USER4> people like you make me love HackerNews even more

<comment><USER3> Hah Thanks! I'm always looking to help! (:

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> If by 'silent crashes' you mean the process dies leaving no trace in Rubyland you might want deep OS/C++ expertise moreso than Ruby...

<comment><USER6> His saying that the backend is crashing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> So, what was it? I am very-very curious.

</comment><comment><USER8> Aman Gupta.

</comment><comment><USER9> To the person who fixed the problem: are you putting this on your resumé and if so how are you describing it?

I imagine something like this might be VERY attractive to certain employers.

<comment><USER9> Also, idea for a startup: Fix My Crisis. Advertise jobs like this when your ops go fubar and you need a deep expert to come in and save your ass ASAP. Reward them with cash and/or resumé glory.

<comment><USER10> I could also see this being abused. "Plz hlp!!1 my website stop working don't know why, my teacher need this ASAP". Maybe if you deal with the payment issues up front you could get around this (no one's gonna shell down real money up front unless they have a real problem), but it's something to be figured out.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> it's great to see people come together and help each other out in such short timeframe.

However, one thing i noticed is that the user posting this "teej" is a popular user on HN with a high karma and post count. Do you guys believe that's one of the reason this post got lots of up votes to make it to the front to get the help needed? I'm just thinking, what if someone new had posted this link? would it have gotten buried within the first hour? I sure hope not.

</comment><comment><USER12> I don't know how often HN get trawled, but you might want to think about removing or obfiscating your details, now that your issue is solved.

</comment><comment><USER13> Francis Cianfrocca

</comment><comment><USER14> Bad title: I thought you were dying of starvation and needed urgent donations.

<comment><USER15> Not sure why your comment was downvoted. Indeed, it would have been better if the title was more concrete, such as: "Need the help from an experienced Ruby dev".

Nevertheless, I'm glad he got some helping hands despite the bad title.

<comment><USER14> Me too, its a beauty of HN that folks always get helped.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I'm not a ruby person, and this post by Joe Damato made me want to stay as far away as possible from Ruby -- but perhaps it would be helpful in your case

<http://timetobleed.com/the-broken-promises-of-mrireeyarv/>

<comment><USER16> Would someone who downvoted me (or who understands the downvotes even if they did not downvote) explain the downvote?

I give reference to a site that describes a class of problems that might include the one described by the op. And it is both scary, and inherent to the existing Ruby implementations. And I also mention that this description keeps me even farther away from Ruby than I was.

And I get 5 downvotes (and counting?), and no comment. I'm not new here, and I do find this puzzling.

<comment><USER17> Honestly, It seems to me like it's probably for bad mouthing Ruby without obviously have having used it yourself. Ruby's pretty popular here, I assume that your comment didn't sit well with the Ruby groups here. While my own feelings toward the language are ambiguous, if you flippantly insulted one of my babies (Haskell, Scheme) my knee-jerk reaction might be to downvote you. Hopefully I'd curb it. Despite the fact that you've given some concrete reasons for staying away from Ruby vis-a-vis a link, I think you might have run into a bit of a tl;dr there. You should enumerate your problems with the language in your comments, or risk being downvoted.

<comment><USER18> More to the point the topic wasn't really about obscure bugs in ruby. The backend was failing due to getting slammed which admittedly could make some nasty bugs surface.

What I think the main problem was is that you answered someone in an emergency with a probably unrelated blog link.

<comment><USER16> > The backend was failing due to getting slammed

The original description was "server is crashing without leaving a trace", which sounds like an obscure bug to me -- certainly of the kind described in the article I linked to. It's as related as it can be given the info they gave when they originally posted their query.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


ActiveState Acquires Perl Cloud Company, Phenona, to Accelerate Cloud Strategy - <AUTHOR> http://www.activestate.com/press-releases/activestate-acquires-phenona-perl-cloud-company

<comment><AUTHOR> > _Phenona's 15-year-old founder, Daniil Kulchenko, will join the ActiveState > team part-time since he is still a student in high school._

Damn labor laws! Congrats to Daniil.</comment>


Pythran: a Python to C++ compiler with a focus on scientific computing - <AUTHOR> http://pythonhosted.org/pythran/ <comment><USER3> What is the advantage of doing this compared to writing Fortran (90+) kernels, use F2Py bindings and combining them with NumPy? For HPC you generally need to be able to have full control over compiler flags. Plus, Fortran already has way better multi-dim array handling built-in - NumPy is basically just a wrapper around that.

<comment><USER4> > Plus, Fortran already has way better multi-dim array handling built-in - > NumPy is basically just a wrapper around that.

I don't think either of these statements is true.

Fortran is hard to beat for performance, but from a usability perspective NumPy (and other Python libraries) has some nice features for array-oriented computation that you can't find even in modern Fortran. The most obvious examples are broadcasting [1] and advanced indexing [2].

NumPy itself contains only C, though some SciPy routines wrap Fortran code. Yes, NumPy drew heavy inspiration from Fortran, but it's hardly a wrapper.

[1] [http://docs.scipy.org/doc/numpy/user/basics.broadcasting.htm...](http://docs.scipy.org/doc/numpy/user/basics.broadcasting.html) [2] [http://docs.scipy.org/doc/numpy/reference/arrays.indexing.ht...](http://docs.scipy.org/doc/numpy/reference/arrays.indexing.html)

<comment><USER3> I guess by "indexing" you mean what NumPy calls "advanced indexing". All the basic stuff seems lifted straight from Fortran. But yes, I should probably have been more exact with my statement - NumPy sure has some more helpful syntax that saves some LOC.

<comment><USER4> Yes, I did mean "advanced indexing" \-- I edited my post to clarify.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The problem with a lot of these optimizing tools for Python is that they only support Python 2.7 not Python 3.

<comment><USER6> Not really a problem here as most of science still seems to be using Python 2.

edit: Cython was always great for Python 2 and apparently supports 3. [http://cython.org](http://cython.org)

<comment><USER7> Yeah. I came across C library that used Cython to create Python bindings. It was funny, they could easily support both Python 2 and Python 3 at the same time since all their binding code was in Cython, it was only their installation script witch used an incompatibility (print statement)

<comment><USER8> What was the library?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> So we have CPython which has an ffi and a native implementation of the source interpreter.

We have PyPy which is JIT for Python that emits assembly at runtime though not as successful Cpython for its support.

The complexity class of this problem, without type annotations, namely completely transforming an arbitary Dynamic Python program to a static, partially inferred typed language (C++) is O(N): [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hindley–Milner_type_system](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hindley–Milner_type_system)

The transformations are also not guaranteed to improve runtime performance and might even do the opposite or have side effects for precision and a program that is slower due to generalizations that an algorithm makes.

With type annotations... why, just why? Use C++ or C if you want types and performance gains thereof..nThe potential for bugs and failures is less than relying on an algorithm if you realise the fear and laziness of compiled languages is umfounded.

</comment><comment><USER10> Compare to [https://github.com/shedskin/shedskin](https://github.com/shedskin/shedskin) which does whole program type flow analysis. Shedskin offers excellent performance on numerical workloads.

</comment><comment><USER11> Wel, too bad they did not implement this with python 3, and actually gave some meaning to the type annotations… I mean

def dprod(l0: list[int], l1: list[int]): return sum(x * y for x, y in zip(l0, l1))

Wouldn't it be much nicer?

<comment><USER12> To be brutally honest, they probably couldn't give a flying fuck, I couldn't when I tried. (sorry)

To the number crunchers, Python 3.* offers no compelling reason to move (except for threats, "you are on your own now, 2.7.* will not get updates"). I see two compelling advantages that 3.* offers (i) better abstractions for asynchrony (ii) UTF strings (that exacts a cost even if you don't need them). If you don't need these two there I see no technical reason to move (political/social reasons yes, technical not really).

<comment><USER13> For what it's worth, Python 3 does offer at least 1 compelling reason to move. Multiprocessing lib in python 3 is significantly faster than python 2. My use case is spawning 30-35 worker processes managed by a pool, and recycling them after 5 workloads pass through. The switch from 2.x to 3.x without any code changes, increased my throughput ~150%. Your mileage may vary.

edit: typo

<comment><USER12> Oh! thanks for this, I did not know.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> What does this do that I can't already do with some combination of Numpy, Cython, and Numba?

<comment><USER15> I use numba quite a bit, and with every new version, the developers have notes like:

PR #1970: Optimize the power operator with a static exponent. PR #1961: Support printing constant strings. PR #1927: Support np.linalg.lstsq.

My point being that the developers have to go about re-implementing (in LLVM IR?) features that are very mature in C libraries (e.g. numpy) and similarly C++ libraries.

Could it be that one gain of going from Python to C++ will be that one could take advantage of all the mature libraries that C++ has access to, without having to do this re-inventing of the wheel?

I am not sure, and regardless, I'll be using numba for a long time coming, because...I like the devs, they work hard on it, and numba works like a charm for what I need to do, so I'm not looking for an overkill.

<comment><USER14> That makes sense.

Numba aside, though, it's strange to me that I see no mention of Cython on their project page. They ought to at least acknowledge that other fairly mature products exist in this space.

Also, maybe it's more of a curiosity for you than a practical tool, but Stan (which is becoming the de-facto standard DSL for Bayesian statistics) compiles to C++, where it takes advantage of libraries like Eigen and Boost.

<comment><USER15> That's a really good point---Cython doesn't have the same issues, it's basically Pythran except it compiles to C. Yeah, no clue.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> We do something similar with Bohrium[1]. Bohrium intercepts your NumPy calls and compile a kernel for either CPU, Multicore CPU, or GPU and run that instead. It will also fuse together all NumPy calls until one has a side- effect, that the run-time needs.

We are currently building smart filters into it as well, so that we can do byte-code optimizations.

