"What it's like to fail": David Raether giving signed copies of his memoir - <AUTHOR> http://crowd.tc/1cWVwPf <comment><USER2> For those of you that somehow missed the full story behind this, you can find it here: [http://priceonomics.com/what-its-like-to- fail/](http://priceonomics.com/what-its-like-to-fail/)

This is such a wonderful story that could warm even the coldest of hearts, and I really hope lots of people get behind this crowdtilt campaign :-)

<comment><USER3> He makes it uplifting (heartwarming, to use your depiction) because he's desperate and no one will help him if he says, "Poverty fucking sucks and there is nothing good about it, and it's a crime that I've had to deal with all this". I don't doubt that he's had some positive moments amid the misery, but I think that making light of bad experiences is at least 50% something people do to make themselves more socially acceptable.

There's good in most things bad, but those things are still mostly bad. People share the positive focus because it's more socially acceptable, and when you're in dire straits, you need to be socially acceptable. (I don't, so I don't fear addressing the truth with anyone who will hear it.)

The truth is that he bought into a dying society (Hollywood, about 5-10 years further along the decline curve than VC-funded so-called "tech") and faced severe age discrimination, because the old and young are the first to bite it when shit goes bad. He also made some big mistakes (8 kids, shallow wife that dropped him) but I still don't see how anyone could watch a man that capable get fucked that bad and _not_ conclude that this is a failing society approaching uselessness and abandon.

<comment><USER2> I don't see why the two are mutually exclusive. Yes, it is a crime that this happened to him, but there are enough media outlets carrying the "Poverty fucking sucks" message. Unfortunately that message is TBU (True But Useless - [http://www.fastcompany.com/1514493/switch-dont-solve- problem...](http://www.fastcompany.com/1514493/switch-dont-solve-problems- copy-success)).

The thing that always strikes me about homelessness is not its remoteness, but rather how it seems that any one of us are only a few unfortunate events and wrong moves away being in the gutter, and how most people feel that it could never happen to them. I find David's account brutally honest, enjoyable and yes, uplifting because it shows that there is a real (albeit long and painful) route out of the damning poverty of homelessness, not because of any particularly joyful spin that he puts on his story.

Is he making it uplifting because he's desperate and he wants people to help him? I don't think that's the overriding reason, but maybe, who knows? At any rate, if he's managed to pull himself so far out of the lows that he's able to adopt that strategy rather than just accept a life of homelessness that just happens to him then fair play - he deserves every success he can find.

<comment><USER3> I agree with you on all of this. I might have come off as somewhat cynical, because the just-worlding of HN gets under my skin.

Decades from now, when the average age of the contemporary HN crowd is 50, if people here are facing the age discrimination of the world that the current VC-istan demigods created, I bet the current crop of HN libertarians will be the first to be up in arms about it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> There are a lot of high-profile themes here (age discrimination, the severe penalties that college tuitions inflict on high-IQ people having children, et al) but I'm going to focus on just one, because attacking all of them would take too much time.

This is proof that the model of undergraduate, liberal arts education has failed in this country.

What, you say?

The _whole point_ of college is to equip people with the skills so that, regardless of market vacillations of trade-specific supply and demand, the person can always find work. Not to find "a job", but to provide someone with general-purpose skills so their careers are, at least, reasonably protected from the market ups-and-downs that afflict the trades.

The market doesn't buy it. People like him-- educated, capable-- end up unable to find appropriate work. Society has decided that higher education isn't valuable anymore. (It might be right; I'm not going to attack that, either.)

That's a market signal that this $40,000-per-year process that the US calls "education" has lost meaning and value.

<comment><USER4> > That's a market signal that this $40,000-per-year process that the US calls > "education" has lost meaning and value.

It's not that it's lost meaning, the meaning has just changed drastically. Imagine that you're deciding between two candidates for a job opening. As you're preparing for the interview, the reception mentions that the first candidate isn't moving and doesn't seem to have a pulse. Are you going to interview both candidates or are you just going to hire the guy who can fog a mirror?

That's what the modern college degree represents. It's no longer a guarantee of lifetime employment. Instead, it's now the bare minimum qualifier for even being considered for employment. A degree tells future employers that you won't soil yourself at work more than once a month. It's not a glowing recommendation, but it's better than the guy with the high school diploma who will soil himself weekly.

Of course, you can point to great counter example from the titans of industry who don't have college degrees. On the other hand, we've had a vice president who didn't have a pulse. However, they're both statistical anomalies and you're far better off hiring someone with a pulse.

For the record, I'm not saying that this is a good system. Rather, that's just the way I've observed it from watching my wife. She's been searching for work for two years. She's had fast food restaurants request her college transcript as part of the hiring process. Even below minimum wage baby-sitting gigs have fallen through because she doesn't have a bachelor's degree. The simple fact is that there's enough desperate people with degrees that there's not to require one.</comment></comment>


AT&T To Impose Caps, Overages - <AUTHOR> http://www.dslreports.com/shownews/Exclusive-ATT-To-Impose-150GB-DSL-Cap-Overages-113149

<comment><USER2> Switch to Sonic.net if you use AT&T in the bay area: [http://corp.sonic.net/ceo/2011/03/23/drilling-through-the- ca...](http://corp.sonic.net/ceo/2011/03/23/drilling-through-the-caps/)

<comment><USER3> sonic.net is amazing, especially if you get the two line bonded Fusion service. We've got it at Sunfire, and get 25/4 for $130/mo business; I got it at a friend's house too, for $70/mo. Instant response from customer service, actual clue on their part, great network peering and transit, etc. I like having Comcast Business Internet as diversity/backup/etc., but if I only had one, it'd be the Sonic.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Unlike the overage charges for mobile telephony, the charges for exceeding your monthly bandwidth aren't that unreasonable:

 _Overages will be $10 for every 50GB over the 150 GB or 250GB limit they travel._

That's $0.20/GB, which is about twice as much that you'll pay for bandwidth on Amazon's EC2.

</comment><comment><USER5> i can't imagine anyone is actually excited about this. i'd prefer not to have formal rules here, with the exception that AT&T can punish their top 0.05% users by bandwidth usage. they want to turn the internet into a giant cable tv package because they know that as soon as they offer speeds fast enough, people will drop their tv subscription. i worry that traffic discrimination will come next.

do we have any solid numbers on how much this costs AT&T? i want to say it's a violation of network neutrality principles, but this could probably be argued on a much simpler basis that AT&T isn't attempting to save money at this point, seems like they're just price gouging now. SMS text messages are a good example here.

</comment><comment><USER6> This is the same thing that has been happening in Canada for a while now with the exact same rhetoric: "it will only affect a small proportion of customers, roughly 2 percent of all subscribers", "[we are] looking at usage caps and usage based billing as a way to rein in heavy data users" [1].

[1]<http://news.cnet.com/8301-30686_3-20058933-266.html>

</comment><comment><USER7> It's official: <http://news.cnet.com/8301-30686_3-20058933-266.html>

</comment><comment><USER8> That's fine, I'm calling them and telling them to cancel my 200 channel HDTV plan with DVR so I can pay for the overages on bandwidth I'll get by watching my TV shows on Hulu and Netflix. I think I'll even end up spending less per month!

I hope they realize their plan for pushing users toward paying for their TV service is backfiring. (At least that's what I see this as)

</comment><comment><USER9> Fine by me, get what you pay for. Just don't distort the market by charging other people to put bytes onto my paid for pipe.

<comment><USER10> Many users only have ready access to one broadband provider. If that provider happens to be AT&T, they're now SOL.

<comment><USER11> How is a 150 GB cap a burden for most people?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Will the bandwith caps also apply to video and VOIP data streamed over the same connection by AT&T's UVerse service? Or will those uses of the network be exempt?

The above question borders on the rhetorical because, while it's not addressed in the article, I think we already all know the answer.

</comment><comment><USER13> Does anyone know whether this will impact business accounts? I haven't been able to find any information on that.</comment>


SchemaCrawler: Free database schema discovery and comprehension tool - <AUTHOR> https://www.schemacrawler.com/index.html <comment><USER2> For those interested in this space, AWS Glue Crawler does schema discovery on databases as well as data stored in S3: [https://aws.amazon.com/glue/](https://aws.amazon.com/glue/)

Disclosure: I work on AWS Glue

<comment><USER3> Curious, does AWS Glue or SchemaCrawler do any type inference past basic data types? Such as string analysis to automatically mark fields as a shipping tracking number, IP address, ISO country/city, correct date format, etc?

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> We use this to impute the schema. Has anyone thought about taking this creating something like an open-source TAMR ? Would love to hear ideas around it if someone has.

<comment><USER5> TAMR is a neat tool, but what is the price? I'm wary of tools that require a demo to even understand if this is a $1M tool or $100M tool.

I'm interested in sustainable ways to map out data across the enterprise. But the vendor space is hard, for me, to analyze at a green fields level because it's full of pretty heavy tools that require implementation and consulting just to set up. I was unaware of TAMR until your post but tried to go through Gartner's analysis looking at data management platforms.

