The DHH Problem - <AUTHOR> http://codon.com/the-dhh-problem Slides and audio from a lightning talk by Tom Stuart at Scottish Ruby Conference 2014. <comment><USER2> > Because DHH is just one person. And he only has DHH's experiences.

Yep. Uncle Bob is one person, too. tl;dr Think for yourself and don't listen to somebody just because they hurt your feelings.

> To pick a topical example: Is TDD hard in Rails apps because TDD is dead or > because Rails makes TDD hard?

This is a misrepresentation of what DHH has said [1], which is that strict adherence to TDD can make your designs worse:

> _Over the years, the test-first rhetoric got louder and angrier, though. > More mean-spirited. And at times I got sucked into that fundamentalist > vortex, feeling bad about not following the true gospel. Then I 'd try test- > first for a few weeks, only to drop it again when it started hurting my > designs._

> _Used as a hammer to beat down the nonbelievers, declare them unprofessional > and unfit for writing software. A litmus test._

If you watch the conversations between DHH, Martin Fowler, and Kent Beck, it seems to me that they all agree: testing is good, test-driven _design_ can be bad, and mocking everything is bad [2][3].

I took some time last week to re-read Uncle Bob's book, _Agile Software Development, Principles, Patterns, and Practices_ [4], and Kent Beck's book on TDD [5]. There was a huge difference: Uncle Bob focuses on test-driven _design_ , while Kent Beck focuses on test-driven _development_. Uncle Bob claims that test-driven development (especially through mocks) universally improves your design, because it reduces coupling and enables refactoring. Kent Beck talks about productivity, certainty, refactoring, and documentation. Uncle Bob says most of those things are just a side-benefit: the real point of TDD is decoupled design.

Uncle Bob's other book, _The Clean Coder_ [6], berates people who do not strictly adhere to test-driven design: if you don't do it, you are unprofessional (he mentions this repeatedly). He says that TDD being universally good is a fact, and anybody who says otherwise is just ranting.

> _Nowadays, however, they are just rants. The bottom line is that TDD works, > and everybody needs to get over it._

> _TDD is the professional option._

> _It could be considered unprofessional not to use it._

The bottom line is that developers should listen to each opinion and use their head. Don't be hurt when somebody calls you unprofessional for not following the One True Gospel™ and mindlessly adopt practices. Don't be hurt when somebody says that mindlessly following those practices is counterproductive. Using your head is about the most professional thing you can do.

[1] TDD is dead. Long live testing. [http://david.heinemeierhansson.com/2014/tdd-is-dead-long- liv...](http://david.heinemeierhansson.com/2014/tdd-is-dead-long-live- testing.html) [2] Mockists Are Dead. Long Live Classicists. [http://www.thoughtworks.com/insights/blog/mockists-are- dead-...](http://www.thoughtworks.com/insights/blog/mockists-are-dead-long- live-classicists) [3] Is TDD Dead? [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z9quxZsLcfo](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z9quxZsLcfo) [4] Agile Software Development: Principles, Patterns, and Practices. [http://www.amazon.com/Software-Development-Principles- Patter...](http://www.amazon.com/Software-Development-Principles-Patterns- Practices/dp/0135974445) [5] Test Driven Development By Example. [http://www.amazon.com/Test-Driven-Development-By- Example/dp/...](http://www.amazon.com/Test-Driven-Development-By- Example/dp/0321146530) [6] The Clean Coder. [http://www.amazon.com/Clean- Coder-Conduct-Professional-Progr...](http://www.amazon.com/Clean-Coder- Conduct-Professional-Programmers/dp/0137081073)

</comment><comment><USER3> I don't see how this is making things better. Of course people should disagree with DHH, he's one person and we don't have to all agree on everything. In fact it would be far more strange for a programming community to insist on orthodoxy when our problems and work styles certainly differ.

This isn't adding to intelligent dialogue about TDD or best practices any more than the writer is accusing DHH of being detrimental. In fact I thought DHH opened up an interesting dialogue about TDD while he was being the "Fox News of Ruby". There were interesting responses from Martin Fowler, Gary Bernhardt and Kent Beck among others. I felt like the articles and dialogue that I saw in response to DHH really helped me think about programming and the projects I work on. And that's not to dismiss DHH's own comments, which I also found valuable.