[1] [https://github.com/bh107/bohrium](https://github.com/bh107/bohrium)

</comment><comment><USER17> As I once discussed with a friend of mine, once you remove semicolons, and give spacing a syntactic and semantic value, you almost have FORTRAN... this is just the icing on the cake :¬)

</comment><comment><USER18> (updated, see comment below) There used to be another python to c++ compiler called "shed skin" it did quite a literal translation, fe python classes would turn into c++ classes and it was quite readable.....

but utterly useless: a python integer would be translated into a c++ int. Where python automatically starts using a wider type this one would just wrap.

<comment><USER19> Are you sure you're not thinking of some other project? As far as I recall unladen swallow always targeted LLVM and was a JIT compiler rather than a AoT compiler.

<comment><USER18> you are right! it was "shed skin".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Wondering how does it compare to Cython?

</comment><comment><USER21> What's the difference between this and nuitka?

<comment><USER19> The big one seems to be that pythran is targeting only a subset of python with the goal of getting faster performance, while Nuitka is aims at being able to compile all valid python programs (currently only up to python 3.4), but in doing so it has fewer opportunities for optimization and thus gives you slower performance than pythran. Pythran also introduces its own type annotation system you have to use if you want to get good performance.

So If you write a python program that is compatible with pythran, then pythran will almost certainly be much faster than nuitka. If however you take a random python program it will almost certainly compile with Nuitka and almost certainly not compile with pythran.

<comment><USER22> No idea why they could not contribute some patches to nuitka to make it do exactly that. Because further down the road it is the goal of nuitka - <USER2> natively compile as much as possible.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Reminds me of JavaCPP: [https://github.com/bytedeco/javacpp](https://github.com/bytedeco/javacpp)</comment>


Burmese pythons in Florida - <AUTHOR> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burmese_pythons_in_Florida#Risk_assessment <comment><USER2> There is an estimated 50–60 hippos in Colombia. A drug lord had some hippos in his private zoo, which police raided some time in the 1990s, and the hippos were released into the wild. They are apparently doing well in the lakes and forests in that area of Colombia.

[http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-27905743](http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-27905743)

</comment><comment><USER3> This is a pretty severe ecological disaster in Florida so far. They have wiped out the mid-tier mammals (raccoons, bobcats, etc) where ever they have spread. It remains to be seen the impact on other parts of the ecosystem there.

</comment><comment><USER4> Cobra effect [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cobra_effect](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cobra_effect)</comment>


Stanford researchers find lead in turmeric - <AUTHOR> https://news.stanford.edu/2019/09/24/lead-found-turmeric/ <comment><USER2> >The researchers did not find direct evidence of contaminated turmeric beyond Bangladesh, and they point out that food safety checks by the importing countries have incentivized large-scale Bangladesh spice processors to limit the amount of lead added to turmeric destined for export. However, the researchers caution, "the current system of periodic food safety checks may catch only a fraction of the adulterated turmeric being traded worldwide." In fact, since 2011, more than 15 brands of turmeric – distributed to countries including the U.S. – have been recalled due to excessive levels of lead.

<comment><USER3> >In fact, since 2011, more than 15 brands of turmeric – distributed to countries including the U.S. – have been recalled due to excessive levels of lead.

I could not find references about this one, but I found:

Ground Turmeric as a Source of Lead Exposure in the United States [https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5415259/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5415259/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I've noticed turmeric is increasingly used as a natural colorant in the US. This makes me a bit worried about lead slipping through, with turmeric being used in that way.

</comment><comment><USER5> Why can't researchers also find a smart way to put restrictions on business and corporations killing the nature?

Man, first we will have to put some moral-science as their mandatory subject to clear..

</comment><comment><USER6> Forwarded the article to a friend who relies on Turmeric already knew about it and claimed it was "big Pharma" trying to discredit alternative medicine through innuendo and flat out lies.

As with most things, the truth is probably somewhere in the middle.

</comment><comment><USER7> Turmeric from India is loaded with lead as well - including the Organic kind.

<comment><USER8> If you have proof, you should provide it.

<comment><USER7> There were articles year ago, but here's one [0] I found quickly, which lists at least 2 Indian importers. Given that even most generics made in India are contaminated and often - recall, I can't trust anything coming from a corrupt country.

[0]: [https://europepmc.org/backend/ptpmcrender.fcgi?accid=PMC5415...](https://europepmc.org/backend/ptpmcrender.fcgi?accid=PMC5415259&blobtype=pdf)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> It has been traditionally used in India for its anti-inflammatory properties for centuries.</comment>


Solidarity against online harassment - <AUTHOR> https://blog.torproject.org/blog/solidarity-against-online-harassment

<comment><USER2> kudos to the tor project team for taking a stand on this issue</comment>


Guns: A Second (Amendment) Look  - <AUTHOR> http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/national/longterm/supcourt/stories/courtguns051095.htm

<comment><USER2> This "article" is complete crap. It assumes that you can somehow translate "the right of the people" to "the right of the state". That is only possible if words have no meaning.

The Constitution uses the phrase "right of the people" 3 times...

A1> ...or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

A2> ...the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.

A4> The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated...

Believing that they didn't actually mean "the people" in Amendment 2, but meant it everywhere else, is convenient but not rational.

</comment><comment><USER3> This article is old. The supreme court bas since ruled in Heller that the 2nd Amendment does in fact confer a right to own firearms.</comment>


Gates Foundation, WHO, NIH, and Wuhan Institute of Virology Hacked - <AUTHOR> https://anewspost.com/anonymous-hacks-bill-gates-foundation-who-and-wuhan-lab-releases-email-addresses-and-passwords/ <comment><USER2> It looks like a load of rubbish. Half the links loop back to that same post. No corroboration, no proof, quoting a source that contradicts the claims made in the post.</comment>


Honda Motor Company leaks database with 134M rows of employee computer data - valiant-comma https://rainbowtabl.es/2019/07/31/honda-motor-company-leak/ <comment><AUTHOR> Good work!

What I personally find "unbelievable" is that one needs to go to Twitter to find contacts (a human) or the security team.

I mean, how difficult can it be (or how much does it cost) to have a "security@company_name.com" mail address and actually monitor it (particularly for large companies that actually have a security team)?

On a very minor-minor scale, a few years ago, while I was looking for some information on the settings of a router, I happened to find out (no Shodan, a normal google search) a number of instances of that given router "homepage" that were:

1) accessible from the internet

2) set with "admin" as password

All in all I found some twenty or so of those, since the model was more "soho" than "enterprise" I managed to contact all the people at the "small firms" involved, the exception were two (large, international) companies. In the end I found a way to contact one of the two, the other one was simply impossible.

</comment><comment><USER2> Great job, @xxdesmus.

I was surprised to figure out kibana doesn't have any access authorisation out of the box, which results in cases like this in companies, where security is treated poorly (by large, most of japanese companies).

</comment><comment><USER3> Author of the post here -- happy to answer any questions.</comment>


US military cloud bidders will have to submit their proposals by hand, on DVD - <AUTHOR> https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/09/27/dods_jedi_program/ <comment> java-man wrapped in a wad of cash i presume?</comment>


THC: compact home automation framework in Tcl - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/Drolla/thc <comment><USER2> Always nice to see TCL work.</comment>


Essence of linear algebra – YouTube video series by 3Blue1Brown - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLZHQObOWTQDPD3MizzM2xVFitgF8hE_ab <comment><USER2> I've been following the author posting these on reddit. These are some of the best animations of linear algebra I've ever seen by a large margin. I really hope the author draws some encouragement from all the praise he's getting because I don't think I'll be satisfied with a dozen linear algebra videos alone.

</comment><comment><USER3> Animation code available? Check.

[https://github.com/3b1b/manim](https://github.com/3b1b/manim)</comment>


Show HN: Codr.cc - <AUTHOR>

I finished building Codr.cc last night.
Codr is a code snippets sharing website much like pastie or snipt.org, but with a few innovations. First is that it autodetects the language and highlights it accordingly.
The second, killer feature, is that it allows you to create snippets from files on your computer. You can select a file using the file browser, or you can drag and drop it into the site.
The app will read its contents and create a snippet from it - ready to share.
--
Now, I'm a college student in need of some quick cash. Recently I sold wrttn.in rather quickly thanks to HN, and I began to wonder if I could make a few hundred extra bucks a month by doing what I love (creating nifty webapps like this one) and selling them at relatively low prices.
Codr was a fun experiment but my intention is to sell it as fast as possible, so if you're interested in buying it, e-mail me at firstname.lastname@example.com or leave a comment below. If it doesn't work I guess I'll keep it and grow it.
--
Let me know what you think! <comment><USER2> I posted a small python snippet. Highlighted version works fine, but the raw version strips the leading whitespace, which is rather important in this case. (See: <http://codr.cc/57F58EAAED>)

<comment><USER3> Would the creator be able to add in a copy function to the highlighted code to remove the line numbers?

<comment><AUTHOR> The line numbers don't get copied to the clipboard when you copy and paste from the highlighted version.

<comment><USER4> But when you're highlighting the code to copy, the line numbers get highlighted which doesn't inspire much confidence

<comment><USER5> What browser are you using? If it helps this behavior is NOT repeatable on windows in FF3.6, IE8, BUT observable in Chrome 9.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Nice little site. I like the simplicity of it. A couple of points:

\- It is not immediately clear to me (FF3.6, Ubuntu) that it is a textarea above the Create Code button on the frontpage.

\- Marking the code and then pasting it in Ubuntu gives me all the code on one line (both ctrl-c/ctrl-v and mark/middlebutton).

\- The privacy model doesn't seem obvious to me when I'm on the frontpage. Is the stuff I post public, semi-public or private? If the privacy model is public a listing of the latest or most linked code snippets could be an idea.