Are there even any open source tools or communities in this space. For example, I started looking at Talend's metadata mgmt oss stack for eval as to whether it's something that would help me, but gave up after their demos wouldn't run in a few environments I tried.

<comment><USER4> Do not know the cost point of TAMR. Aware that it is expensive. There are a couple of tools that come to mind, metacat (as someone pointed out), wherehows (linkedin), apache atlas (not sure who contributed). The issue is also to look at not just RDBMS but also RDF, Graph and then abstract it through a semantic layer.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I'm currently using: [http://schemaspy.org/](http://schemaspy.org/) and I also used its predecessor.

There are certainly warts, and they seem to be Oracle first, but on the whole I get a reasonable documentation experience out of it.

<comment><USER7> I also use Schemaspy. Two things I like about Schemaspy 1) Recognises markdown in your database comment field. 2) you can merge documentation in a text file with metadata from your database. It's a neat way of keeping database documentation.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> This is a great tool. We use it to generate an Entity Relationship Diagram from our canonical DDL file checked into our repo.

Here's the basic recipe:

      1. Spin up a fresh Postgres instance on Docker using -P to claim an available ephemeral TCP port
      2. Use `docker inspect` to read the Postgres port
      3. Run DDL script on the fresh instance
      4. Run SchemaCrawler Docker container using --network host option so it can connect to Postgres
         and using -v so it can save a schema image to the host filesystem

This entire process is a `/bin` script checked into our repo, so we can update `/doc/db-schema.png` any time. It takes about 15s total since we have to pause for the Postgres instance to come online.

</comment><comment><USER9> I'd also used wwwsqldesigner[0] (possibly a different fork) with some custom hacks to infer relationships by naming where foreign keys were not present. It produced a quick ERD for getting started on a project. Always wanted a more complete (non-PHP) version of this tool and perhaps there is one in these comments.

[0] [https://github.com/ondras/wwwsqldesigner](https://github.com/ondras/wwwsqldesigner)

</comment><comment><USER10> This tool is fantastic. In a previous life, I used it to dynamically analyze and extract users from a multi-tenant database and determine the proper sort order for reinsertion in a different database on a potentially different (JDBC-compatible) platform.

</comment><comment><USER11> What can this tool do? Download it and run -h to find out.

One can only wonder why any javascript library of the week has better docs.

<comment><USER12> Quite a bit of detail in terms of command line options, etc, under Features menu. Could be better organized, but I don't think it's as bad as you suggested.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> How is this different from a web crawler?

<comment><USER12> Similarity really is only the name. Web crawlers scrape web pages and follow links to find additional pages to scrape. A tool like this inspects your database and determines your schema, relationships, etc.</comment></comment>


Hacktivism gone wrong? Nearly 16,000 whistleblowers have had their info exposed - <AUTHOR> http://stream.aljazeera.com/story/201305230032-0022772 <comment><USER2> I philosophically believe hacktivism or any kind of demonstrative breaking-of- unjust-rules is a good thing. But 'unjust' is the key. and I think this is reflective of the wiki-leaks/anarchist culture of "breaking 'any' rule is a good thing". It ceases to be activism of any sort, and becomes children playing with firearms. It also serves to undermine the impact of genuine hacktivism like that of Aaron Schwartz and Weev.

Genuine hactivists/activists harm institutions, and do their utmost to avoid harming innocents, as they know that undermines the cause.

<comment><USER3> _the wiki-leaks/anarchist culture of "breaking 'any' rule is a good thing"_

What? I don't think that's actually something many people advocate for. Do you have links to examples?

<comment><USER2> ...googling Julian Assange is left as an exercise

<comment><USER4> Totally ot but I was just looking at some code he wrote... Beautiful stuff, very tight. I was looking for something to rewrite in cuda fortran for the shits and giggles and an seemed perfect given how long bigger anagram can take. Great way to learn new tricks

<comment><USER5> Which code?

Bigger anagram?

<comment><USER4> Sorry should have been bigger anagramS, autocorrect. He wrote /usr/bin/an the anagram maker

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I don't see this contradicting Anonymous's philosophy at all.

These are people tipping the police off anonymously. This is more often then not for crimes like drugs that Anonymous does not agree with.

They did exactly the same thing in the US a year or so ago.

The police are 'The man', people acting in secret with the police are not what Anonymous would see as on their side.

<comment><USER7> "This is more often then not for crimes like drugs"

Citation needed, I guess?

<comment><USER6> Well really I'd just have to cite Anonymous thinks that. But true I have no evidence they do actually think this.

<comment><USER8> The idea that 'anonymous tipsters are only/mostly snitching on drug users,' is a bit tenuous and doesn't seem to have much basis in reality.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Which is better? That it is publicized that the security hole exists and anonymous tips aren't truly anonymous? Or that people continue to trust the site, while criminal organizations monitor it for their own benefit?

No question that this was an action with the potential for short-term harm. But I'm not convinced that in the long run it will prove to be a bad thing to put police everywhere on notice about how important it is to better secure databases like this.

Heck, if they want to improve, they can do worse than to start with [http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/newsdesk/2013/05/stron...](http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/newsdesk/2013/05/strongbox- and-aaron-swartz.html) and see how well it serves their needs.

</comment><comment><USER10> What's the difference between a narc and a whistleblower again?

<comment><USER3> A whistleblower informs on the powers-that-be to the public, a narc informs on members of the public to the powers that be.

One lets the public or their community decide, the other appeals to an authority to come into the community and take care of the problem.

<comment><USER11> People who report illegal actions inside private companies to law enforcement or regulatory authorities are still called "whistleblowers."

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> This is the problem with `Anonymous`. Literally anyone can claim they are part of it. Any group could use it as a cover.

<comment><USER13> "problem"?

<comment><USER8> Well, for the people that try to classify it as a singular group with a singular purpose.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> It just shows why you should always take steps to remain anonymous.

If your name isn't attached to the report you can't be hurt no matter what happens.</comment>


Ask HN: Resources for designing custom file formats - <AUTHOR> I am working on a custom OO micro-database, which needs to persist to files.
I am spending a lot of time solving problems utilizing files that are novel to me; but I am certain have been solved many times over by others. I'm having a hard time finding resources describing patterns and practices for custom file types (especially where data is changing often, the items being stored can vary in size, and I want to rewrite the smallest portion of the file possible).
Are there resources out there that you know of? Old resources would be great. The language doesn't matter. Any hints would help me save time.
The data is too volatile for something like JSON or XML to make sense, and the more I can optimize for performance the better. I will be storing more data than I want to keep in RAM at any one time, so just loading everything into RAM is not an option for this.
Thank you for any response :D <comment><USER2> The authors of SQLLite are better than anyone else at writing persistence code that works despite the real-world imperfections of file systems. Either do what they do or just use SQLLite!</comment>


The Magic Ring Buffer (2012) - <AUTHOR> https://fgiesen.wordpress.com/2012/07/21/the-magic-ring-buffer/ <comment><USER2> libsoundio has a working implementation of this. It's been tested on Linux, Windows, and MacOS.

[http://libsound.io/](http://libsound.io/)

Interesting bits of the implementation are here: [https://github.com/andrewrk/libsoundio/blob/1fe64770bde0a4fb...](https://github.com/andrewrk/libsoundio/blob/1fe64770bde0a4fb4a9a7f08e3bce8d4ee89b7c2/src/os.c#L617)

<comment><USER3> What are those locks I see in realtime functions? Sources of unbounded runtime and hanged machines?

Can you prove they are always safe? (at least on the level of linux kernel LOCKDEP) I bet you cannot, because 1.1.0 changelog mentions "fixing" a deadlock by tossing functionality.

Likewise, I see a lot of places that do reference counting (those _ref/_unref calls). Those are probable deallocations on heap from RT side, which have unbounded runtime unless you have a realtime memory allocator. I haven't noticed anything like that in the code.

This coming from a guy who supposedly "has carefully read the documentation for every audio backend and understands the purpose of every line of code."

For people who want to get a primer on such issues, I recommend this book: [http://www.amazon.com/Real-Time-Systems-Programming- Language...](http://www.amazon.com/Real-Time-Systems-Programming-Languages- International/dp/0321417453) It's a bit old despite updates (e.g. no C++11, no C99), but still highly relevant. The techniques themselves and the analysis parts are well written.

<comment><USER2> You are mistaken about the presence of locks and memory deallocation in real- time functions. I invite you to point out specific lines of code and I'll help you fix your understanding.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I can indeed see this being useful for realtime audio. I spent a lot of time trying to optimize IPC performance while making a 32 - 64bit bridge for audio plugins. I used a related hack that allowed me to reduce inter-process synchronization latency to zero (though that phrasing might be disputable). The hack was essentially that whenever the host requested an audio block from a plugin, it would get the output not for that block but for the previous block instead. This introduced a fixed audio delay for bridged plugins, but it eliminated IPC latency, so even complex tracks with lots of bridged plugins wouldn't stutter.

Thankfully I don't put up with any of this now that all the software I use works correctly in 64 bit. Still, latency is often a huge PITA with realtime audio.