This meta DHH slamming seems far more like school yard gossip and mud slinging and "Fox News" than anything DHH actually says. At least even when he's being rude he's actually talking about programming. I've also seen DHH hop on HN threads and provide gists where he refactored code to make his point. That's seriously constructive in a way this talk isn't even aspiring to be.

<comment><USER4> I don't think there's anything wrong with the meta-commentary that the author provides. He is, after all, encouraging everyone to contribute their own commentary in the same way that Fowler, Bernhardt, and Beck did.

It's sort of like saying we shouldn't ever discuss or scrutinize the reporting done by news outlets. We should only discuss the news they report. I think that's a bit unrealistic.

<comment><USER3> There's nothing wrong with meta commentary. Let me be more specific, this strikes me more as an ad hominem attack than real meta commentary.

<comment><USER5> He is more attacking the person cult. DHH has an aura that shadows many other voices, so not DHH himself is the problem, but the reception of DHH.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I like DHH (and I've never written a line of Ruby).

He writes thoughtfully (and provocatively, "Fox News" mostly just has the provocatively) about things he likes and dislikes (even when I don't agree his pieces are worth a read).

He created an extremely influential framework (Laravel which keeps me sane working with PHP owes much to it).

All that said I'm really not sure what the point of this video was at all.

<comment><USER7> I wouldn't be surprised if the video was made by one of the TDD/Agile-coaches.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Extremely hard to read. Maybe considering porting the message to a different medium?

<comment><USER4> The DHH Problem:

DHH is an intelligent and successful person. DHH invented rails. And now I can get paid for writing Ruby even though I enjoy it.

So thanks DHH (sincerely).

But. There's a problem. DHH is Ruby famous. Which means that DHH is extremely visible. Some might say disproportionately visible in the ruby community.

Why is that a problem? Because DHH is the Fox News of Ruby.

He's noisy, he's reactionary, he's anti-intellectual. He's very sure that he is right. And he enjoys being rude. (Photo of his famous "fuck you" slide.) That was eight years ago, but things haven't changed much.

Just like Fox News, DHH appeals to common sense and makes a show of being "fair and balanced" but in reality his arguments use aggressive rhetoric and rely on a fix viewpoint.

To pick a topical example: Is TDD hard in Rails apps because TDD is dead or because Rails makes TDD hard? Is TDD not worth the effort because TDD is dead or because the complexity of software can be more managed more effectively if you only work on one product for which you control the requirements? If we only listen to DHH, then we'll never know. Because DHH is just one person. And he only has DHH's experiences.

All I'm saying is the Ruby community is large, and diverse, and thoughtful, and that is why I love it. Please listen to DHH. His experiences are valuable. But DHH does not speak for me, and he probably doesn't speak for you. My personal preference is for a bit less of this ("fuck you" slide) and a bit more of this (slide: "What others do may be the stimulus of our feelings, but never the cause.").

Please give DHH's opinions the weight they deserve: They are what one man thinks. And if you disagree with him: please speak up. Write a blog post, give a talk. Create a web framework. So that we can all learn what the world looks like to you.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> TDD is a non-issue for everyone except those using Rails. Be honest, if I had written a blog post saying the same thing, ya'll would have enjoyed trolling me all day, don't lie.

<comment><USER7> It's a non-issue, but every now and then there is someone blogging about how it's the only way to ensure code quality.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> DHH wouldn't do this for example- He would rather talk about TDD

</comment><comment><USER11> TLDR: DHH is human, too.

<comment><USER12> Yeah, real news at 11 stuff here.

When he posted that first 'TDD is Dead' article, I was like 'that's just like your opinion man.'</comment></comment>


Trump says he plans to bar TikTok from operating in the U.S. - <AUTHOR> https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/07/31/tiktok-trump-divestiture/ <comment><USER2> So he's going to build a big, beautiful firewall --- and let me guess, China is going to pay for it?

Maybe the reason Trump hates China so much is envy.

</comment><comment><USER3> Two can play at that game. Why does the US so often have the mindset that nobody can retaliate?

Market size is important. I'd rather be locked out of a 350 million person market, than a 1500 million person market.</comment>


The brain's 7D sandcastles could be the key to consciousness (2017) - <AUTHOR> https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg23531450-200-the-brains-7d-sandcastles-could-be-the-key-to-consciousness/ <comment><USER2> I struggled to find the meat in this article and a quick google of the terms involved only really brings back the same article, which is almost 3 years old now.