\- I miss a link to the frontpage when I've looked at a code snippet.

</comment><comment><USER5> Worked as expected. Only thought would be shortening the "shortened" URL? I'm making some assumptions about what you're doing here but having 10 chars, assuming only A-Z, 0-9, (36 possible chars), gives the capacity for an unnecessarily large number of snippets.

Unless I'm half-awake at the moment, a 5 char string still yields more than 60 million possibilities, and shaves 5 chars off the URL for twitter etc.

<comment><USER7> I think it's more like a hash than a "shortened" URL. Kind of like thingler.com

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> When I click "Create Code" I get an error.

<comment><AUTHOR> Must be because the field is empty. The space there is actually a textarea.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Are there any good books on statistical quant analysis? - <AUTHOR> I'm looking to build an experimental trading system over the summer and was wonder if anybody knows of a good statistical quant book, something relating stats back to finance would be preferable<p>Thanks <comment><USER2> Some good ones that I would check out are 1.) The Econometrics of Financial Markets (Campbell, Lo, MacKinlay) and 2.) Time Series Analysis (Hamilton). Note that I would check these out from a library before buying them as they are pretty advanced.

That said, it really depends on what types of assets you are looking to trade. At the risk of stating the obvious if you are doing any type of derivatives, you'll need pricers and data for those.

As a start, look for what is the easiest way to obtain a near complete data set and go from there. Good luck!

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm just looking to create the system and then simulate running it. Have you had any expereince in doing this type of thing?

<comment><USER2> Emailed your profile email. Thank you.</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Is Lighttable dead? - <AUTHOR> The last commit on Github was was almost a year ago and their last blog post was in Jan 2017.<p>What is a good alternative to Lighttable for Clojure development, aside from Vim and Emacs? <comment><USER2> I'm making a clojure editor with an instaREPL. It runs by embedding it in your project as a dependency rather than a separate application. Not hugely featureful but it might fit your needs:

[https://sekao.net/nightlight/](https://sekao.net/nightlight/)

</comment><comment><USER3> IntelliJ Idea + Cursive.</comment>


NFL Bans Twitter Before, During and After Football Games - <AUTHOR> http://www.devtopics.com/nfl-bans-twitter-before-during-and-after-football-games/ <comment><USER2> Just to clarify, the ban only applies 90 minutes before a game, through the game and ends after the official post-game media time.

And this will last. Remember this is a league that mandates players stay in hotels and have a curfew the night before games, even for home games...

<comment><USER3> There are also a limited number of players, and those players are employed only by the good graces of the league. In the case of broadcast, there are a very limited number of distributors, and they distribute live images of the game. In the case of Youtube, a larger number of people are broadcasting delayed images of the game. The ban, by comparison, affects millions of users describing, textually, what is happening.

That's like the RIAA attempting to sue you for humming a song being played by the performers in Miami tonight. I'm not saying it won't last, just that it won't stick.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> "Internet sites may not post detailed information that approximates play-by- play during a game."... "The NFL has strict regulations on who can report what from its games."

When will major organizations realize that these new-fangled web tools actually increase the value of the organization through user/fan involvement? Probably won't happen for a while...

</comment><comment><USER5> Won't last. The NFL will come to its senses soon enough. After all, the NFL isn't popular because of the games themselves, it's popular because of what it really is: gossip for men. The beat writers don't understand the game, the announcers certainly don't understand the game, hell, half the coaches don't understand the game.

But what are NFL fans really interested in? Who's injured. Who has the best statistics. Who's on the schedule? Can we get a good seat at the sports bar? What's the spread in the game? Who's dating a hot model? Did T.O. fart today? How's my fantasy team doing? (Honestly, go to any sports bar on a Sunday afternoon and see how many guys are watching 5 games at once just to see how their individual players are doing.)

When the players go on strike and unknown replacements play, no one cares. Fans care about the players and all their exploits, on the field and off. Twitter would be the perfect addition to the media phenomenon that the NFL has already become. Guys who pay $200 for seats, $100 for a day at the sports bar, and gamble away all their discretionary income will salivate over tweets. It's only a matter of time.

<comment><USER6> I don't know what shitty "football fans" you've been hanging out with, but you need to find some better ones.

<comment><USER7> What is a true football fan by your definition?

<comment><USER6> I have no interest in laying out a definition for a "true football fan", but "someone who likes to watch football" is a good place to start.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> That won't stop Ochocinco.

<comment><USER9> Chad Ochocinco, formerly known as Chad Johnson, is famous for nicknaming himself "Ocho Cinco", wearing the name "Ocho Cinco" on his jersey because he thought it would be funny, getting fined by the NFL, and then _legally changing his last name to Ochocinco just to get away with wearing it on his jersey_.

The joke was on him though--due to legal obligations with the manufacturer of the jersey, he had to wear the "C. Johnson" jersey for a full year after he changed his last name to Ochocinco, since they had to get rid of inventory of Johnson jerseys.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> How exactly do you send tweets while "playing" football?

<comment><USER11> Active players on the sidelines, during timeouts, and between periods can still easily be considered to be "playing" the game-in-progress, even for those moments they are not strictly "in play" or "on the field".

But you could even imagine -- with a team's permission for promotional purposes -- that players with helmet radios could dictate tweets to someone else.

<comment><USER6> > But you could even imagine -- with a team's permission for promotional > purposes -- that players with helmet radios could dictate tweets to someone > else.

That would never happen, not in any foreseeable reality.

<comment><USER11> After things like live player-helmet and umpire cameras, I don't think you can be so sure. About those cams:

<http://www.cbssports.com/info/about/press/2000/nfle>

Sure, it'd be banal -- "we really need to make this 3rd and long"... "my linemen are doing a great job today"... etc. -- but it could happen.

And if not on Twitter, it could be official league-sanctioned Facebook status updates, etc. as part of some other promotional tie-in with the league websites or cable network.

And if not the NFL, a scrappy upstart, like the UFL or new USFL or AAFL could try it.

<comment><USER6> Ah yes, when you put it like that I could see it happening easy, at least in an "NFL Films" or "mic'd up" kind of way where the player is only passively taking part.

My reaction was to the word "dictate" really, the idea of a player (which would have to be the QB) actively twittering in-game while on the field, eg actually saying "hey coach, tell twitter we're going to go long and school the Browns secondary".

As for non-NFL leagues, well I wouldn't put anything past them, they have no brand to protect so they'll try anything.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Sounds like a target for some startup to topple.

<comment><USER13> The NFL has proven very resilient. It absorbed the All-American Conference about 1950, the AFL in the 1960s. The USFL sort of hung on in the 1980s until Donald Trump decided to go head-to-head with a fall schedule.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> OT: fellow yanks, watching a single game of Rugby Union, say, All Blacks vs Wallabies, will let you see NFL 'athletes' for the panty waisted, overpaid, timeouting-begging wussies they really are. _Pathetic_.

<comment><USER15> Australian rules football seemed even more interesting to me than Rugby. It seemed a bit faster and with more movement.

<comment><USER16> And the umpires wear spiffier duds.</comment></comment></comment>


Kestrel: Twitter's new message queue, written in 1500 lines of Scala - <AUTHOR> http://github.com/robey/kestrel/

<comment><AUTHOR> More details on the additional features over Starling (big queues, blocking fetches, reliable fetch) are over here: <http://robey.lag.net/2008/11/27/scarling-to-kestrel.html></comment>


Olympic organisers shut down "Space hijackers" protest Twitter account - <AUTHOR> http://blog.indexoncensorship.org/2012/05/23/olympic-organisers-shut-down-space-hijackers-protest-twitter-account/

<comment><USER2> Related: <http://www.protestlondon2012.com/10reasons.html>

<comment> excuse-me Simple solution - here is a list of London 2012 sponsors, just avoid them and their products. [http://www.london2012.com/about-us/the-people-delivering- the...](http://www.london2012.com/about-us/the-people-delivering-the- games/olympic-partners/index.html)

If you are a business customer just tell them that you aren't buying from them because you don't like the olympics attitude. Then wherever-the-f __* 2016 will have a little more difficulty finding suckers.

<comment><USER3> > Then wherever-the-f* 2016 will have a little more difficulty finding > suckers.

You think? Somehow I don't imagine BP or P&G or Cisco saying 2016 Olymipcs committee: "sorry, we couldn't sponsor you anymore, that excuse-me guy from Hacker News really got us in the tough spot, so we have to choose between being associated one of most watched and admired events in the world and his business, so we can't really do anything here. Maybe in 2020..." Olympics are popular, probably vastly more popular than the Hijackers bunch, that describe themselves as "We're a bunch of fuck-wits". I have nothing against them having their fun, provided they don't hurt anybody, but given the existing trademark laws, it is hard to expect a different outcome. And if you plan to boycott every business that defends their trademark, you have a lot of boycotting to do...

<comment> excuse-me Companies are extremely sensitive to their public image and want the sports they sponsor to match that.

Formula 1's image used to be exclusive/glamour/rich and so had Rolex type sponsors. Then when tobacco adverts were banned it went after young/adventure/excitement types. But do RedBull really want their cool/hip/trendy young customers in Seattle to picture RedBull with police shooting democracy protesters at the Bahrain GP?

For example, IBM sponsor golf - Apple don't. IBM's customers don't care that the golf tournament is being held at a course that doesn't let women in - Apple's certainly would!

BP - frankly they could put baby seals into a wood chipper on national television without damaging their public image!

But CISCO are the most vulnerable to image. Up to now they sold to big business who just bought on a salesman's word. But now they are trying to be the face of the internet to regular buyers. Having their name plastered across news reports about visitors to the olympics being banned from posting twitter/youtube/facebook doesn't look so good.