What's interesting is that as processors get faster, audio plugin makers publish stuff that uses more and more processor. So much that I'm now considering getting one of those new 16-core processors for my next workstation.

<comment><USER5> > What's interesting is that as processors get faster, audio plugin makers > publish stuff that uses more and more processor.

Uggh. I know how you feel. For a while now, I've wanted to create some sort of audio processing engine (either a very versatile LADSPA/VST/AU/etc plugin or a minimal DAW) wherein all the different components that usually run their own code to generate/process audio are described as data instead (e.g. transfer functions), and then the host decides how to actually compute the audio. This would give lots of room to try new optimizations that aren't usually possible, and you only have to optimize _one_ area of critical code, rather than optimizing each individual plugin. This is especially beneficial when trying to make conditional use of processor extensions like SSE.

<comment><USER6> This sounds a bit like what Mac OS X's CoreImage does for pixel transformations: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Core_Image](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Core_Image)

 _Instead of applying a series of filters individually, Core Image assembles a dynamic instruction pipeline so that only one calculation needs to be applied to the pixel data to achieve a cumulative effect... Regardless of the number of filters, Core Image assembles the code for this instruction pipeline with a just-in-time compiler_

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> See also :) [https://mikeash.com/pyblog/friday-qa-2012-02-17-ring- buffers...](https://mikeash.com/pyblog/friday-qa-2012-02-17-ring-buffers-and- mirrored-memory-part-ii.html)

</comment><comment><USER8> It's definitely a failing of modern virtual-memory operating systems that there's no nice way of doing this without getting the filesystem involved or creating race conditions. Windows almost does this right with the Nt* APIs for manipulating sections, but user space programs are not supposed to use those directly. Instead they're stuck with the Windows 9x-era public APIs. A modern API for manipulating virtual memory would be a really powerful thing to have.

<comment><USER9> I think you can do this on OS X using the Mach vm_XXX family of functions (I've only used them for querying state, though, rather than rearranging the mappings.)

The documentation is pretty terrible, though, so some experimentation may be necessary. It's also even less like the POSIX parts than the NS bits are...

(Apple doesn't seem to tell you much; OK references are [https://www.gnu.org/software/hurd/gnumach-doc/Virtual- Memory...](https://www.gnu.org/software/hurd/gnumach-doc/Virtual-Memory- Interface.html#Virtual-Memory-Interface) [http://www.amazon.co.uk/Mac-OS- Internals-Systems-Approach/dp...](http://www.amazon.co.uk/Mac-OS-Internals- Systems-Approach/dp/0321278542), and, of course, [http://www.opensource.apple.com/source/xnu/](http://www.opensource.apple.com/source/xnu/). The source has some reference-style documentation in it.

<comment><USER10> This is mentioned in the comments of the original article, I'll quote:

> There are a couple of in-depth articles about implementing this same idea on > Mach / OS X:

> [http://www.mikeash.com/pyblog/friday-qa-2012-02-03-ring- > buff...](http://www.mikeash.com/pyblog/friday-qa-2012-02-03-ring-buffers- > and-mirrored-memory-part-i.html)

> [http://www.mikeash.com/pyblog/friday-qa-2012-02-17-ring- > buff...](http://www.mikeash.com/pyblog/friday-qa-2012-02-17-ring-buffers- > and-mirrored-memory-part-ii.html)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> The article mentions that Wikipedia has a "POSIX implementation" but that code has been scrubbed from the article.

I dug around in the history and was able to dig it out:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Circular_buffer&o...](https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Circular_buffer&oldid=647976593)

</comment><comment><USER12> That's a really cool idea!</comment>


Indie game developer – Harry's Escape - <AUTHOR> https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.ArpitRoyGames.apps&hl=en <comment><AUTHOR> A game for Potterheads, by a Potterhead. Not too spectacular a game, however with limited coding knowledge, I am quite satisfied by what I've achieved. Humbled by the awesome user reviews as well! What do you guys think? Let me know.</comment>


Ask.com buys About.com for $300M  - <AUTHOR> http://www.zdnet.com/ask-com-buys-about-com-for-300m-7000003195/ <comment><USER2> All this hate for about.com just goes to show how much of a bubble some of you guys' internet activity exists in. As far as "content farms" go, they are very good at what they do. The quality of their articles have always been very well done (for the information I was looking for). I never got the feeling of landing on an SEO spammer site when I landed about.com. Actually, I used to spend quite a lot of time on about.com many years ago. Their sections are more than just content farm pages, they're also communities centered around specific topics. Think reddit without the childish memes and BS. The quality of discussions there were always much higher than you'd find on most popular places on the web today.

Much value exists on the internet outside of the techcrunch echo chamber. Dismiss it at your own peril.

<comment><USER3> >Think reddit without the childish memes and BS.

I agree, however, for simple answers I've had some very good luck on r/explainlikeimfive. If anyone here hasn't seen that subreddit I suggest taking a look at it. There are plenty of things that I had no idea about and someone can explain it very simply in a very short paragraph, compared to a wall of text that other places might provide (assuming I just want a simple answer).

Take this for example.

[http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/ywh1y/eli...](http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/ywh1y/eli5_the_spanish_inquisition/)

<comment><USER2> I didn't mean to imply any hate towards reddit in my original post. While the quality of some parts is questionable, reddit is undoubtedly a hub filled with great content and knowledgeable people. Amazingly interesting and insightful posts await those who are willing to dig for it. My reddit addition is just as strong as anyone's.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Business Insider has more details here:

[http://www.businessinsider.com/heres-how-much-money-the- new-...](http://www.businessinsider.com/heres-how-much-money-the-new-york- times-was-losing-on-aboutcom-2012-8)

Revenues for About.com have been steadily declining. It's not surprising that the NYT dumped it. I'm just surprised that there was a bidding war over it.

<comment><USER5> A content farm covering a story about a content farm buying a content farm.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> These organizations are both so far removed from my life that you could have switched their names in the title and it would have had the same impact

</comment><comment><USER7> So... A search engine with obnoxious and intrusive ads is going to buy a mostly mediocre content site with obnoxious and intrusive ads and we're supposed to be happy and use this stuff?

This will become the Viacom of the internet... Content without content?

<comment><USER8> About.com is quite good for content IMO. The ads are kind of annoying though. I don't think they are $300m good, and they have lost a lot of value due to open content like Wikipedia.

<comment><USER7> Your standards differ from mine then.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I worked there and lived through the Primedia and NYT acquisition. The fact that they have sold this company this many times is amazing. The major equity holders probably cant believe their own luck.

</comment><comment><USER10> One change to the Google SERP ranking algorithm is going to ruin their day.

<comment><USER11> this is exactly my thoughts. I feel like they haven't been as prevalent as they were in results a while ago when searching.

<comment><USER12> About.com got hit pretty hard by the Panda algorithm change - they have definitely been less prevalent in search recently, although they still appear to be reasonably profitable. As far as content farms go, they're one of the better ones? (since they basically invented the space, and demand etc. took it to new depths of pathetic content)

<comment><USER13> machine generated "content" must be profitable, no suprise here

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Its funny when you think about it because you never realize how important that site is for many people who aren't as savvy as the rest of you all.

Gotta remember that for every person who uses the web, there is someone who knows even less about it.

There is a niche for everyone. Literally.

</comment><comment><USER15> Some background: there was a month-long bidding war between answers.com and IAC (ask.com) for about.com[1]. I wonder how things went since IAC's offer[2]. Did Answers upped their offer? Did it went personal and they left the table? One can wonder.

[1] [http://money.cnn.com/2012/08/27/technology/times- about/?hpt=...](http://money.cnn.com/2012/08/27/technology/times- about/?hpt=hp_t3)

[2] [http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/08/21/us-nyt-about- sale-...](http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/08/21/us-nyt-about-sale- idUSBRE87K10Y20120821)

</comment><comment><USER16> This is the first time I'm wishing for an acquisition to shut a product down.

</comment><comment><USER17> I am amazed Ask.Com is making enough money to fund a 300M purchase... who uses Ask.Com????

<comment><USER17> Oh just saw the other comments about the parent and its other subsidiaries.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> I'm constantly amazed at how often I stumble upon About.com's material, even for topics well covered by more reputable sites. When I think of About.com, I think of junk content just barely better than Yahoo Answers...but some sections do have a wide breadth of content that you'd think would be too technical of minutiae for About.com

Here's their Ruby site: <http://ruby.about.com/>

Note: I can't say the quality of the technical writing is good. I'm just surprised they try to do so much at all, given the number of great technical blogs and free references out there (nevermind, ahem, Stack Overflow). It just goes to show that About.com's content strategy seems to be very lackadaisical

</comment><comment><USER19> Who realized that Ask.com was successful enough to buy someone else for $300M? Wow.

<comment><USER20> I actually thought the other way around, I figured About.com was worth more than 1/3 of an Instagram.

<comment><USER21> Instagram was paid in cash _and_ stock whose value is now lower that what it was at the time of sale. This deal however is cash. So the comparison is not very simple.