On top of that the story is a cookie cutter rewrite of every upcoming ML/math technique which are always poised to provide some amazing insight into the human mind.

A more honest title would be "algebraic topologists think algebraic topology is great, academics who have employed algebraic topologists want it to be great but don't really understand it".

Edit: for anyone looking for the actual meat this appears to be it:

Objective Morphological Classification of Neocortical Pyramidal Cells (2019)

[https://academic.oup.com/cercor/article/29/4/1719/5304727](https://academic.oup.com/cercor/article/29/4/1719/5304727)

<comment><USER3> You seem interested in this subject, I found this to be very interesting. tl;dr they may wake people out of comas with psychedelics. [https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fnhum.2014.0002...](https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fnhum.2014.00020/full)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> "They might even unravel the greatest mystery of them all: consciousness."

Don't get me wrong. Brains are interesting. Consciousness is a real puzzler. But... the mass of the known universe is estimated to be about 10^53 kg. In all that mass, there might be a few other mysteries here and there. Believing that the "greatest mystery" is between our two ears feels a tad bit egoistical.

<comment><USER5> "If a tree falls in the forest and nobody is around to hear it, does it make a sound?"

Similar thing here. A mystery is a concept which can only occur within human consciousness.

<comment><USER4> You couldn't have illustrated my point nicer. Yes it makes a sound. There will be vibrations in the air pressure propagating from the impact. If there are birds around they might take a flight. The ground vibrations will create ripples in the nearby pond which might distract a dragonfly enough that a frog swallows it whole. I understand that I'm taking a Zen koan in the most literal sense, but this the best way I can illuminate the ludicrousness of it. We are not the centre of the everything. Things happen without us. Believing otherwise is as I wrote egoistical, self-centered.

There is an unremarkable planet orbiting a regular star a thousand and two light year away from us. On that planet there is a somewhat deer-like species descendant from a prey animal. They are masters of mathematics, philosophy and technology. Their cognition is so advanced that they would only politely smile at the notion that "human consciousness" is the greatest mystery of all. One of them between two ritual playfights took a dust bath on the meadow. It was thinking about the atmosphere of gas giants, when he come up with a question. There is not even a point in trying to explain to humans what the question was. We don't have the capacity to comprehend it. That question was the greatest mystery of all. Pity that they all went extinct before coming to terms with their own inability to find their answer.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Too late to the thread but I will give it a shot.

First of all, the Blue Brain Project (equivalent of the US Human Brain Project) has been widely criticised within the neuroscience community for its failures to invest the funding appropriately [0,1] as well as failing to produce their exaggerated claims of "brain on a computer", even 3 years after this article was published.

Secondly, it is insanely hard to even map in all the connections between neurons with their thousands of synapses. Imagine one neuron connects to another 1000 neurons and a cubic millimeter of mouse cortex contains about 9×10^4 neurons. Even 1mm3 of cortex hasn't been mapped yet for a rodent (mouse/rat) brain. Mapping the whole rodent brain will easily take another decade [2].

Thirdly, even when you have mapped the complete brain, inferring states of consiousness from it is a far fetched hypothesis and most neuroscients don't even dare to go there because it is so absurd to talk about it from incomplete simulation models.

Given the complexity of wiring of neurons and the sheer amount of specific nature of this wiring, building simulation models assumes that the connections between neurons are totally random which is an age old view which computational neuroscientists are now starting to accept (except the BBP, for now). Contrary to the BBP simulation models, this [3] model actually pays attention to the observed wiring from past experiments and is the closest to anything "realistic" but of course with several caveats.

[0] [https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/why-the-human- bra...](https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/why-the-human-brain- project-went-wrong-and-how-to-fix-it/)

[1] [https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2019/07/ten- year...](https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2019/07/ten-years-human- brain-project-simulation-markram-ted-talk/594493/)

[2] [https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31055238/](https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31055238/)

[3] [https://journals.plos.org/ploscompbiol/article?id=10.1371/jo...](https://journals.plos.org/ploscompbiol/article?id=10.1371/journal.pcbi.1006535#abstract1)

</comment><comment><USER3> This doesn't have that much substance in the article. I hope that you haven't heard of the entropic theory of the brain, its one of the most fascinating theories and its very exciting! [https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fnhum.2014.0002...](https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fnhum.2014.00020/full) [https://mind-foundation.org/entropy-as-more-than-chaos/](https://mind- foundation.org/entropy-as-more-than-chaos/)

</comment><comment><USER7> I didn't understand the article at all, but it did make think about about how many dimensions are required for humans to understand how objects in life relate to each other.