<comment><USER3> Nobody was banned from posting to twitter. What was banned is the use of specific image - similar to registered trademark. And somebody like Cisco has nothing to do with it, so you are trying to build a chain starting with event that did not happen and going to the people that had no connection.

<comment><USER2> You're playing with words. An _account_ definitely was banned/blocked/suspended/whatever due to "the use of a specific image". But it's the account that was blocked, not the image as you imply.

<comment><USER3> No I am not. "Banned from twitter" means that person/organisation was prohibited from using Twitter. That is not what happened - account was temporarily suspended because of the usage of trademarked image (not because of its ownership or content) and if they stop using the trademarked image they could post to twitter as much as they wish. Nobody censors them because they offended the mighty 1% (these constant knee-jerk allegations really are getting tiresome). Their account is suspended for using trademark that doesn't belong to them - that would happen with any trademark in any situation. Try using Coca-Cola logo in your twitter account and if Coca-Cola learns about it your account most probably will be suspended. Not because Coca-Cola hates you but because you're using their trademark.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Why disable the account rather than just notifying them and asking them to change the logo?

I had a parody twitter account which was accused of trademark infringement last year. Twitter just asked me to change the logo to make it more clear that it wasn't the official one (I changed the shape of it rather than just one of the words), and everything carried on as normal. The whole thing was over in a couple of days and my account stayed online the whole time.

</comment><comment><USER5> The rules around the olympics branding extends further than normal laws. There are guidelines even on referring to the games and athletes. The fact they are using a variation of the official logo is rights for a challenge. However shutting the account is a bit far. Is this in breach of twitter terms and conditions?

Edit: Their account is temporarily suspended and not shutdown. If they change the branding and verify their account they will be reinstated.

<comment><USER6> Combinations of "summer" and "2012" can cause problems. See the BBC 3 tv programme needing to be called "Twenty Twelve" to avoid trouble.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Nice article on the behind the scenes of the London Games in Vanity Fair: [http://www.vanityfair.com/culture/2012/06/international- olym...](http://www.vanityfair.com/culture/2012/06/international-olympic- committee-london-summer-olympics#?currentPage=all)

 _As Livingstone prepared to sign, he paused for a moment. Then he looked up at the I.O.C.'s executive director, Gilbert Felli, who was standing by his side, and said, "My lawyers advised me not to sign this contract. But I don't suppose I've got any choice, have I?"

"No," Felli answered, "you haven't, really."_

</comment><comment><USER8> The heavy handed enforcement of trademark and brand around the olympics is insane. Though on the other hand, this [http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/apr/22/olympics...](http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/apr/22/olympics- thank-god-for-sponsors)

</comment><comment><USER9> I believe unless you are officially a sponsor for the games, or have recieved permission to use branding, you may not use the phrases "2012 Olympics", "Olympic Games" or "London 2012". There was a hotel had to change it's advertising to "Need rooms for the big event this summer" or something allong the lines because they weren't an official sponsor. And a Cafe had to change it's name from "Cafe Olympic" to "Cafe Lympic" [1]

From the 2012 Olympics "Using The Brand FAQ" [2]

>4\. Who is allowed to use the Games' Marks? Official commercial partners, sponsors, suppliers and licensees are allowed to use the Games' Marks in accordance with the terms of their agreements with LOCOG or the IOC. See our current partners. > >We have also granted a number of non-commercial partners helping to deliver the Games the right to use our brand. This includes central government departments, the Greater London Authority and boroughs hosting various events for the Games.

So it's more likely than anything they were taken down just for using the Olympic name and modified logo

[1] <http://www.businessweek.com/ap/2012-05/D9UTL52G0.htm> [2] [http://www.london2012.com/about-us/our-brand/using-the- brand...](http://www.london2012.com/about-us/our-brand/using-the- brand/index.html#who%20allowed%20to%20use%20Games%20Marks)

<comment> excuse-me So no political reason at all then?

A bit like the Anti-Nazi league, presumably Nazi is a registered trademark of "3rd Reich inc" and so they should be banned for copyright infringement.

<comment><USER9> I'm sure there is/would be a political reason, but it's most likely some marketing person refreshing a Google alert feed then (metaphorically) hammering anything that isn't one of their official sponsors. Just a theory

<comment> excuse-me So no reason to push through amazing legislation that bans the use of phrases like London / Summer / 2012 / Games to such a ridiculous degree?

"This legislation offers a special level of protection to the Games and their sponsors over and above that already promised by existing copyright or contract law. A breach of these acts will not only give rise to a civil grievance, but is a criminal offence."

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> This twitter account <https://twitter.com/#!/london20l2> may be of interest to people reading this thread. It appears to have been setup by people involved with Space Hijackers, though that is not totally clear...

<comment><USER10> Also <https://twitter.com/#!/charltonbrooker> has been trolling them for some time now. He's a very popular figure so if they send him a takedown notice then it will suddenly become a big issue.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Well, I'm just hoping they arrest Lisa Simpson for 'acting like a logo' lol

</comment><comment><USER12> Bow to the O-word overlords or we'll chunk you in jail.

I live in London and the city has turned to shit since it was announced. Everything is literally broken and being fixed up and convered in turd polish.

The last 5 times I've bothered to commute in rather than sitting on my arse at home, the public transport is screwed.

</comment><comment><USER13> You mean the 2012™ London™ Summer™ Olympic™ Games™?

<comment><USER14> Sir, you are going to have to come with us.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Their logo looks pretty close to the Olympics one. So twitter really doesn't have much choice unless they want to risk a lawsuit - which they do not. Olympics guys probably don't have much choice too - TM laws require the owner to defend the trademark or lose it. The SJ guys would have to create their own logo.

<comment><USER14> Comeon, the IOC is by far the most aggressive ip owner in the world, even counting all other sports events. It s more Like "protecting the rights of Adidas to say I sponsor Olympics" than protecting the ancient Olympia

<comment><USER3> Any data that support this claim that they are the most agressive IP owner among all?

<comment><USER14> [http://www.blogherald.com/2008/08/25/the-most-aggressive- cop...](http://www.blogherald.com/2008/08/25/the-most-aggressive-copyright- holders/) [http://www.cpaglobal.com/newlegalreview/4909/marketers_warne...](http://www.cpaglobal.com/newlegalreview/4909/marketers_warned_don_t_play_ga) <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olympic_symbols> [http://www.guardian.co.uk/sport/2012/apr/13/olympics-2012-br...](http://www.guardian.co.uk/sport/2012/apr/13/olympics-2012-branding- police-sponsors)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> _Update:_ The account has been reinstated. <https://twitter.com/spacehijackers>.

The protestors couldn't have asked for a better aid to their cause than the suspension.

</comment><comment><USER14> It is universally known that the members of the Olympic (tm) (r) (truly sorry) Commitees would gladly kill their mother to protect their intellectual property (which the ancient Greeks built but who cares).

</comment><comment> mkr-hn I could see changing the logo, but shutting the account down was too much. I doubt the account itself had any content related to the Olympics aside from the logo.

</comment><comment><USER15> Does anybody know which logo it was? The five rings one or the Lisa Simpson one? I want to change my Twitter theme.

<comment><USER8> these are the logo files they're using <http://www.protestlondon2012.com/images/banner_ads.png> it's a parody of the main crazy rave rendering of 2012 that is used by all the olympic related things.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Why are they not selling those t-shirts?!

</comment><comment><USER17> It's an act of petty, vindictive censorship because the Olympic Committee are legitimately defending their trademark ?

Wow. Way to give the legitimate and serious issues around censorship a bad name.

<comment><USER18> You can be a good legal citizen and a huge jerk at the same time. These are just different domains. There is no causation that if you are acting within your legal rights you're exempt from moral responsibility.</comment></comment>


Web Frameworks Benchmark 2015 - <AUTHOR> http://www.infoq.com/news/2015/04/web-frameworks-benchmark-2015

<comment><AUTHOR> lwan looks really awesome. I will give it a try</comment>


Facebook's GraphQL gets its own open-source foundation - <AUTHOR> https://techcrunch.com/2018/11/06/facebooks-graphql-gets-its-own-open-source-foundation/ <comment><USER2> I did a huge heads down on GraphQL vs AppSync vs Firebase for an app I'm building around document collaboration, annotation and sync for people working with PDFs and web content ([https://getpolarized.io/](https://getpolarized.io/)) - it's kind of like an offline web browser.... anyway.

GraphQL is super awesome at what it does but it's definitely not designed for rapid prototyping applications.

The thing about GraphQL is that it's middleware. It's designed to act as really nice glue between multiple backends.

It solves a lot of nice problems like over-fetching too much data, calling too many APIs, etc.

The problem is that you really don't need these to get an app shipped immediately.

The REAL sweet spot for GraphQL is for a company like Netflix or Facebook where you have 1500 APIs and tons of problems with data over-fetch and you have the time to sit down and do things right.

I think I'm going to end up going with Firebase just because you can bang something out FAST and get it shipped.

It's not going to be perfect but you can ship an MVP and start making revenue and/or grow your user base while you figure things out.

<comment><USER3> GraphQL to REST is a more typical comparison. In this case: designing a GraphQL API is substantially easier to both make and consume; while REST just tells you "here's some guidelines, now go do it however you want", GraphQL enforces a much more consistent view of how an API should look, while allowing clients much more freedom in how they get the data they need.

Where you start running into issues is the surrounding tooling. Integrating a typical REST API into an APM monitoring solution is a cinch, because all of these tools know how to read the incoming requests, HTTP methods, paths, bodies, etc. With GraphQL, you might be left building glue for your APM tool of choice, or just using the highly limited, but at least specialized, Apollo Engine. Enforcing strict rate limiting is easy with REST; very difficult with GraphQL due to how complex and free-form queries are.