<comment><USER22> At the time it was worth $1B total, regardless of how it has depreciated since. Anyway it's still more than 2x what About.com went for.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


How Facebook Ruins Friendships - <AUTHOR> http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970204660604574370450465849142.html

<comment><USER2> Some things I've learned:

* never look at the profile of someone you're interested in.

* never look at an ex's profile.

* I prefer my own profile page over the "Home" page.

If you absolutely have to look at the profile of someone you're interested in, get the information you need and get out. Don't look at any pictures whatever you do! The result will always be bad!

A helpful question to battle jealosy/envy when you do run across something unsavory:

"Why would these two people be talking on facebook? Why aren't they just talking on the phone or something? They must not really be that close, since they're talking on facebook after all..."

<comment><USER3> If you don't do all that, what _do_ you do on facebook?

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> An older colleague pointed out this article to me the other day, as evidence in support of their opinion that Facebook isn't all it's cracked up to be. In response I said,

This article isn't about Facebook so much as it is a commentary on the effects of new technology on the evolution of social norms.

I'm sure when the telephone was invented people had similar complaints. As we develop new technology we must also develop new etiquette for it's use.

<comment><USER5> I don't think that's true at at all. The problem this article brings up isn't "with Facebook" as much as it's with the fact that Facebook doesn't make it easier to delineate private items from public items. Which, imho, is one of the biggest un-talked about issues our society faces.

Facebook is modeled after a very childish model of "I'll just share everything with the world". But now you have everyone from future mates to HR departments checking people's profiles and under that scrutiny the current model doesn't stand up well.

You want to invent a Facebook killer all you need to do is figure out a way for people to share everything they do on Facebook while only giving select "friends" access on an item by item basis.

<comment><USER4> Exactly, new etiquette. Don't post things to a persons wall that are best said in a private message. don't post embarrassing pictures of yourself or others etc...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This post is a duplicate: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=784824>. There should be some kind of test that runs and alerts a poster of possible duplicate entries. Thoughts?

<comment><USER2> The urls are different

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> The only thing I check on facebook is the pictures of the babies of my brothers :-) I only see my nephews once every 3 months, so facebook is great there! And occasionnaly I send a message to an old acquaintance from high school or get an invitation to go to some event. That is great.

But all the useless talk that make up 90% of the facebook experience... it's stupid the author is right there.

</comment><comment><USER8> Facebook is not about friendship, but networking. It is just a way of communication or time wasting.</comment>


The Dirty Truth About 'Clean Diesel' - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/03/opinion/sunday/the-dirty-truth-about-clean-diesel.html <comment><USER2> Why does everyone concentrate on fucking cars? Cars are not the problem, the 15 biggest ships cause more pollution than ALL cars worldwide ([0]).

The problems are ships (which burn stuff that's essentially waste and generally have no form of emissions treatments [1]), locomotives (these burn diesel, but again, the vast fleet of old diesel locos doesn't carry any adequate filters [2]), wood furnaces (in poor countries, where anything that burns is used to heat and cook [3]), and factories where no money is available to get their emissions under control ([3]).

Also, to clarify, I'm not after greenhouse gases, but after the stuff that actually kills people. Greenhouse emissions are nasty but as others have noted, agriculture is to blame here and not cars or anything else.

[0]: [http://www.gizmag.com/shipping- pollution/11526/](http://www.gizmag.com/shipping-pollution/11526/)

[1]: see [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fuel_oil#Environmental_issues](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fuel_oil#Environmental_issues)

[2]: [http://www.russfrei-fuers- klima.de/themen/schienenverkehr/](http://www.russfrei-fuers- klima.de/themen/schienenverkehr/) (german unfortunately)

[3]: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2013_Eastern_China_smog#Causes](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2013_Eastern_China_smog#Causes) (though I have to admit, it's coal, not wood, but the result is the same)

<comment><USER3> If I recall, all that you cited above is far less damaging than livestock agriculture.

<comment><USER2> Depends on the pollutants. What I cited above is mostly particulate or toxic pollutants, livestock is a greenhouse-only problem.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> One way or another, the author was charged with writing a hit-piece on diesel passenger cars in order to put pressure on regulation to keep them out of the US market. They did it poorly, with little factual backing. That's because they don't have much of a case.

Clean diesel can be very clean. Clean gasoline engines are something we created in the 70's, 80's, and 90's; We used to have an enormous smog problem from tailpipe emissions, but we've basically solved it through regulation of what sort of fuel gets made and what sort of emissions controls are built into cars. With diesel trucks, we resolutely refused to make the corresponding changes for several decades; It's going to take 20+ years to get the truck fleet on the same footing as cars, and we only started the ULSD rollout about 10 years ago; we've only just begun major emissions level requirements in 2015 vehicles. The trucks you and I grew up around have no attempt to control emissions whatsoever, due to the power of US industry lobbyists. There is very little comparison to the clean diesels that are now a well-developed, highly regulated chunk of the EU passenger car market.

The diesel emissions scandal was about a deliberate conspiracy within one manufacturer, wherein software was written to turn off major emissions controls in order to gain a very small mileage advantage, and then turn them back on to pass emissions testing. It has no relevance whatsoever to the practicality of clean diesel engines.

</comment><comment><USER5> Article is low on numbers

"An air quality expert in Britain reported that much of it was "stale diesel" from traffic emissions generated in European cities."

how much is "much of it" ?

and big on personal observation like

"As anybody who has seen the black smoke spewing out of the pipes of a big rig as it changes gears can testify, diesel has a fatal flaw."

IMO a fluff piece.

</comment><comment><USER6> The interesting thing about NOx and soot pollution is that it remains a local problem, unlike the (higher) CO2 emissions from gas engines, which are just a contribution to global climate change. In that sense, I'd say it would almost be preferable to require all passenger vehicles be diesel - people could see quickly why they should drive less... Many diesel owners in the US (myself included) run varying amounts of biodiesel in their engines, which produce slightly more NOx (generally), but less particulates.

<comment><USER7> Unfortunately drivers dont mind killing people with their emissions it turns out.

<comment><USER8> People generally don't mind doing things that slowly kill other people or themselves for that matter. Smokers are a prime example.

If the effect was immediate and those 9000 odd people just dropped to the ground dead as you drive past them, we would see a more direct reaction.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Some of the sources used in this article are not at all of the quality I have come to expect from the NY Times. Sources like the Daily Mail and "www.searchautoparts.com".

</comment><comment><USER10> There's either some bias or flat out ignorance with this author. I'll start with:

> In other words, a driver who steps on the accelerator of a diesel car may be > filling the lungs of nearby pedestrians, cyclists, infants in strollers and > other drivers with potentially deadly particulate matter.

Driving a diesel car is nothing like driving a gasoline car. In a gasoline car, when you "step on the accelerator" you follow the horsepower curve, revving the engine to 5000-5500 (perhaps higher) RPMs before shifting. This is because the torque curve in a typical gasoline vehicle follows the horsepower curve until you get close to the red line, typically 6500-7000 in modern cars.

In a diesel passenger car (using a VW TDI as a reference) the torque develops early, peaking at about 2000-3000 RPM, then falls as you go past 3000. So if you want to get going fast in a TDI, you keep the shifting going on at around 3000. With the way the DSG and ECU work in a TDI, that means running at about 1/3-1/2 throttle. Definitely not "stepping on it". Also note the red line on a TDI is 5000 RPM.

As a side note, the TDI ECU's algorithm for detecting faulty inputs imposes about a 1.5 second delay on actually opening the throttle if you floor it from a dead stop. It's very counterintuitive if you need quick acceleration, you have to give about 1/4 throttle, then slowly increase as the car starts moving. Again, if you want to go fast, the car actually incentivizes NOT stepping on it.

Second, and this is the one that everyone seems to fail to notice. The TDI passes emissions when the bypass mode is disabled, putting the ECU into normal mode. What normal mode means is the car more frequently cycles the Diesel Particulate Filter (DPF), which reduces NOx emissions by accumulating soot in the DPF then burning it by passing unburned fuel through the engine 1 out of every 4 cycles while the system is in a DPF cycle. The unspent fuel lands on the soot, then the heat from the following combustion cycle ignites it and dumps mostly ash/greatly reduced NOx down the tailpipe. There are of course performance and fuel efficiency issues with normal mode. With proper tuning of the software it should be able to both meet emissions standards without sacrificing too much in the drivability department. A decrease in mileage is inevitable though.

VWs mistake in all this was failing to accept a 28/38 MPG (or 27/37) rating, and insisting on 30/40 MPG (which likely came at the behest of VW Marketing). Had they been willing to accept slightly lower MPG numbers, they would have been in compliance with the law.

To me, all the kerfuffle seems a little overblown. I don't give VW a free pass for breaking the law, they need to be held accountable. But this whole idea that diesel is doomed seems very off kilter to me. Diesel produces fewer greenhouse gases, converts hydrocarbons to kinetic energy most efficiently of all internal combustion engines, has fewer emissions from ancillary chemicals than gasoline like acetone and toluene (both unregulated at present). It truly is the way forward until we can retool the worldwide vehicle fleet to be driven by electricity (30 years minimum if we start right now).