I counted: a point, a line, a plane, a solid, a solid at a point in time, a solid that might exist in some possible future, and a solid at a point in time that might have existed if our past had been different.

That's all I could come up with (and I'm not even sure if the last one is a dimension).

It's probably a coincidence (there's nothing crankier than numerology), but it did make me happy that it adds up to seven.

<comment><USER8> > I counted: a point, a line, a plane, a solid, a solid at a point in time, a > solid that might exist in some possible future, and a solid at a point in > time that might have existed if our past had been different.

A solid in some parallel universe.

A solid in some fictitious parallel universe.

A solid in some non-cannon fictitious universe.

A solid thinking of another solid in some parallel universe derived by combining one of more non-cannon offshoots of a particular fictitious universe combined with our own but also exploring and deconstructing revisionist history themes.

All of that, but also the main character is revising her schema to be in fifth normal from.

That's kind of arbitrary, but I'm sure it regularly happens on fanfictiction.net

Just because picturing geometry in more than three dimensions is hard, doesn't mean we can't grapple with dimensionality or abstraction. We're pretty good at it.

<comment><USER9> In the sense being used by the original article, those are not dimensions. That is a very scify type of dimension, which has no known real-world referent. The original list goes wrong at "a solid that might exist in some possible future"; that is not a dimension. That is simply a solid with a time value in the future, which is the same four dimensions as the preceding example.

A dimension is an additional necessary number to characterize a system. Beyond the location inside a point (0 numbers required), a line (1 number required), a plane (2 numbers required), and a full 3D space (3 numbers required), examples of real world entities that require more than three dimensions are:

A RGBA color value, which is four-dimensional.

The location and orientation of a rigid object; 6 dimensional. Three for the location, three additional for the rotation.

The location, velocity, orientation, and spin rate of a rigid object: 12 dimensional. In addition to the previous six, three new ones needed for the translational vector and three new ones needed for each spin axis rate.

Any arbitrary multiple of three: Any RGB image, where each pixel is three dimensions each, one for R, G, and B. Images get to be high-dimensional spaces very quickly.

High numbers of dimensions are hard to visualize, but they are completely bereft of any "woo woo" value or any of the sort of mystery one might be inclined to ponder on illegal substances. Bog-standard examples of such things are encountered on a daily basis; the state of the display you are reading this on is characterized by a several-million-component vector. That's how "boring" and "normal" such things are. If you've got any of the woowoo in your concept of "dimension", you don't understand dimensionality.

The bad news is that this may take away the vague fuzzy fun of pondering the meaningless concept; the good news is that this opens you to much more concrete and real, and still quite mysterious, fun of pondering real high dimensionality spaces, which is a much richer and more interesting space that has enough stuff to explore for the rest of your life, were you so inclined. The "woo woo" scify concept is exhausted in five minutes, or perhaps a drug- fueled trip. It may feel fun for a moment but it doesn't go anywhere.

<comment><USER7>
       > That is simply a solid with a time value in
       > the future, which is the same four dimensions
       > as the preceding example.

My train of thought (not to say it's original) is: You can't move a solid without another (a fifth) dimension (ie: time). You can't move the trail of solids that exist in time without a second dimension of time (the sixth, if we're counting all the way up from a 1D point). If you have two sequences of events that are slightly different (side by side, ignoring that a "side" is a 4D side, I guess), that "timeline" which differs from the original is a "possible universe".

<comment><USER9> The problem here is that you've got a subset/superset relationship reversed. "Dimension" is simply the need to add a number to fully describe a system, as I gave in the several examples. It is true that if there was some system of parallel universes that a number identifying the universe could be necessary to fully identify the location of an object. (Depending on the nature of the multiple universes, it could even require more than one.) But "identifying which universe something is in" is not the definition of "the fifth dimension". It is simply a particular instance/subset of the general concept of dimension, which happens to also be currently meaningless and without referent. But even so, it manages to screw people up and provide significant cognitive interference for the _real_ concept of dimensionality, which is, as I said, much less "woo woo", which may be sort of disappointing, but also a much richer concept that provides much more to explore, because it actually has content to it.