Optimizing your backend to support those free-form queries is also (I dare say _intractably_ ) difficult; I haven't seen a single backend framework which doesn't actively encourage an N+1 problem on any query which returns multiple objects of data. AppSync as well, my god is that an evil play from AWS; if you've got separate lambda functions serving all the different nodes in your graph, a single query could trigger dozens, or even hundreds, of invocations. Combine that with their guidance to use Aurora Serverless and any casual observer might say that they're actively exploiting the unfortunate ignorance of an engineer trying to jump on the latest trends.

I don't believe any of these things are problems with GraphQL. I think they're issues with ecosystem immaturity, and I hope they get better over time. Frankly, every single backend library I've used sucks; its designed to be awesome on the frontend, and it is.

I think you're right that, right now, its best suited to large organizations. Large organizations can engineer around all of its issues and extract a LOT of value from it. Medium organizations are almost immediately going to run into ecosystem immaturity and scaling issues. Small organizations are going to get the most value from an "all in one" solution, whether that's Firebase, or a simple REST API on App Engine, or something like that.

But I could be wrong in my analysis that its not a core issue with GraphQL, and there are subtle complexities with the API definition language which make scaling it for anyone who isn't Facebook intractable. Time will tell.

<comment><USER4> > I haven't seen a single backend framework which doesn't actively encourage > an N+1 problem on any query which returns multiple objects of data

Well then you haven't really looked :)

[https://join-monster.readthedocs.io/en/latest/](https://join- monster.readthedocs.io/en/latest/)

[https://github.com/graphile/postgraphile](https://github.com/graphile/postgraphile)

[https://www.prisma.io/](https://www.prisma.io/)

[https://subzero.cloud/](https://subzero.cloud/)

These are all examples of tools/libs that implement a graphql api without a N+1 issue

<comment><USER3> Those are great resources. But all of them appear to be tightly coupled with a SQL storage backend. That's valuable, but what I believe the ecosystem needs is a generic system which can "pre-compile" a GraphQL query into a backend language data structure which the developer can then transpose into a database query.

I think Facebook's Dataloader is more close to a solution.

<comment><USER5> PostGraphile is built on Graphile Engine which is completely backend- independent (like GraphQL itself). This is what we use in PostGraphile for the "look-ahead" functionality, allowing you to build a database/API/backend query that represents a full GraphQL query as one action. You can read more about it here, though it's currently not as well documented as PostGraphile itself. [https://www.graphile.org/graphile-build/](https://www.graphile.org/graphile- build/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> As someone who knows a few of the folks involved in this foundation, I think this is a real net positive for everyone who builds GraphQL APIs and is involved in improving the ecosystem.

</comment><comment><USER7> I remember when I was at RealNetworks a long time ago and Microsoft and Real were competing over the future of multimedia languages (SMIL vs HTML+Time). I was on some of the standardization committees and remember being surprised when some of my colleagues suggested that standardization was used by companies like MS to slow down the innovation process (and catch up to faster starts like RealNetworks had made). I wonder how often open source foundations serve the same purpose, or if these are truly embraced by companies like Facebook? Is there a reason internally Facebook would have fought something like this? Is it all roses?

<comment><USER8> Generalization of Hanlen's razor: Never attribute to malice what can be explained by laziness/greed/stupidity.

FB has GraphQL stable and doing exactly what they want it to do. Now they can pass it off to a foundation for maintenance and blame without having to pay out of pocket.

<comment><USER9> GraphQL isn't a system per-say, it's a spec and many tools around it. Putting the spec in a foundation (with a few of those tools) gives the entire community certainty about the direction of the project. Hopefully that spurs more people outside of FB to commit to GraphQL.

The existence of the foundation is orthogonal to FB's internal investment and usage of GraphQL, which was and will continue to be significant.

<comment><USER10> >"per-say" -> "per se"

Right pronunciation, but it's Latin. :)

<comment><USER9> Thanks! At least I learned something today.

<comment><USER11> per se = "in and by itself"

Having given tutoring in Latin when I was 15, I'm always dying a little inside if I'm reading "per say".

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Both Swagger (Open API Spec) and GraphQL are now part of the Linux Foundation! That's cool!

</comment><comment><USER13> I'm not a big fan of GraphQL. Its main benefit is for serverless which I am also not a fan of. It shifts all the control to the client and makes the server generic which actually takes away flexibility overall.

</comment><comment><USER14> Are there good alternatives to Apollo at all?

<comment><USER15> There's lots of alternatives, but whether they are good or not depends on your use case:

\- Relay by Facebook, it's own GraphQL client: [https://facebook.github.io/relay/](https://facebook.github.io/relay/)

\- Urql by FormidableLabs, an effort to build a simple React GraphQL client that covers the 80% use case: [https://github.com/FormidableLabs/urql](https://github.com/FormidableLabs/urql)

\- GraphQL Request by Prisma, a minimal, universal GraphQL client: [https://github.com/prisma/graphql-request](https://github.com/prisma/graphql- request)

Plus a variety of smaller ones like Lokka ([https://github.com/kadirahq/lokka](https://github.com/kadirahq/lokka)), FetchQL ([https://github.com/gucheen/fetchql](https://github.com/gucheen/fetchql)) and micro-graphql-react ([https://github.com/arackaf/micro-graphql- react](https://github.com/arackaf/micro-graphql-react)).

It's all about the tradeoffs you want to make: if you're building a React app your can't go wrong with Relay or Urql, if you're writing one-off (universal) scripts graphql-request is probably your best choice, etc.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Oh great, an ad that covers the entire page on mobile. Guess I'm not reading this article then.

<comment><USER17> I don't think they care if you read the article. They just care that you saw the ad.

<comment><USER18> Sums up 90% of news websites. Content gets upvoted because of the title and the few that do click through get attacked by ads.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> About time.

</comment><comment><USER20> N+1

<comment><USER21> DataLoader

<comment><USER22> abandoned

<comment><USER23> It's a pretty simple library, does it need commits every month to prove that you should still use it?

<comment><USER22> code rot is a thing

<comment><USER23> It is, but it's not a universal rule. In the 2+ years I actively used Dataloader (not using GraphQL-JS right now), I had one feature request which got implemented, but other than that it was perfectly stable and fit for use.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Great. Another solution for an already-solved, already-standardized query API language (SPARQL).

<comment><USER25> SPARQL demands a certain data model (triple stores). Also, everything about it smells like ivory-tower academic snobbery + ultra-large-enterprise crap. GraphQL does neither.

<comment><USER24> GraphQL also demands a certain data model. Just that it is not standardized. And no, RDF/XML is not the only representation for SPARQL. It can deal also with JSON.

<comment><USER26> GraphQL has no demands on your data model. You can do whatever you want behind the schema you provide to client apps

<comment><USER24> I think you should read it directly from the website: "GraphQL is a query language for your API, and a server-side runtime for executing queries by using a type system you define for your data." You need a type system to bypass the datamodel. Just pushing the issue around.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


I Botched a Perl 6 Release - <AUTHOR> http://perl6.party/post/I-Botched-A-Perl-6-Release-And-Now-A-Robot-Is-Taking-My-Job <comment><USER2> Maybe it's just me, but I've worked with a handful of source control systems over the years, and none of them (not even git) has done a terrific job of encapsulating the #1 scenario, which is "I copied some stuff locally and changed it and now I want to put it back on the server so other people can get my stuff (and of course I want undo in case I mess up and merge in case we both change the same file)" without inventing their own special opaque language and concepts for everything. We all intuitively understand file systems somehow but with source control it's way too easy to miss something subtle and end up with a steaming pile of merge conflicts, broken pulls, incomplete fetch requests, unpublished tags, and borked integrations instead of your awesome code ending up on the server so others can share in the awesomeness.

<comment><USER3> Git _has_ done a terrific job of it. It just doesn't do a great job at communicating what it does, how it does it, why it does it that way and how to achieve those results.

In other word, git's great internally... externally it just has a poor UI. But what's new there.

<comment><USER4> I think it's a problem that you don't _need_ to know Git that well to use it productively. Once you get the basic commands you can pretty much put away Git's documentation for a few years until something goes particularly wrong. It's been on my "list" for a long time now to deep dive into it but I've just never had the impetus to do so despite the fact that I use Git every single day.

<comment><USER5> I think the real problem is that "knowing git that well" is even a thing. If git's interface were more predictable and if its abstractions were less leaky, learning the basic commands would be enough and noone would ever need to do a deep dive into the documentation.

I finally realized this after reading this xkcd comic[1]. Now I'm happily using mercurial (with hg-git) whenever I expect that I will need to do something nontrivial.

[https://xkcd.com/1597/](https://xkcd.com/1597/)

<comment><USER6> I don't completely agree. While git definitely could still be more polished, the problem it tries to solve is fundamentally complicated.

Git does a good job of cleanly modeling the graph of distributed changes and providing a set of useful operations on that graph. The disagreement is more about whether somebody has learned or should learn that underlying graph.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> > I run my gr alias for git pull --rebase to bring in the new changes

The mistake was blindly using git rebase. History rewriting (which includes not only rebase but also amend) should be done with care, and never on history which has already been published (with a few special exceptions, but unless you really know what you're doing -- don't).

The correct thing to do, since the commit was already pushed, would have been "git pull" without the --rebase, and then pushing the resulting merge commit. Getting in the habit of doing "git pull --rebase" every time is not a good idea; better have a "dirtier" history full of merges, than have to untangle messes like this one later.

<comment><USER8> I don't even like the habit of using "git pull". When training folks I start by introducing them to "git fetch" and manually merging or rebasing on the remote tracking branch so they're fully in control of the process while understanding what's going on.

Only after people grok that do I mention "git pull", and only in passing while discouraging its use.

<comment><USER9> So basically you want them each time to do the job that git pull does right 99.999% of the time?