When I look at this anti-diesel campaign, I look at it through the lens of the Saudi's fear not of peak oil, but of peak demand. Diesel threatens to lower the plateau of peak demand. [http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-04-12/saudi- arab...](http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-04-12/saudi-arabia-s- plan-to-extend-the-age-of-oil)

<comment><USER11> Thanks for the reality check on this poorly written article. I think the NYTimes should have asked you to edit it!

<comment><USER12> Hardly a reality check, his post was quite misleading.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> If you want to know exactly what Volkswagen did in their software for the emission control unit, I recommend this talk from last week's Chaos Communication Congress: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xZSU1FPDiao](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xZSU1FPDiao)

</comment><comment><USER14> "The diesel engine is inherently efficient: Even a heavy sedan can get as much as 50 miles per gallon, while producing fewer carbon dioxide emissions per mile."

There seems to be a common misconception about CO2 emissions from cars, evidenced in this statement.

Burning hydrocarbons produces CO2 and water. The more burned, the more emitted. The efficiency of the engine (and vehicle in total) determines how much fuel is used while driving. More efficient = less emissions.

Diesel engines are thermodynamically more efficient by virtue of their higher combustion temperature and pressure. It's this same high temp and pressure that causes nitrous and sulphur oxide pollutants to form in the exhaust gas. Hence there is a definite trade-off between high thermodynamic efficiency, and NOx pollution.

Diesels are more efficient, but less clean.

</comment><comment><USER15> This article is missing the forest for tiny NOx colored trees.

Sure, there is an indirect health problem with pollution, but there is also a much more direct _health problem_ : cars causing fatal accidents. The best way is hence to fix the problem at the root: personal cars do not belong in cities, and _cars_ do not belong in pedestrian areas.

<comment><USER16> Vehicle emissions cause 53,000 premature deaths in the USA every year: [http://news.mit.edu/2013/study-air-pollution- causes-200000-e...](http://news.mit.edu/2013/study-air-pollution- causes-200000-early-deaths-each-year-in-the-us-0829)

I'd be happier to fix both problems at once, but fixing just one would go a long way.

<comment><USER15> I've expanded on this in the other child comment, but of course banning diesel cars doesn't solve the pollution issues.

There is no _healthy threshold_ for particulate concentration and other pollution, even if safety standards want to create this illusion. It's a continuous world, after all.</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: What is a good Mac app for keeping notes, that supports code snippets? - <AUTHOR> I use OneNote for most of my projects/notes, but having code in it is a nightmare, and I prefer to write in Markdown, or at least a much less 'rich'/minomal editor.
There's a few buyable options, but no trustable reviews or trials.
Any recommendations? <comment><USER2> I use notion.so

They support code snippets via code blocks.

I use it for notes but also for much more.

For example, my website ([https://blog.kowalczyk.info/](https://blog.kowalczyk.info/)) is almost fully generated out of content stored in Notion via a custom program ([https://github.com/kjk/blog](https://github.com/kjk/blog)) that uses my (unofficial, reverse-engineered) API library for Go ([https://github.com/kjk/notionapi](https://github.com/kjk/notionapi)).

Notion is very rich so it might be overwhelming at first but it's the last note-taking application I'll ever use.

</comment><comment><USER3> I've spent quite a lot time on this. And the Oscar goes to the Typora([https://typora.io/](https://typora.io/)).

Pros:

\- You can just add any snippet with language specific highlighting. I added a folder with the name quickscript. It has documented snippets, you can even add some equation in Latex then add the implementation as code snippet.

\- Available for Mac, Linux, Windows.

\- I store all my data in Google Drive.

\- All data is stored in Markdown format. This is very important. You can easily export your notes or edit from raw version even if app would stop working one day.

\- Realtime preview of markdown.

\- Some sort of Latex support. Well if you are researcher this is very very cool.

\- Crazy themes. Mine seems like exactly Bear note app.

Cons:

\- No mobile client. But you can use a markdown editor with Google Drive support.

\- It might have some non-critical bugs now and then.

</comment><comment><USER4> I've been using Boostnote[1] for several months and I really enjoy it, and it sounds exactly what you're looking for. It has just two kinds of notes, markdown and snippets, supports syncing with Dropbox/google drive/etc. Though my absolute favorite feature, and the reason I haven't looked for anything else since downloading it is it supports VI key bindings.

[1] [https://boostnote.io/](https://boostnote.io/)

</comment><comment><USER5> VoodooPad.</comment>


The Beatles Appear In iTunes - <AUTHOR> http://www.macrumors.com/2010/11/16/the-beatles-appear-in-itunes-store/

<comment><USER2> Yawn. If you wanted the Beatles on your iPod you could have gone out and bought the CDs and ripped them.

<comment><USER3> ...Or otherwise acquired them. This is a letdown for how much they were hyping it out. Was I too optimistic to hope for something that I would _actually_ never forget, like cloud-based iTunes?

<comment><USER4> The average consumer doesn't care about a cloud-based iTunes. The Beatles are something that they will never forget, but they don't care about the technical delivery method. They just want the content.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Meh! Apple's marketing department needs to go back on their meds, the only thing we will never forget is how overhyped this announcement was.

In the UK the White Album on iTunes is £17.99, on Amazon it is £12.99, what am I missing?

<comment><USER6> What am I missing?

What, exactly, did Apple's marketing department do to hype (much less overhype) this announcement? It seems to me that there was a cryptic teaser page on the iTunes site for 24 hours. It's hard to imagine a more low-key launch, other than silently adding the Beatles albums to the iTunes catalog.

It seems to me that it is the tech media who need to have their meds adjusted.

<comment><USER5> Apple's teaser suggested an unforgettable announcement, this must have been designed to fuel speculation. The disappointed backlash will be quite funny, and deserved.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> I'm quite surprised at the level of 'upmph' that has been given to this announcement... we all knew it was going to happen one day but to be honest, it makes no difference to anyone.. most people already had the beatles on there iPod years ago...

</comment><comment><USER7> Why are there _THREE_ stories about this on the front page of HACKER NEWS?!

 _THREE_!

<comment><USER8> Because TWO was not enough, and THREE is ONE HIGHER!

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Apple never introduced products "You'll never forget" without a media event. Apple would describe their products as "magical", "amazing", or "revolutionary", but "Tomorrow is another day", "You'll never forget" is personal. It has an obvious sense of lyrics. And music, include that from the Beatles, is to most people unforgettable. People has an attachment to music on a whole different level compared to technologies, which are replaceable and in most cases just tools to get things done, like listen to music.

Anybody who knows Apple wouldn't expect anything other than Beatles from yesterday's tease.

</comment><comment><USER10> Zzz.

Is this announcement any more seismic over in the music industry?

(Is there a music industry equivalent to HN? Hack News?)

</comment><comment><USER11> Is that it?!??! We were all set for music streaming and we get the back catalogue of a fairly influential band whose label had a long standing trademark dispute with iTunes over the word Apple.

</comment><comment><USER12> Can we please stop posting popular stories on Hacker News? If I wanted to know that the Beatles Album came out, I could have gone to ANY news source.</comment>


Some of China's '996' tech tribe quit, seek less stress - <AUTHOR> https://www.reuters.com/article/us-china-tech-labour/opting-out-some-of-chinas-996-tech-tribe-quit-seek-less-stress-idUSKCN1SM0HX <comment><USER2> Personally I can't do more than 2-3 hours of genuine "deep work" per day. That is high quality, focused, immersed thinking on a difficult problem and writing code.

IMO people who work a large number of hours each week get cognitively slowed. They can't tell they've slowed down (partly because they don't have a control to compare against) and so think that if you do 80 hours per week you'll do twice as much as if you do 40 hours per week. You won't, you'll do less.

Executives who think the best way to measure business performance is by how much your employees are sat at their desks are idiots.

<comment><USER3> Intuitively and introspectively I agree with you.

But then I ask myself, where are all the successful 30-hour week companies? Why is it that nearly every single successful organization has a culture of long hours?

I personally know that I can't sustainably work 10+ hours a day. But the observed results in the real world seem to say something different.

It's hard to square that circle, and I'm genuinely interested in anyone who has insight on this.

<comment><USER4> Looking at the games industry where passion stands for self exploitation. If you don't push back most employers will take everything they can get.

<comment><USER5> But the question is, what do they get?

Would they develop products faster if the employees worked less?

<comment><USER6> What if they don't? What if crunch works, at least in the short term, for the employer? Does any criticism of crunch time necessarily hinge on productivity? Does the health and well-being of individual employees warrant sufficient concern by itself to scale back working hours?

<comment><USER7> The pattern seems to be :

* Get a new job at game studio * Start off OK-ish, then get pushed to crunch more and more as release date nears and then slips (probably by design) * Release game * lay off most staff * They're broke for a while but the time without work is nice * Repeat

I can't find a source but I understand the average length of a career in the industry is 5-6 years. Also, I couldn't help but notice at my last place that those of us doing more general work (python, data engineering, etc.) were a hell of a lot more relaxed than those with video-game-specific skillsets (Unity3d).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Can anyone from China who has worked a 996 provide an account of what the work is like?