You can also see the confusion in the miscounting of dimensions, because they are not being thought of as simply numbers that identify a place/thing, but some sort of ordered list of "concepts", where "things that don't exist yet" are somehow in another "dimension". But as I said, you don't need another "dimension" for that; it's just a time coordinate, which we already have, in the future. This is the sort of thing that drives me to post this point.

It's a surprisingly popular viewpoint. There's a YouTube video that does this sort of thing, which got very popular, and I don't even want to link to, because it's a steaming pile of garbage, leaving viewers who watch it feeling like they understand better when in fact they understand far worse. It's not necessarily in the top ten list of "ideas that will prevent you from understanding the world better" or anything, but it's certainly on that list.

<comment><USER7>
        > But "identifying which universe something is in"
        > is not the definition of "the fifth dimension".

Is there a difference?

Lets say we have a bunch of film strips, laid one on top of another, only each frame represents an entire 3D universe, and each layer of a new film strip, at the same point from the start, becomes less similar* as you move from layer to layer. To identify where something is, you would refer to the delta (ie: of the number of layers). That was what I was getting at.

*Hand-waving to ignore that in real life, each frame probably spawns multiple children, but only has one parent.

<comment><USER9> It is _a_ dimension, in your hypothetical example with no known real-world correspondance. It is not _the_ fifth dimension.

"The" fifth dimension is a scifi concept, not a real one. Perfectly normal, mundane reality contains numerous instances of much higher dimensionality. Which of the subcolors of the pixels on your screen is "the" fifth dimension?

Dimensionality isn't "about" parallel universes. It is a very tiny, and really quite useless, instance of the concept, which is full of useful and interesting members that actually, you know, exist.

<comment><USER7>
        > "The" fifth dimension is a scifi concept,
        > not a real one.

I'm confused now. How Is it possible for a dimension to "not be real" when a dimension is just a way to relate multiple points together? Unless you run out of points, can't you describe their relation using as many dimensions as you need?

Maybe our communication is breaking down over the term "parallel universe". I don't mean it as a sci-fi thing, I mean it as a Schrödinger's cat thing.

 _Without_ possible universes, we can't explain our intuition that an event can have multiple outcomes. Why should _one_ of them happen, and not the others? _With_ possible universes, there's no problem, because they _all_ happen. How would one describe the relation of _where_ they happen without a dimension higher than time?

I don't mean a parallel universe as some fantastical place that we could "visit" etc.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Isn't a another dimension simply another column in the table?

<comment><USER11> Yes, and if you have a set of tables (observations) you have a tensor.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Perhaps I am missing something, but the use of dimensionality in this article seems a bit overblown. The article says that a digraph meant to represent a rat brain formed 8-cliques in response to some input data. You could represent this 8-clique as a 7D structure ... but not necessarily. I am a bit worried that a layperson will read the article and think that the human brain is literally 7D in some actual way

<comment><USER13> A lot of laypeople are already mixing up "dimension" with "universe".

"In an alternate dimension... thousands of different dimensions..."

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> > these transient structures, which appear and disappear like sandcastles on a > beach

That's a good metaphor for building up elaborate programming concepts in your brain then someone bothers you and it slips away. So you have to sit quietly and build it back up (quicker this time).

</comment><comment><USER15> >[what is..]consciousness

Isn't this an answered question? Consciousness is the sensation we get when we point our ability to predict others actions back on itself. The inverse of putting our-self in someone else's shoes. This was scientifically confirmed by both the _decision delay_ experiments, as well as brain imagery that showed the same circuitry activate whether you ask someone why _they_ did something; or why _someone else_ did something.

That is not to say all the secrets of the brain have been understood or uncovered, but this seems to be searching for a more feel-good answer to a question that has largely been answered.

<comment><USER16> This still leaves the core problem - how does anyone (or anything) experience anything at all?

<comment><USER15> The evidence suggests we don't feel anything at all, its more accurate to say we rationalize ourselves with feelings and intentions than it is to say we have feeling and intentions.