<comment><USER10> I don't know about him, but yes it's what I do too and I recommend it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Releases are hard. With Rust, our nightly releases are 100% automated, but stable releases are not.

[https://forge.rust-lang.org/release-process.html](https://forge.rust- lang.org/release-process.html)

For 1.11, we had two things go wrong:

1\. stable docs got accidentally deleted, so we had a small amount of downtime before the new ones went up.

2\. We recently moved the website to be i18n-able, and there was a subtle bug with Cloudfront invalidation tokens. So the site was updated, but the older version was still being shown for a bit.

We could and maybe will make this 100% automated in the future. There's always so much work to do...

</comment><comment><USER12> This is where I have to point out that this would have been unlikely to happen with BitKeeper. :)

BitKeeper doesn't provide a 'pull --rebase' and instead puts this in separate commands 'bk pull; bk collapse -e@; bk citool'. By default, collapse will refuse to replace an already released cset. Yeah less powerful, but we believe more predictable.

Also, tags are fully revisioned controlled and propagate with every pull. You can move a tag to another revision and that operation becomes its own cset that propagates.

www.bitkeeper.org

<comment><USER13> Maybe so, but have the licensing and philosophical reasons that led Torvalds to move the kernel away from BitKeeper been resolved?

Until that can be said and news of that disseminated widely, I think many open source projects will consider BitKeeper as simply not having enough of a technical edge over Git to discount the cultural penalties (namely, "bad" reputation withing FLOSS and smaller population of users).

<comment><USER12> I fully understand your concerns, which it why I try to post about bk periodically. Go look at bitkeeper.org, we are now fully open source and published under a plain Apache 2.0 license. No additional license or restrictions. So we can be as evil as we want and you are still safe to use it. ;-)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Why build some new tool to do builds and releases? Why not use something existing like Jenkins or CircleCI? The biggest advantage is that other people will already know how to use it and how it works, unlike anything you build by hand.

<comment><USER15> My experience tells me that since everyone's build and release cycle is such a unique flower of hackiness that building and maintaining your own pipeline is actually easier than trying to fit everything into the community plugins of Jenkins.

Also have you been on Jenkins recently? It looks and feels like butt.

<comment><USER16> How recently? Nowadays, Jenkins is looking half-decent again imo. Also, I think you can do literally anything in Jenkins that you can do with a custom tool, without really twisting it out of shape.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Always wondered how coding in Perl is, guess I will have some fun with it tomorrow :)

<comment><USER18> Perl is a great language. I haven't had an op to use 6 yet but 5 is great for small programs.

The big problem with Perl is it requires discipline to prevent creating a mess for your team or eventual successor.

<comment><USER19> It's not like Python or Ruby are much better in this regard.

<comment><USER9> Except they are.

<comment><USER19> This comment sounds like you've never worked on any program larger than few hundreds lines.

All three languages implement the same programming paradigm and neither of them enforce (or even suggests) any structure whatsoever, so you easily end up with the same mess/spaghetti, no matter the language.

Of course Perl adds some idioms of its own on top of it, but (a) not that many as most people like to attribute to Perl, (b) most of the idioms are syntax sugar, and (c) most of the mess comes from program structure, not from superficial things like syntax.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Git just tries too hard. Worst UI and lexicon.

There is this charisma around git that I simply don't understand.

Errors like this are avoidmake. Supporters explain it away as user error.

</comment><comment><USER21> I mostly use pull, fetch and stash when I can't pull because of local changes. I have a hook on my gitserver to disallow force push: I never rebase. But I can't even rebase the history that is published. Bow I can't screw up too badly :) I really recommend disabling forcepush. Amend can still be used as long as you did not push yet. I don't mind 'oops a typo'-kind of commit messages. It happens.

</comment><comment><USER22> Learning question: so the tag was on an orphaned commit? What ways could this be resolved?

The obvious and chosen one was to tag a new release and explain to people that the old one isn't accessible because of a muck up.

Would of merging it back in worked? that would of fixed the "<nwc10> the tag is for a commit which is not a parent of nqp master" right?

<comment><USER23> The commit is not orphaned, because the tag is still pointing to it, but it's indeed not reachable from a branch anymore.

git does not update local tags when the tag has changed remotely (see "on retagging" in the git tag man-page), so it would have to be a different tag.

Merging it back would be confusing, because you know have the old branch and the new branch in your history. It would cause the tag to be reachable again from master though.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Great headline, good read.

</comment><comment><USER25> "A robot doesn't care if it has to rebuild from scratch a hundred times while you're trying to debug a release-blocker (OK, I think it doesn't care... any robots' rights activists in the audience to tell me I'm wrong?)" :)

<comment><USER26> Yep, that's a thing, albeit currently an ironic thing:

[https://www.reddit.com/r/botsrights/](https://www.reddit.com/r/botsrights/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> That's a very interesting consequence of a git rebase. Would be nice if git warned that a tag would become stale in such a situation. Could even make an argument that it should be automatically updated.

<comment><USER16> Definitely arguable, if git can see the tag is not on the remote yet. The problem is git can't tell if the tag is not on _any_ remote, so just not moving them ever is always the safe choice.

This could have been prevented by using "the cactus model" of git branching (sorry no link to source as am on mobile, Google should find it tho) where releases are branches, not tags.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> So, it turns out we need AI to handle GIT.

</comment><comment><USER29> Please just use Jenkins or TeamCity.</comment>


Japan's 'Space World' apologizes for freezing 5,000 fish in skating rink - <AUTHOR> http://edition.cnn.com/2016/11/28/asia/japan-frozen-fish-rink-trnd/index.html <comment><USER2> How can someone think of this as a good idea? Of course people will complain even if the fishes were death before.

<comment><USER3> I feel like I understand the reaction instinctively but not analytically.

I recall in some Japanese restaurants there are koi swimming on the glass roof above the people eating.

Is it the use of animals as decoration that's disturbing or is it the possibility of being in contact with dead animals, possibly hitting them with a skate.

If the fish were beneath a transparent frozen surface, do you think it would be less troubling?

<comment><USER2> > Is it the use of animals as decoration that's disturbing or is it the > possibility of being in contact with dead animals, possibly hitting them > with a skate.

It is although I would say that for fishes there's an exception. They are commonly seen in aquariums and if they are treated correctly, I hardly think that people would complain about it. Even dissected animals have this creepy atmosphere around them that not many people like. I also don't think that people would like to see animals trapped in cages around them while eating but cat cafes are pretty much accepted.

> If the fish were beneath a transparent frozen surface, do you think it would > be less troubling?

I think people would have enjoyed it way more than that idea with the frozen fishes. In the end I think it's seen as a disrespectful act towards the animals.</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: What would a LinkedIn competitor look like now? - <AUTHOR> I saw this tweet by Sundeep Peechu (https://twitter.com/speechu/status/742365425380384770) and was curious why he thinks that now is a great time to start a competitor as well as what the competitor would focus on.<p>Does anyone here have any thoughts on this that they would care to share? <comment><USER2> The business model is essentially to trick people into signing up then spamming everyone in their contact lists with little permission, then in turn encouraging them too to sign up, rinse, repeat.

Now that everyone has signed up just spam them with job adverts, charge recruiters for the spam, and make tons of money from effectively legalised spamming.

That's more or less LinkedIn's entire business model. The real trick is setting it up to avoid violating the "Can Spam Act," but still make it needlessly difficult to unsubscribe or close the account.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you! I agree that spam is a big issue for LinkedIn and also seemingly for its competitors like branded.me.

Would spam reduction tactics, both from the company itself as well as from members/bots, be one of the key differentiators?

I would like to believe that it would be possible to be successful in this market without spamming your users.

<comment><USER2> It would be a major perk.

I closed my LinkedIn account because of the spam and dishonest tactics. I want to feel like the companies I work with want everyone to "win" not only them (i.e. their users derive value also).

The bots are problematic, but unfortunately some of it is humans acting bot- like, meaning recruiters pasting in generic messages, so even captchas might be ineffective.

But anything a LinkedIn competitor could do to drop the spam, contact harvesting, and bots would be a massive perk over LinkedIn actual.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Like Xing. Ok, Xing copied a lot from LinkedIn (including some dark patterns) but overall it's a much cleaner experience.

One thing that Xing does differently is that you cannot prevent other people to see when you visit their profile, not even as a paying customer. On the other hand you can only partially see who visits you if use the free plan. This gives the whole thing a different dynamic. People often sign up for a payed plan because they are curious to know who visited them.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you! First time hearing about it. They have some odd reviews on App Annie. [https://www.appannie.com/apps/ios/app/xing-your-business- net...](https://www.appannie.com/apps/ios/app/xing-your-business- network/reviews/?start_date=2016-05-13&end_date=2016-06-12)

EDIT: Wow, their first release on iOS was back in 2009!

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> LinkedIn was so great at engagement at one time, but it feels like it went a bit too far which has created [I think] a negative flywheel.

I accepted invitations from those who seems like were playing the game of some trying to get as many connections as possible. My once valuable LinkedIn Rolodex has degraded because I don't recognize most of my connections. I was getting endorsements from people I haven't known since I was a kid. They clearly aren't qualified to endorse me. And as mentioned, spam begets spam when it comes to recruiting. Recruiters take a machine gun approach to reaching out to candidates. Candidates understandably start ignoring those inmails. The recruiters then increase the # of people they reach out to, which then alienates more candidates.

We (Step.com) are trying to take an approach where we crowdsource a professional's market value from companies while the professional isn't looking at a job. It's completely anonymous. And as the professional is getting valuable market data from the marketplace personalized to them, they are in effect building a little black book of companies that are interested in them. So once a professional does start looking, they have a starting point.