Do they have heavy PMP-managed work with meeting paralysis or is it just sitting at your desk and being expected to magically perform, or is it just sitting around doing nothing and not being able to leave?

All of those are their own types of hell, but they're all different. What are they doing in those 12 hours?

<comment><USER9> Not a direct answer, but most Chinese had undergone tougher hours and more dreadful win-or-your-life-is-screwed college examination pressure during high school. I was in a class where the morning session started from 5:30am and the day ends around 9pm(and we have full Sat and Sunday morning). Just imagine how mentally tough Chinese is when 1 point left you 10+k behind in regional ranking.

So honestly 996 means nothing for a lot of people (esp new grads). Even though there are protests now, I'm pessimistic it'll shake anything eventually

<comment><USER10> Cumulative stress is cumulative. One doesn't recover from burnout with more burning.

<comment><USER11> you need to experience it yourself or see someone close to you going through a burnout to understand how crippling it is.

Some people I know where unable to get anyway near code for years after a burnout.

Another person gained deep seated anxiety that they are unable to get rid of.

<comment><USER10> Right. The idea that someone can become tougher by subjecting themselves to stress is silly (or at least misguided). That path leads to burnout which is crippling. It doesn't lead to tougher people who can keep burning themselves even more. They just hit a wall where they aren't capable of much of anything.

<comment><USER9> I mostly agree, I do think the limit is higher for Chinese, but it's not infinite

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I know a lot of Korean and Chinese school kids who cram study until late and night and that is just normal. I suspect 996 isn't that weird to many young Chinese developers because that is what they've done their whole lives. 9pm is probably an earlier end than when they were doing homework.

Even in the US now children are getting more and more homework and stressed out about getting into the most prestigious universities. If that is normal when growing up, spending all your time in the office is just more of the same, except you get paid more than everyone else so society loves you too.

<comment><USER13> In Korea they actually passed a law banning private prep classes after midnight. And there are "raids" to stop the students from studying! The mentality there is very different from the US

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> On a somewhat related note, I'd love a set of those pictured sleep capsules at my office. I've taken to running to my car to catch a quick 20 minute snooze during my lunch break, but it's way too bright, I'm uncomfortably sleeping sitting slightly upright, and I've got to have the windows open in a noisy car park. Having a cool, dark, dedicated sleeping pod would be much more civilised.

<comment><USER15> Having an office with a door that closes solves that problem too. I have one and take naps on the floor with a yoga mat and a pillow I bring from home on my lunch break. It's sad that most workplaces are still "open." Even when I was a grad student I took naps on my library cubicle. Cubicles would be a step up from the warehouse setup of most workplaces.

<comment><USER14> That would be wonderful, but my company has fully embraced the 'open office' idea. Even upper management have offices that are completely windowed. All this setup seems to achieve is to provide on open door for people to ask questions that could be done over email, interrupting work flow every couple of minutes so no one gets anything done.

The best chance I'd have of finding a place to nap in private would be finding a crate of packing peanuts in dispatch and hoping I get shipped off to France.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> > heavyweights such as Sequoia Capital's Mike Moritz highlighted it as a > competitive advantage over the United States.

It's an issue when the so-called tech heavyweights don't understand the basics of worker productivity in the industry.

<comment><USER6> What if 996 work hours do, on average across a large population, make workers more productive? When they burn out, they are easy to replace. Would this justify such a work schedule?

EDIT: This post is not in support of 996. Does anyone do Socratic dialogue in comment threads anymore?

<comment><USER17> At some point productivity just isn't worth it when it leaves you workers with like...one day a week to live. What a bleak and pointless existence.

<comment><USER6> Yes, that's what I was driving at.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I worked at Ant Financial for a time (startup acquihire) and spent some time working in offices in both Beijing and Hangzhou. As an American 996 was surprising but also doesn't quite live up to it's name, or at least not at Ant afaik.

In practice the typical "996" day would usually go something like this: \- ~9:30 - 10am Arrive, commutes could vary as you might imagine \- 10 - 11:30am Morning meetings, usually a team stand-up or two \- 12 - 1:30pm Lunch, typically 1.5 hours \- 1:30 - 7pm Most work is done during this period, with some meetings later in the day \- 7 - ~8:30pm Team dinner, sometimes in the office and sometimes at a nearby restaurant* \- 8:30 - 9/10pm People start to leave

* - I was a visitor in the China offices so that could've affected how long we spent at dinner or how often we actually left the office for it

On top of the large breaks it was fairly common that the work day was filled with breaks and naps and such, so I didn't really observe people actually working for much longer than most western offices but it did tend to increase the bonds of teams by keeping them together for the entire day. As for working Saturdays... I asked various colleagues about it and was told that it was rare, only when it was absolutely necessary to ship something on a set schedule.

Another thing I found interesting was that our office in the US had Tue/Thur work from home days and when folks from the China offices would visit they were just as surprised as I was when I first heard about 996. Some of them asked me how I would get any work done from home or how management could enforce it. In general I saw that management in China placed a lot of value in office time even though the levels of productivity seemed to match it even less than in western offices.

</comment><comment><USER19> I question the whole premise of this article. The use of "some" in the title also seems incorrect when just one person actually quit. The person also quit to go to an industry where all she has to do is charge rent, in other words, she quit to go do nothing. I think that another perfectly reasonable explanation is that her quitting had nothing to do with the stress of whatever '996' job she had. She quit because she didn't want to work.

</comment><comment><USER20> High-paying and comfortable jobs(government jobs, state-owned companies; for example you need to bribe like 30K usd to stay in the military and get promoted) in China are reserved for people with connections, even then they hardly have to do anything if show up at all, there's a hierarchy, those who don't need to work and those who have to work extra.

So while the examples in this story sound good, but majority of people don't really have a choice.

</comment><comment><USER21> The funny part is that one VC firm proudly names their podcast "996 podcast": [https://996.ggvc.com/category/podcast/](https://996.ggvc.com/category/podcast/)

Talk about out of touch

</comment><comment><USER22> I love how there's tons of hype from leaders to have employees work more hours but not so much hype to PAY THEM MORE.

It's just your DUTY?

<comment><USER23> It makes sense when you understand that those at the top really don't view the rest of us in the same terms that they view each other. We're not accorded the same hopes, dreams, desires, needs, etc. They're special; we're not. Everything they do, morally speaking, proceeds from that premise.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> This is the biggest reason why I didn't return to China after university even though I really wanted to. 996 is clearly violating the labor law, but big companies' spokesmen can publically admit they will enforce 996 without any major backslash.

The fact that 996 has become a norm among business lines is REALLY terrifying.

</comment><comment><USER25> Is stress the right word? I get stressed when I can't figure out how I'm going to get my bills paid or when I'm stuck in traffic and there's a meeting I'm trying to get to. Working long hours isn't _stressful_, it's exhausting. I've done the unreasonable peer-pressure driven long work hours thing before and I just want to go to sleep and I'm frustrated that everybody is just demanding more and more out of me.

<comment><USER26> Sounds like stress to me.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> Is 996 completely new though? Wall Street folks, associates at law firms, and employees at early startups in SV all work crazy hours.

</comment><comment><USER28> This' another example of the current wide-spread anti-China sentiment. It suggests only Chinese firms inflict such inhuman work demand on their employees. Totally not true. Stressful work condition is the norm in Silicon Valley, it's the norm on Wall Street for years. Investment bankers start their day at 5:30am and don't go home till 10pm. Some need to follow foreign markets and stay even later than that.

</comment><comment><USER29> 3 anecdotes and a single untargeted statistic isn't much. Reuters should dig deeper.</comment>


Photo Ark – An effort to document every species living in zoos and sanctuaries - <AUTHOR> https://www.nationalgeographic.org/projects/photo-ark/ <comment> Y-bar Is this site using some automated translation service? I get crazy odd names for the species when I visit from a Swedish IP address. Examples:

> Graycrowned Crane

> Grå krontrana (Swedish name)

> Grå krönad kran (NG namn)

Or

> White-backed vulture

> Vitryggig gam (Swedish name)

> Vitryggad gös & Vitryggade gärningen (NG names)

<comment><USER2> This is horrible! Everywhere the English is mixed with bad translations to Swedish! Who thought this was a good idea?

<comment><USER3> Undoubtedly it was a species at risk!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Be sure to click through to the Explore page since it's not immediately obvious.

<comment><USER5> Direct link: [https://www.nationalgeographic.org/projects/photo- ark/explor...](https://www.nationalgeographic.org/projects/photo-ark/explore/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Truly great endeavor.

If you have the chance to see this as an exhibit in a museum, 100% do so. Getting up close to the level of detail you'll see in giant prints is special.

Joel Sartore, the photographer, shares the photos to his Instagram account and is worth a follow as well. Sometimes even runs promos for prints.

Lastly, their merch is also worth a pickup - it's high quality art, I have the printed photo book - and helps support the project of documenting all these creatures.