I've never actually tried to explain that before, having done so i understand why we are appearing so desperate to find another answer.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> tldr: researchers build computational models of mice's brains then study the models through methods of algebraic topology e.g. looking at artificial neural cliques ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neural_clique](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neural_clique)) up-closed i.e. at a level of detail unobtainable with an actual slice of brain tissue, and measuring their dimensionalities

Here are the stuff the project published so far: [https://www.epfl.ch/research/domains/bluebrain/blue- brain/pu...](https://www.epfl.ch/research/domains/bluebrain/blue- brain/publications/)

</comment><comment><USER18> Wouldnt make more sense to try to describe the brain in computational science terms rather than algebraic topology?

<comment><USER19> Dont we already attempt that as AI and NNs? Why not give math a chance too?

<comment><USER20> NNs, other than being vaguely inspired by it, have nothing to do with the brain or neurons. AI as it stands today also has essentially completely abandoned any idea it may have once had of understanding any aspect of the human brain or cognition, unfortunately.

Instead, NNs and AI are entirely focused on the external world and trying to model it for strictly practical purposes (trying to predict aspects of it, in general).</comment></comment></comment>


The Road to Running Haskell at Facebook Scale [video] - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sl2zo7tzrO8 <comment><USER2> Recently started to dive into FP and Haskell, and it's nice to see it used at this scale.

If anyone is looking for a starting-point: I stumbled upon a great book: [http://haskellbook.com/](http://haskellbook.com/) It's still early-access, but the biggest part is done and it's already at 1000+ pages.

(I'm not affiliated with this project in any way)

<comment><USER3> +1 for this book. Also, version 0.9 got released yesterday adding more chapters.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I'm really excited about this. If facebook is able to use it in production, then Haskell is no longer an academic language. I would tell my boss that we can use Haskell because facebook is using it:)

BTW, the stackage project have resolved a big problem (Cabel hell) in Haskell ecosystem, and I start to use haskell again.

<comment><USER5> Facebook using Haskell, or any language, does not make it less "academic" or more "production quality."

Ultimately, we can use lots of different languages in different roles. People have been shipping Haskell code in production for years. The runtime and compiler have been up to snuff for some time, and honestly the build tools were not in any worse of a place than Go's are right now.

The decision if something is production-ready for your shop is a matter of your personal (and/or organizational) commitment to that technical platform. You do not need the blessing of a big company to use a tool. Perpetuating this idea only makes it harder for people to try new tools. And so long as Haskell continues to be flexible and easy to extend, it'll still be useful to academia (hence the 100+ language extensions still available).

<comment><USER6> Strongly agree -- I'm on a team at Facebook that has D code in production. There is a lot of investment that we'd have to do to make it what I'd call solidly production quality.

At one point, I found myself writing a heap profiler, since the tools available where inadequate. If your company doesn't have the ability or will to fix issues deep within the runtime of the shiny new system you're using, I'd be cautious about using a shiny new tool in production. I'm not necessarily saying "Don't do it", but you do need to think long and hard about how you'd handle a tricky bug in your tool.

<comment><USER5> Yeah, although I always try to be more positive for startups. Rarely are those bugs so destructive that they'll take down your business unless you do a really deep dive like that.

And if it's a leverage factor for a small time, the math is almost always in favor of the more pointed tool.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Have they done a similar talk about their use of Erlang for their Facebook chat (ejabberd) platform at scale?

<comment><USER8> They stopped using Erlang at least two years ago and use C++ for the chat now</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Team password manager - <AUTHOR> What are you using to securely store passwords, credentials etc for a dev team, support team all in one. Must be secure, Web based, support roles and RBAC. <comment><USER2> LastPass for business [https://www.lastpass.com/business](https://www.lastpass.com/business)

</comment><comment><USER3> Bitwarden is web based and open source. Don't know about RBAC.</comment>


Data to Money: How Much Does Google Owe You? - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W8kA-EZReA0 <comment><USER2> How much money do I owe Google? How much would a company charge for the same services as Google if data wasn't a source of income?

Some of their services I could see being free/cheap and still almost as good. Like Gmail for example.

But stuff like Google Maps? Things that leverage all that data to do things no one else can? I'm not even sure someone else could do it as well without all that data, let alone do it for free.

<comment><USER3> > Some of their services I could see being free/cheap and still almost as > good. Like Gmail for example.

Fastmail is pretty damn good and keeps getting better. I still use Gmail exclusively, but _pay Fastmail an annual fee to hedge my bets and support an alternative_. If Fastmail was to support multiple labels on a message, I would move tomorrow. That's the only thing holding me and my 9GB of mail history back.