I don't know if our approach is the answer (i hope it is) but I do think the next model needs to deliver high value content and protect professionals from the low value content and contact.

</comment><comment><USER5> Thinking about this in terms of a "direct competitor" is the wrong way to frame a potential business and nearly impossible at this point, I think.

LinkedIn is fantastic at being LinkedIn.

The only way to bring them down would be to approach a part of the problem they solve in a completely different way and in a compelling enough way that would make a piece of LinkedIn irrelevant.

You can only compete by making LinkedIn irrelevant, not by building a better LinkedIn.

<comment><USER6> I totally agree with you on this point. I think to make Linkedin irrelevant, you gotta be solving the user acquisition problem from a different angle. I think stackoverflow is doing a good job of doing that with developers. Dribble is doing that with designers. And there are bunch of other niche-based communities that attract people and formed a business model around recruitment which is a major source of Linkedin's revenue.

<comment><USER5> Exactly!

If Github offered better community discussion features and a professional portfolio/resume product for developers, then Github could become more relevant than LinkedIn for the developer community.

If Dribbble doubled down on those types of things too, then Dribbble could be more relevant than LinkedIn in the Design community.

etc, etc. and it's possible that people have various skillsets for which they have various types of professional personas. There's a lot of angles here, and it's not like they're not being explored, but these things take a long time. It's easy to forget.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I don't want a competitor to LinkedIn. I want a next-generation replacement for LinkedIn.

One that doesn't spam me. One that doesn't encourage others to spam me.

Xing looks nice, but it is very focused on Germany and german-speaking countries in Europe. But they are kind enough to have a landing page in English -- well-written, English, too. I'd almost use them for that reason alone, even though I don't speak German and I'm not in Europe.

I can't tell anything about step.com, which seems to be in beta and focused on NYC.

Surely the YC/HN crowd can come up with something good, right?

</comment><comment><USER8> Something less creepy.

The dark patterns employed by LinkedIn in order have left a bad impression with say half of the people I know. Even the gray patterns are awkward--for example when it suggests I know other people at my organization simply because we coincidentally have the same last name.

</comment><comment><USER9> Verified resumes. As in, dates, title and job are confirmed true.

<comment><AUTHOR> I actually think that this would be really big, in addition to being able to verify whether a person who is claiming that they have met you in person have, in fact, met you before.</comment></comment>


Simulate Amazon's interview loop for $4,500 - <AUTHOR> https://www.airbnb.com/experiences/277118 <comment><USER2> I legit can't tell if this is a troll.</comment>


Acute Effects of LSD on Amygdala Activity During Processing of Fearful Stimuli - <AUTHOR> https://www.nature.com/tp/journal/v7/n4/full/tp201754a.html <comment><USER2> So if I am reading this right, LSD reduced fearful reactions. I initially mis- read it as a correlation between LSD and fear.

Part of the reason psychedelics is kept away from treatment is because of those occasional bad reactions. You never know who might get a bad trip and for what reason. I wish psychedelics were researched without the baggage of "possible treatment". This would allow for the study for it's own sake, imho.

If anyone is interested in reading some first time experiences of random first time users here is a link. [0]

\</comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment>-

[0] [https://erowid.org/experiences/subs/exp_LSD_First_Times.shtm...](https://erowid.org/experiences/subs/exp_LSD_First_Times.shtml)

<comment><USER3> Definitely agree with you about the possibility of an unexpected reaction: I had to experience my friend losing touch with reality, taking off his clothes, running around my dormitory almost naked, and finally pulling the fire alarm. He was last seen that day being handcuffed and put into an ambulance. In case you're wondering, he took about 200 ug of real LSD.

<comment><USER4> 200ug are a pretty high dose[1], 10 to 20 times the threshold and your friend's reaction is not really typical even for a bad trip: In most cases people just want to reduce the amount of auditory or visual input they have to process when it is too much - so nothing like starting a fire alarm. Are you sure it was LSD?

[1] [https://erowid.org/chemicals/lsd/lsd_dose.shtml](https://erowid.org/chemicals/lsd/lsd_dose.shtml)

<comment><USER5> 200ug is not high...?

Starting a fire alarm etc. just means the guy was using the reduced inhibition to go ballastic. Just stupid really. Don't go blame the stuff for that.

>400 is high. up to 150/200 is low - can function normally. between 200/400 is hard to function normally. above 400 you really kinda can't, best just lie down and let the colors wash over.

<comment><USER6> High for what barrier?

200µg is certainly enough to perceive the world radically differently—so, very high to a sober person. However, it's very low on the scale of LSD you can safely ingest.

Either way, the dude had more going on than an acid trip that day.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> This is a little disappointing considering that their conclusions can be summarized with the sentence "These data suggest that acute administration of LSD modulates the engagement of brain regions that mediate emotional processing". Not particularly surprising to anyone who has ever tried or read anything about LSD

<comment><USER8> Research 101 is about measuring and documenting results, even if they agree with popular knowledge.

It is what separate anecdote from data.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I'd love to know how the trial could remain double blinded after administration of the LSD or placebo...

<comment><USER10> The paper includes a caveat at the end: "Our study has several limitations. First, although the trial was formally double-blinded, assignment to placebo or LSD was unavoidably unblinded by the obvious psychedelic effects caused by the dose used."

<comment><USER11> In some studies they use other drugs that illicit similar but different feelings, e.g ecstasy

<comment><USER12> FYI, the correct spelling is "elicit". "Illicit" means forbidden or illegal, ironically in this context.

<comment><USER11> Haha whoops. Thank you for that!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Interesting. I would have come to the oppisite conclusion, namely that lsd would increase the response to fearful stimuli. It makes sense. My friends who have had bad trips weren't triggered by fearful, external stimuli. They were caused mostly by repressed emotions or thoughts that lsd or mushrooms brought to the fore.

From my experience and observations, bad trips can be powerful experiences that have a positive effect, forcing you to face that which you have hidden away. Of course, it can be damaging as well.

</comment><comment><USER14> This may be interesting to those in this thread: [https://www.reddit.com/r/Drugs/comments/63p20e/why_billionai...](https://www.reddit.com/r/Drugs/comments/63p20e/why_billionaires_should_be_intrigued_by/) (Why billionaires should be intrigued by psychedelic research)

</comment><comment><USER15> A commenter here said, _[this only measured a small chemical effect and did not make any claims about real fear]_

Let me add some color for you, it's absolutely real. I predict the drug will eventually be validated as one of the most powerful and useful therapeutic substances discovered to date.

>>impaired recognition of fearful faces, while it did not significantly affect recognition of neutral, happy and angry faces

This characterization is a bit misleading. Recognition of faces is not impaired at all, recognition is also not impaired of some of your most terrifying inner thoughts. Instead, you recognize them fine and are simply not bothered because you perceive them in an unbiased, rational context.

>>exhibits some 'empathogenic' effects (such as increased openness and trust)

Some? I know, good medical science has to be conservative. However empathy, emotional connection and understanding, can become almost savant like. I won't give an example - too hard to offer an anecdote and not sound hyperbolic or like an exaggerated account. How's this: I believe it to be significantly understated.

>>positive long-term effects outlast acute pharmacological effects

Let that sink in. Who would believe taking an anti-depressant once could change your life years later? They would not believe it, because like every other mental health drug, anti-depressants can easily stop working (to the degree they work at all) as soon as you stop taking them. This is not like that. It's some kind of unusual mechanism that for reasons not yet entirely clear, is just very different from other drugs.

I would ask that no one act on my opinion by using illegal drugs. I'm not worried about liability, or even legality. The problem is simply that self- administering street drugs comes with quite a bit of risk that for some reason, a lot of people don't mind ignoring. Worst case you could be intentionally poisoned as part of a scam and die. You could get the wrong substance, for example fentanyl is unknowingly taken all the time, and again easily die. You might somehow get the real thing, but precise dosing is difficult enough that overdosing LSD is very common. Having the wrong dose will not kill you, but the results can be bad enough many people feel like death would have been an easier option. Some people believe that impurities and imprecise dosing are responsible for a lot of what people describe as "bad trips".

<comment><USER16> I don't have a dog in this hunt, I will simply point out that people who have used LSD have been claiming that it's pretty much magic, that everyone should try it, etc... for decades. The very guarded initial ventures into real research seem to be entirely secondary to the evangelical zeal of some people who have taken the drug in question, and feel it's "essential".

Edit: I should point out that obviously, they could have reached this conclusion because it _is_ that amazing, but a lot of people have ironclad convictions about everything from drugs to religion after all. The research should hopefully offer an answer that can be, frankly, believed.

<comment><USER15> You suggest folly as a possible explanation, but there are a few problems with the cogency of that.

1) You point to nothing in this paper, other research, my comment, or contemporary comments of others to support that hypothesis.

2) The behavior you describe skeptically could match equally well a society where most people live unaware of a great truth hidden to them, in part because the government has made even acquiring information illegal.

In North Korea, a small minority whisper fantastical ideas that are difficult to comprehend, let alone believe. Most of the world is not starving. Places exist with untold self-determination. Our leader is not God. These people often speak with an almost "evangelical zeal".

3) Do you see me doing thrill-seeker liquor store holdups with a "Born to Lose" tattoo on my chest? Ok that was De Niro, but the point is how do you explain people who do not fit the profile? I am not new age, spiritual, or culturally connected to these ideas. I resent mysticism, super natural forces, and magic.

Of course I accept the possibility of being wrong. But the little recent research governments have allowed hasn't yet pointed to that. And until it does how can I deny things that, while anecdotal, are based on first hand observations?

Maybe we'll have solid data some day, if I'm wrong I'll buy you a beer.

<comment><USER16> I'm pointing to a basic desire for evidence when presented with claims, especially extraordinary ones, especially when presented with religious fervor. That is all.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> "Oh Amygdala, Oh Amygdala... Have mercy on the poor bastard!"