</comment><comment><USER7> I find this amazing. I am still finding animals which look like somebody made them up, here is the bat-griffon: [https://www.nationalgeographic.org/projects/photo- ark/animal...](https://www.nationalgeographic.org/projects/photo- ark/animal/saguinus-midas/)

And the name (midas) is brilliant as well.

<comment><USER8> This collection is an inspiration for illustrators. What an emotional range this guy [https://www.nationalgeographic.org/projects/photo- ark/animal...](https://www.nationalgeographic.org/projects/photo- ark/animal/cacajao-calvus/) has in his photos! I can see some Orc-inspiring features in him as well.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> It would be great if these were released under some kind of open licensing. Requiring a backlink/credit would do wonders for promoting the project as these would likely get used across all kinds of professional and amateur media.

Then again, these pics obviously took an extraordinary amount of skill/travel/equipment so it's perfectly understandable that they aren't freely licensed.</comment>


Playstation 5 - <AUTHOR> https://techcrunch.com/2020/03/18/sony-finally-unveils-playstation-5-details/ <comment><USER2> > Sony was planning a much bigger reveal in a few weeks at GDC in SF, but, > well, COVID-19 happened. So here we are with a live-streamed version of the > event, offering far and away the deepest dive into the next-gen console.

I wonder how far we are from purely digital launches for many products.

Aside: TechCrunch should really stop hijacking the back button. You shouldn't have to possess frontend development skills to know how to disable the intrusive JS which powers this.</comment>


Show HN: Create an IoT Environmental Sensor with NodeMCU and Lua - <AUTHOR> https://blog.alexellis.io/iot-nodemcu-sensor-bme280/ <comment><USER2> Did a similar thing. MQTT broker and small node server to include current values. It's not generalized and tuned, but could be a nice starting point. [https://github.com/martinlechner1/raspberry-node- mqtt](https://github.com/martinlechner1/raspberry-node-mqtt)

<comment><AUTHOR> That looks awesome too. I used InfluxDB with my Raspberry Pi variant and plotted the data in graphs - [https://blog.alexellis.io/environmental- monitoring-dashboard...](https://blog.alexellis.io/environmental-monitoring- dashboard/)

This can be combined with the NodeMCU units which I think are better suited for low-powered data-logging than the RPi.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Super useful.

Have you worked out how to run for a long time from a smallish battery?

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm running 4 of these sensors right now and I am just using the small free- gift type of USB power packs. They are lasting several days without using deep sleep optimizations.

In the next post I'll show how to aggregate the data into InfluxDB for charting.</comment></comment>


Angr – User-friendly binary analysis platform - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/angr/angr <comment><USER2> The interesting part about Angr (and arguably, its' reason for existence) is that it can execute native (x86_64, ARM, others...) concolically [1] - ie., given a binary and a requested end state, it will strive using both formal methods and brute force to find input required to reach that state. All automatically, including converting binary code to an IL (cle & Vagrant IL via PyVEX), executing that IL (simuvex) and interacting with SMT solvers (claripy). This can be used for finding bugs, reverse engineering and exploit generation, at least in a toy/CTF setting.

Angr is also the open-source part of the Shellphish/UCSB contestant (Mechanical Phish) that competed in the DARPA CGC [2].

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

[2] - [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2016_Cyber_Grand_Challenge](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2016_Cyber_Grand_Challenge)

<comment><USER3> > Angr is also the open-source part of the Shellphish/UCSB contestant > (Mechanical Phish) that competed in the DARPA CGC

It's not the only open-source part: [https://github.com/mechaphish](https://github.com/mechaphish)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> There are other similar platforms (listing biggest ones):

1\. BAP (OCaml) - [https://github.com/BinaryAnalysisPlatform/bap](https://github.com/BinaryAnalysisPlatform/bap)

2\. BinCAT (OCaml) - [https://github.com/airbus- seclab/bincat](https://github.com/airbus-seclab/bincat)

3\. radare2 (C) + radeco (Rust)(WIP) - [https://github.com/radare/radare2](https://github.com/radare/radare2) \+ [https://github.com/radare/radeco-lib](https://github.com/radare/radeco-lib)

4\. Falcon (Rust) (WIP) - [https://github.com/falconre/falcon](https://github.com/falconre/falcon)

And a bunch of others, less common or less featureful.

</comment><comment><USER5> If you're an everyday C/C++ programmer and can't imagine how Angr could fit into your workflow, then check out DeepState ([https://github.com/trailofbits/deepstate](https://github.com/trailofbits/deepstate)). It is a Google Test-compatible unit testing framework that lets you write parameterized unit tests, using Angr to perform the state space exploration. What that means is that you can write a unit test, e.g. that addition of two integers doesn't overflow (it can), and using the power of Angr, DeepState will evaluate your test for all possible integers, not hard-coded ones, and not just some randomly chosen ones.

<comment><USER6> For this usually CBMC is used. [http://www.cprover.org/cbmc/](http://www.cprover.org/cbmc/)

You can also use CBMC to solve the usual state reverse engineering problems, like coverage analysis, finding input for output, hash collisions, ...

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Hm, if the example written on README is representative for current usage, then it surely changed a lot recently. I remember checking angr out a few months ago, and simply running a binary required a few dozens of, mostly boilerplate, code. I may try it again now, looks like it improved since then.

</comment><comment><USER8> Did Manticore lead to a focus on ease of use? Not sure I've seen angr described as user friendly before.

<comment><USER9> You are more or less correct. The `project.execute()` API was indeed inspired by Manticore!</comment></comment>


Why Pascal Is Not My Favorite Programming Language – Current Status - <AUTHOR> http://wiki.freepascal.org/Why_Pascal_is_Not_My_Favorite_Programming_Language

<comment><USER2> It would be more interesting if Walter Bright had a similar article. I wonder what would be the the FPC response.</comment>


Interfacing with native methods on Graal VM - <AUTHOR> https://cornerwings.github.io/2018/07/graal-native-methods/ <comment><USER2> Awesome. I wonder how well this works on a stock JDK10 using graal.

Whenever I see a speed boost to do what is conceptually the same thing I'm always curious where the fat was cut. What did we give up? You can dump the resulting assembly with -XX:+UnlockDiagnosticVMOptions -XX:+PrintAssembly and diff might be revealing.

My hunch is that the line from the tutorial: `@CFunction(transition = Transition.NO_TRANSITION)` makes all the difference. Explanation of NO_TRANSITION from [0]:

No prologue and epilogue is emitted. The C code must not block and must not call back to Java. Also, long running C code delays safepoints (and therefore garbage collection) of other threads until the call returns.

Which is probably great for BLAS-like calls. This lines up with my understanding from Cliff Click's great talk "Why is JNI Slow?"[1] basically saying that to be faster you need make assumptions about what the native code could and couldn't do and that generally developers would shoot themselves in the foot.

[0]: [https://github.com/oracle/graal/blob/master/sdk/src/org.graa...](https://github.com/oracle/graal/blob/master/sdk/src/org.graalvm.nativeimage/src/org/graalvm/nativeimage/c/function/CFunction.java) [1]: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LoyBTqkSkZk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LoyBTqkSkZk)

<comment><USER3> A team I was on in the past had a well known bottleneck for performance on the most performance critical component. It was one that couldn't possibly be avoided or minimised. It was one called with high frequency, and wall clock wise, didn't take too long.

"JNI is slow", being the conventional wisdom, and knowing just how frequent the calls would be, people had ignored it as an option.

Randomly one of the devs who was most bothered by the bottleneck, had an hour spare and threw the conventional wisdom out the window and dropped in JNI calls to an standard (highly optimised) library and re-benchmarked. 40% performance boost. Further experiments found that "JNI is slow" isn't as true as conventional wisdom quite had it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> There's an effort to bring a more modern FFI to Java that works similar to the one described in the article, called project Panama. It has tools to convert C header files into the equivalent annotated Java definitions and is intended to help improve performance as well.

You can follow along here:

[http://mail.openjdk.java.net/pipermail/panama- dev/](http://mail.openjdk.java.net/pipermail/panama-dev/)

The same project is also adding support for writing vector code in Java (SSE, AVX etc).

<comment><USER5> Disclaimer: I'm affiliated with a semi competing project to panama called javacpp: [https://github.com/bytedeco/javacpp](https://github.com/bytedeco/javacpp)

I can say for a fact that panama is not seriously targeting this space. We implement a ton of that native code today that works with c++ _and_ actual android _today_. We also handle gpus. Project panama is only targeting c, and even then will only do it a cross platform non committal fashion. They aren't doing it the way they should be in order to properly target native vectorized code.

We know this from experience, because this is all we do: [https://github.com/deeplearning4j/deeplearning4j](https://github.com/deeplearning4j/deeplearning4j) [https://github.com/bytedeco/javacpp- presets](https://github.com/bytedeco/javacpp-presets)

We tried seeing if we could get some of this work in to the JDK, but their goals fundamentally compete with what it takes to get vector math to be fast. It's also not nearly as ambitious as it needs to be to handle real world tensor workloads.