> But stuff like Google Maps? Things that leverage all that data to do things > no one else can? I'm not even sure someone else could do it as well without > all that data, let alone do it for free.

OpenStreetMap? And now there's OpenStreetView [1].

[http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Comparision_Google_servic...](http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Comparision_Google_services_- _OSM)

[http://searchengineland.com/founder-openstreetmap-good- bette...](http://searchengineland.com/founder-openstreetmap-good-better- google-maps-already-192089)

[1] [http://openstreetview.org/](http://openstreetview.org/)

<comment><USER2> Gmail was an example what I did think people could do for free/cheap.

OSM isn't close to what Google Maps is, Google Maps is OSM+realtime traffic detection+Realtime transit integration+realtime Uber integeration+tracking municipal detours+a million other small things.

I highly doubt any free project will ever be able to replicate the insanely extensive feature set Google Maps provides (half of them probably aren't even outward facing but improve direction data). The tracking aspect alone takes tracking device GPS data.

<comment><USER3> You're entitled to your opinion!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> 1\. The irony of this being on youtube

2\. a gov-regulated repo of data.. seems horrible for privacy</comment>


The Secret to Work Life Balance - <AUTHOR> http://blog.kirigin.com/work-life-balance

<comment><USER2> Someone asked on Twitter about the implications of my personal decisions about work life balance.

It's really simple: I work less because I have kids. No need to sugar coat that.</comment>


Mammals can 'choose' sex of offspring, study finds - <AUTHOR> http://med.stanford.edu/ism/2013/july/ratios.html

<comment><USER2> Original, non-blogspam article: [http://med.stanford.edu/ism/2013/july/ratios.html](http://med.stanford.edu/ism/2013/july/ratios.html)

This PR is ridiculously unscientific. This doesn't "prove" their hypothesis. They've found no mechanism of action meaning they found a correlation. Correlation is not causation. Maybe the actual study found something more than the PR says but it doesn't seem like it. Also, they called it the "holy grail". Seriously?

<comment><USER3> Actually I thought of very fun experiment - because the gender of the baby is determined by the father - make two groups live in extreme condition bio-dome style for a month or two - 900 males and 100 females and in the other 100 males and 900 females in the second. Then at the end of the period just examine the ratio of sperm cells with X and Y chromosome in the males' semen. If there is sizable difference means there are mechanisms for regulation and selection.

Anecdotal evidence is that even after very bloody wars where the males die off disproportionately the population does not stray off a lot in the gender balance after a few years.

Bonus points if you make it with humans as reality TV on Bravo.

<comment><USER4> The hypothesis here is that it is _not_ the father that determines the gender of the baby.

<comment><USER3> The father determines the gender in a sense that he provides both X and Y. The woman only provides X.

In the facts given in the article I found nothing convincing that the gender selectors are females i.e. they conclude that they are.

Now I haven't studied seriously biology but to change the meiosis of sperm cells to skew the odds seems more effective (and simple) than to have the egg cell select the sperm with the X or Y chromosome during the fertilization that is messy as it is. And if X and Y sperm cells were somehow different I think we may have found out.

<comment><USER4> > The father determines the gender in a sense that he provides both X and Y. > The woman only provides X.

That's not a meaningful sense. Obviously it's a question of whether a sperm cell carrying an X or Y chromosome gets into the egg, but both parties have a lot of biology involved between meiosis and fertilization that might impact that.

> Now I haven't studied seriously biology but to change the meiosis of sperm > cells to skew the odds seems more effective (and simple) than to have the > egg cell select the sperm with the X or Y chromosome during the > fertilization that is messy as it is. And if X and Y sperm cells were > somehow different I think we may have found out.

X and Y sperm cells are different - one is carrying an X and the other is carrying a Y and these will therefore have different masses and probably some other characteristics will differ. As female mammals tend to invest hugely more resources in the individual child, it's more likely to be worthwhile to them to sacrifice some chance of conception to favor a particular gender. Furthermore, if the child is more likely to stay with the female, the female is a better predictor of the environment the child will be raised in. Since meiosis produces an X and Y cell inherently (it splits a cell with an X+Y in half, with one chromosome going each way) and furthermore happens well in advance of mating when the partner may not even be determined, it seems less likely that the cause for any pattern in SR would be manipulation of the ratio of X vs Y cells during meiosis. Of course, biology surprises on occasion, I just think you're making entirely unwarranted assumptions.