</comment><comment><USER18> In other words, the cure for fear is acid.

<comment><USER8> Possibly. but don't just go down a tab hoping to get rid of a phobia.

LSD is a key, not a door.

<comment><USER18> That would never occur to me - I'm more interested on what would change in political views if more people used LSD. Fear-driven politics have been central to many changes in the past years. Maybe LSD could have spared us.

<comment><USER19> I'm guessing people might perceive that politics is simply a manifestation of ego games not dissimilar to hierarchical rituals of chimpanzees and this is unlikely to change ever until human nature itself changes. Along with the astonishingly unlikely glimmer of hope that human nature can in fact change.

<comment><USER18> Or maybe the conscious decisions not to behave like chimps with alopecia ;-)</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: How do you charge software upgrades to customers? - <AUTHOR> I'm currently in the situation that two mobile apps should be updated to make future developments easier to implement.
By update I mean that the underlying framework needs to be completely replaced.
Do you charge these kind of upgrade to your customers or not? <comment><USER2> If there's no outwardly visible features your customers care about then no, don't charge for the upgrade. You should only consider charging customers for an upgrade when something of direct value to them has been added to your app. In this example it sounds like you, the developer, are the primary benefactor of this change. It makes things better and easier for _you_. Once you've used the new framework to deliver something of value to your customers then consider charging them for it.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you. My gut feeling told me something similar and you're completely right: I am the one who benefits.

Well then I must first go in advance.

<comment><AUTHOR> BTW: it's Framework7 ([https://framework7.io](https://framework7.io)) I'm using.

<comment><USER2> What made you choose framework7 over something like react native? We're looking at these frameworks so I'm interested in how you arrived at your decision.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Young and middle-aged people, barely sick with Covid-19, are dying from strokes - <AUTHOR> https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2020/04/24/strokes-coronavirus-young-patients/ <comment><USER2> Terrifying. But the silver lining is that they're catching on to the patterns, which means they can start adjusting treatments. I think that beyond just flattening the curve, delaying one's infection date right now probably has a significant impact on survivability simply because of how much we're still learning about this disease every week.

<comment><USER3> Exactly. People are talking about "moving goal posts" because the curve has already been flattened. But if I get it, I want to be as far out on that curve a possible so doctors know better what to do about it.

<comment> rv-de You know that joke about the two hikers who stumble upon a hungry bear and one of them goes about fastening his laces ... oddly fitting.

<comment><USER3> As they say, you don't need to out run the bear, only your partner

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Not a doctor, just a thought, could this in part be caused by some sort of Deep Vein Thrombosis or other clots due to people not physically moving as much during quarantine?

<comment><USER2> The part about clots forming literally as the surgeon was operating seems much more exotic than something so simple as reduced activity.

<comment><USER4> Did the earliest victims of Covid19 also show similar levels of clots? Or are we only seeing elevated levels recently? Could help to plot this over time as the lockdown extends. If there's a correlation, would help to stress the importance of staying active in quarantine, ex: lifting, stationary bike, jump rope.

<comment><USER2> I think there's a bias in the data because a) lots of people die from the respiratory symptoms before they get a stroke, and b) young people who get a stroke might not know how to recognize it/what to do about it, so they may just stay at home and die there and never get recorded as a COVID death.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> "Doctors are often able to reopen blocked blood vessels through techniques such as pulling out clots or inserting stents. But it has to be done quickly, ideally within six hours, but no longer than 24 hours: "The message we are trying to get out is if you have symptoms of stroke, you need to call the ambulance urgently. ""

After a family member's stroke, we were told that 4 hours is the magic number.

Per the Mayo Clinic: "Therapy with drugs that can break up a clot has to be given within 4.5 hours from when symptoms first started if given intravenously. The sooner these drugs are given, the better. Quick treatment not only improves your chances of survival but also may reduce complications." [https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases- conditions/stroke/diagno...](https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases- conditions/stroke/diagnosis-treatment/drc-20350119)

<comment><USER2> I wonder if anybody's considered packaging these drugs up for home use? A "stroke EpiPen", if you will.

<comment><USER6> Interesting idea but unfortunately this isn't feasible, unless you also have access to a full suite of diagnostic equipment at home. Even if someone at home could self-diagnose a stroke with any accuracy, around 10% of strokes are actually caused by haemorrhage (bleeding) rather than a clot. A CT scan is almost always carried out to rule this out, before administering thrombolytic drugs or aspirin, as these drugs can significantly worsen existing bleeding.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> This should be surprising to no one really flu and other respiratory illnesses have been known to increase stroke likelihood and severity considerably (upto 40% in the first 15 days), it also increases the likelihood of other cardiovascular conditions including cervical artery (CAD) and neck artery raptures..

[https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2019/01/190130075757.h...](https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2019/01/190130075757.htm)

[https://www.ahajournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1161/STROKEAHA.110.59...](https://www.ahajournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1161/STROKEAHA.110.596783)

[https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5899905/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5899905/)

</comment><comment><USER8> Mirror: [http://archive.is/6OQQj](http://archive.is/6OQQj)

</comment><comment><USER9> Can someone explain to me why the number of daily infections in California is still going up despite home orders. I just saw this and it baffled me (European here).

<comment><USER10> Latent phase coming to its end, perhaps?

</comment></comment><comment> jules-jules Is there a non-paywalled link?

<comment><USER11> Not the same paper, but [https://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/929345](https://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/929345)

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> First off, yes, Covid is real, it's way worse than flu, social distancing is essential, it's not 5g and not a government conspiracy. But I can not help but wonder - if we were to look for other variables, like, i don't know, eye color, isn't it likely that we would find a similar correlation? What is the model of action here and why are medical professionals so sure it was caused by covid? Maybe covid is a confounding variable, most apparent because we are mostly looking at it now?

<comment><USER12> > Mocco, who has spent his career studying strokes and how to treat them, said > he was "completely shocked" by the analysis. He noted the link between > covid-19 and stroke "is one of the clearest and most profound correlations > I've come across."

<comment><USER10> Okay, let's burn more karma. Maybe there is some hidden variable that makes these young people more susceptible to covid. Correlation without a model of action is, well, a correlation. Clots from damaged lungs maybe? But clotting without lung damage is unlikely. It's very weird.

<comment><USER13> Covid-19 attacks the whole body, including brain, vessels, you name it. They've found Sars-Cov-2 in eyelids. This is exactly why you want governments to be responsible and take precautionairy actions first, because we know next to nothing about this virus and effects. Those who claim otherwise are simply ignorant, because we all are. The science will come later.

<comment><USER10> Well AFAIR virii are like that - they tend to be found, well, about everywhere, provided viral load is sufficient. That doesn't mean that their protein spike has an affinity (i.e. can bind to and infect) to other cells, so "attacking the whole body" is a bit of an overstatement. It's just shit luck it targets a receptor that is prevalent in key organs, as it regulates the blood flow. Then again i am not really an expert so let's leave it at that.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Police destroy evidence with 10 failed passcode attempts on iPhone - <AUTHOR> https://nakedsecurity.sophos.com/2016/01/28/police-destroy-evidence-with-10-failed-passcode-attempts-on-iphone/ <comment><USER2> 20 feet no-filming zone around cops? lol, mmurica.

<comment><USER3> I love how Sophos quotes a source that has the wrong bill number, proving that neither Sophos nor AP fact-checked it at all.</comment></comment>


If you want to make money from apps, forget about the app store - <AUTHOR> http://qz.com/112398/if-you-want-to-make-money-from-apps-forget-about-the-app-store/

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm surprised to see the contention that somehow contract devs for non- consumer (presumably corporate specific apps) are the largest money makers in the mobile app economy.</comment>


Google enabled switching between multiple GMail accounts - <AUTHOR> http://gmailblog.blogspot.com/2010/08/access-two-gmail-accounts-at-once-in.html

<comment><USER2> Google seems to be trying to roll out account switching across all their services. I noticed a few weeks ago that it gave me an option to log in to Google Docs using either my Google Apps powered college email address or my normal gmail account, when both cookies are set as logged in. However, with Google docs there are a few bugs, for instance it seems to log me in to Google docs with my college email address but when I actually click a document it tells me that I don't have permission to access it.

</comment><comment><USER3> God, this is going to save my marriage.

</comment><comment><USER4> Overall: good idea.

Praxis: problems. Right now its hiccuping on my Apps for Domains accounts (specifically docs). Let's not declare victory yet.

<comment><USER5> _"Since Google Apps customers can already sign in to their accounts at the same time as their personal Google Accounts, we won't be adding this new feature to Google Apps until the new infrastructure is in place."_

I really _really_ wish paying Apps customers got a little more priority than this. It's becoming a habit.

<comment><USER6> I wonder if they see it as using the free (non-gApps) accounts to vet out the new features first rather than risk breaking paying customers accounts with new features that have random bugs that they did not catch in internal testing.

<comment><USER5> I wish that was the case, but even things that have been fully announced (like Docs permission settings) aren't live on Apps to this day.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> For some reason, when I click on their link (google.com/accounts) and login, I am directed to "how to clear cache and history" page.... So I searched for multiple sign in, and I'm back to the clear cache and history page again... WTH

</comment><comment><USER8> This is why I generally have multiple different browsers open.

</comment><comment><USER9> I tried it, and it's pretty neat, but by now I'm just used to multiple browser profiles for this purpose.

</comment><comment><USER10> It's not nearly as awesome as I supposed.</comment>


Über for the Common Man - <AUTHOR> http://www.forbes.com/sites/eshachhabra/2014/12/03/uber-for-the-common-man/

<comment><USER2> Waste of bandwidth.

edit: Oh, I see there's content past that stupid splash page.</comment>