<comment><USER6> >Project panama is only targeting c, and even then will only do it a cross platform non committal fashion

John Rose of Oracle:

 _Panama is not just about C headers. It is about building a framework in which any data+function schema of APIs can be efficiently plugged into the JVM. So it 's not just C or C++ but protocol specs and persistent memory structures and on-disk formats and stuff not invented yet. We've been relentless about designing the framework down to essential functionality (memory access and procedure calls), not just our (second-)favorite language or compiler._

 _The important deliverable of Panama is therefore not Posix bindings, but rather a language-neutral memory layout-and-access mechanism, plus a language- neutral (initially ABI-compliant) subroutine invocation mechanism. The jextract tool grovels over ANSI C (soon C++) schemas and translates to the layouts and function calls, bound helpfully to Java APIs with unsurprising names. But the jextract tool is just the first plugin of many._

 _We do look forward to building more plugins for more metadata formats outside the Java ecosystem, such as what you are building._

 _In fact, I expect that, in the long run, we will not build all of the plugins, but that people who invent new data schemas (or even data+function schemas or languages) will consider using our tools (layouts, binder, metadata annotations) to integrate with Java, instead of the standard technique, which is to write a set of Java native functions from scratch, or (if you are very clever) with tooling. The binder pattern, in particular, seems to be a great way to spin repetitive code for accessing data structures of all sorts, not just C or Java. I hope it will be used, eventually, in preference to static protocol compilers. The JVM is very good at on-line optimization, even of freshly spun code, so it is a natural framework for building a binder._

>They aren't doing it the way they should be in order to properly target native vectorized code.

Which is interesting since Intel is the one contributing the majority of the vector code changes.

<comment><USER5> Yes that's what I stated above. I've also stated that I haven't just read the news. We've talked to that team physically. Being language/platform neutral does not mean it is going to fulfill most use cases people would have for c bindings. Java tends to be "good enough" for a lot of use cases out of the box. It might help a bit with libraries like netty and memory management, but it's not going to work on real world math code which, as I stated, is our main use case.

That codegen isn't going to match what you need to do for real speed on cpus or gpus when writing vectorized math code.

Re: his last point. That's exactly what we talked to that team about. We don't feel those tools are going to work for real world use cases. We already do the codegen and auto bindings/mapping ourselves in addition to the memory management ourselves.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Back in the day, GCC's Java native compiler "GCJ", had an alternative native method interface called CNI.

GCC recognized _#extern "Java"_ in headers generated from class files. You could then call (gcj-compiled) Java classes from C++ as if they were native C++ classes, as well as implement Java "native" methods in natural C++.

The whole thing performed a lot better than JNI since it was, more or less, just using the standard platform calling conventions. Calling a native CNI method from Java had the same overhead as any regular Java virtual method call.

Ultimately, GCJ faded away because there wasn't a great deal of interest in native Java compilation back then, and too many compatibility challenges in the pre-OpenJDK days. But it's interesting to see many of it's ideas coming back now in the form of Graal/GraalVM.

<comment><USER8> There was interest in native Java compilation, not in doing the work for free.

Most third party commercial Java SDKs do have support for native compilation, specially on the embedded space.

Around 2009 GCJ suffered an exodus of developers to OpenJDK.</comment></comment>


Saving forums from themselves with shared hierarchical whitelists (2009) - <AUTHOR> http://www.cawtech.demon.co.uk/outer-circle/core.html <comment><USER2> The problem is that spammers will very likely create accounts (n) , use these accounts to create hierarchial lists assigning account (A ) at the top of hierarchy and use that to spam post or advertise.

SEO spam works very similiar to this.

<comment><USER3> How would a spammer get to the top of each user's personal hierarchy?

This personal hierarchical, not pagerank.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Discussed at the time: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=920110](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=920110)

<comment><USER3> 2009 and aged like milk.

Top comment: "Maybe this is why Twitter works"

<comment><USER4> Fine old threads are interesting; lousy old threads show that things don't always get worse. Win-win!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Has anyone experimented with forums that require verified identity? The forum would have to add a hell of alot of value to get people to do it, but I'd imagine it's the most airtight way to stop trolls and spammers.

It wouldn't scale particularly well, but most forums have a relatively small group of posters adding all the value anyway.

<comment><USER6> I'm on a forum that's been around for a solid 15 years and doesn't give you posting rights unless you pay $5/year. The amount is trivial enough that even the poorest members can manage it (or if they're regulars and liked, others gift them a subscription) yet it seems to be enough to stop spammers bothering. There's been a few trolls over the years who paid the $5 to bombard the forum with stuff but there's also posting limitations for new members and other restrictions so it never goes very far.

I still love forums to this day and think they have a place in the modern web. Reddit and Facebook will want you to think otherwise, but there's hundreds of niche hobbies that specifically DON'T want the network effect of a large multi-topic forum like reddit and still do very well.

<comment><USER3> Is that Something Awful, Fark, Metafilter, or something else?

<comment><USER7> Something Awful isn't 5$ a year, it's 10$ for an account.

And the amount of people who buy 10$ to re-reg their banned account and get banned for the exact same reason as before could not be classified as "a few".

I am interested in learning which forum does the 5$ a year, I wasn't aware of many other forums with a pay-wall.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Sounds pretty much the way facebook works - you ensconce yourself in a bubble of opinions you agree with. Not that there's anything wrong with that if that's what you want, but don't try to fool yourself into thinking that the discussions will suddenly improve in "quality" if you filter out the people that irritate you.</comment>


Ask HN: How many vetted users does Hacker News have now? - <AUTHOR> I'm curious how many users are on here now, that are above the karma threshold. Similarly, are there metrics posted anywhere with HN stats? <comment><USER2> Some users have posted in 2,3 to 7-8 years. Does this count? Do you mean to ask active users? That would be interesting to know for sure but not essential. What makes HN great is the quality of users's input. If there were 10000 active users it would seem not very much but it's quite a lot if you think about it...

Anyway, it'd be interesting to know the answer to this query

<comment><USER2> I meant haven't. There are accounts whose last comments were 7-8 years ago. Technically those shouldn't count as the active users. Also lots of users have a few handles or use throwaways for certain delicate subjects. Should those count as well? I guess it'd be hard to come up with a correct number even for HN

<comment><USER3> It's not only the comments I think to mark favorites or support a post is also activity</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Social Nets - Can I have my data back please? - <AUTHOR>

Hey HNers,
Social networks have proved that people can and will communicate online, sharing bits of their lives with their friends. Facebook with its millions of users is the modern and most successful example!
I would like to propose a possible improvement of the privacy-related issues that arise from the central design of such networks:
Use something along the lines of public key (PK) cryptography to hide the messages exchanged by users. Friends would somehow exchange public keys and a Javascript client would automatically encrypt/decrypt messages that are stored in the network. For example: a status update would be a long string containing instances of the actual "status message", each encrypted with the (public) key of the friend that is allowed to see it. The client at the friend's side, will decrypt the instance (and discard the rest, non-decryptable string) and show it as normal status update message.
That would create a sub-network, and yes, loosing the private key will be a very bad event!
Anyway, what do you think? <comment><USER2> What problem are you solving with this? It seems like you are adding a lot of overhead and needless data to a simple system.

<comment><AUTHOR> Well, many people raise privacy concerns about FB and (ofcourse) Google, as to what these corporate bodies actually do with the data they collect. See for example here [http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2009/12/my_reaction_to...](http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2009/12/my_reaction_to.html)

There are not many good examples of privacy violation up to now, but as more individuals participate and share info, the "problem" may rise.

You know, when "talking" with your friends, you actually want to do just that: talk with your friends. It is rather unsettling to know that most probably there are "eyes" that may watch over your info. These eyes are not FB's or Google's (they just want to sell things).

My examples may not be the best...but I do know that day by day, I feel that I lose hold of my data :(

<comment><USER2> _I feel that I lose hold of my data_

OK, I understand what you are driving at. I still am a little confused by the concept where you willingly post "your data" into the essentially open ether, then lament that action.

How about not posting it to Facebook in the first place? It seems that the implied contract with posting data into public places is that the data is in fact public.

What you propose is interesting, but I'm not sure it provides even basic security-by-obscurity. The keys would either have to be so overly distributed to your friends that they essentially become public. Or the data stream has the same message encrypted over and over again, which makes the size of the data grow exponentially (and also most likely makes it easier to crack).

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm referring to the "friend-space", where info is public but only among these friends. I want to share stuff with my friends, and FB seems a rather good technology for that!

The public key is used for encryption, not decryption, so anybody can have it...To read a message I send you, you use your private key. The message will be encrypted by me using your public key. So, any friend can send me a message but only I can read it. If more friends are to be able to read the same message, the string must actually include an instance of the message, encrypted with the "other" friend's key.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> That is actually a cool idea. As an extension or a greasemonkey script, it might actually work quite well

<comment><AUTHOR> hm, you're right! I didn't think about greasemonkey ;) Perhaps a dedicated FF extension would be perfect!</comment></comment>