<comment><USER5> Still the mechanisms by which the male body might control the ratio of sperms with X vs. Y is astoundingly simpler than mechanisms by which an egg can somehow "sense" and reject sperm. On the other hand, a mechanism by which the female body can selectively abort an embryo is way more plausible. Either way, this leads to some pretty testable predictions. You might not even need to do much direct experimentation, an outcome of the second hypothesis is that if gender selection is highly activated than more eggs/embryos are wasted, which might lead to smaller litters/ longer time between pregnancies.

<comment><USER4> > mechanisms by which an egg can somehow "sense" and reject sperm.

Evolution doesn't work like an engineer. If you or I were going to sit down and say, "Hmm, how do we control the sex ratio from within the female's body?" we'd come up with things like a mechanism to differentiate the sperm and then try to apply that to a mechanism to block or help one group or the other, because modularity is good and such.

Evolution doesn't pay attention to the mechanism, just the result. Maybe it happens that one type of sperm is disproportionately affected by acidity levels or viscosity of cervical mucous or any of potentially hundreds of attributes of the environment the sperm will be encountering between meiosis and conception, and that's assuming any differentiation happens pre- conception. If there is such an effect, there's a good chance evolution will "spot it" and exploit it where the gain outweighs the cost; the female has (evolutionarily speaking) far more motivation to make use of it, if it involves any tradeoff with chance of conception.

Note that by his hypothesis, smaller litters or longer time between pregnancies probably is what you'd see if the decision was being made in the female's body, whether pre- or post-conception.

<comment><USER4> s/by his hypothesis/by this hypothesis/

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> _Hamilton [2], focused on scenarios specific to particular insect groups. In Mammals and birds a more general principle applies: the number of offspring a male produces is often limited by how many females he can mate with, while a female is limited by how many offspring she can physiologically produce [5], [6].This generates a tendency for males to vary more in first-generation success than females. Thus male offspring are a high-risk-high-reward bet for potential grandparents in the genetic lottery; while females are a safe, hedged bet [5], [6]. However, just like in insects, if a grandparent 'knows' that a male offspring is a low-risk-high-reward bet, then they can beat the house, and hit a jackpot (in terms of grandchildren produced) [5], [6]. Furthermore, grandparents can beat the house in other more subtle ways, leading later authors to propose a variety of advantages to SR manipulation that might apply to vertebrate species (e.g. local resource competition or enhancement [3])._

some basic background from the paper. lets try and drag the level of debate up a little here?

[http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjourna...](http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0067867)

</comment><comment><USER7> Some of the worst science reporting I've ever read. That said, after reading the journal article itself, I found plenty of false assumptions there as well.

"... if functional consequences of SR manipulation were to be found in mammals, then it would suggest that mammals (either in individual species, or in general), possess unknown physiological mechanisms to control birth SR."

This sentence in the introduction assumes a level of choice on the part of the mammals that is pervasive in the article but never substantiated or even formalized to the point of a testable hypothesis. It is the type of sloppy science that takes away from the truth, and it's becoming way too common. It's as if scientists feel that if they just have some good hard numbers, they get the freedom to toss conjecture around as Theory for a few paragraphs.

The study found that gender bias in birth rates can affect the number of grandchildren. That is the takeaway here. No evidence whatsoever of what caused that bias is present, nor do I accept their statement that the study taking place in a zoo means that their findings are somehow more likely to be present in the wild. That would require a different experiment on its own.

<comment><USER8> > This sentence in the introduction assumes a level of choice on the part of > the mammals that is pervasive in the article but never substantiated or even > formalized to the point of a testable hypothesis.

The field here is evolutionary biology, and specifically the area of parental investment and applications of game theory. It is very common in that area to talk about "choice" etc. while not meaning anything conscious. For example, it is acceptable to say that genes "want" to propagate copies of themselves, but of course this is just shorthand for something very different. In the field, this is not misunderstood, it is the norm.

> The study found that gender bias in birth rates can affect the number of > grandchildren.

No, the point was that they found that gender bias in birth rates appeared to be not entirely random (50-50) and weighted towards what generates an optimal number of grandchildren. That exactly supports a hypothesis that has been around for decades that through female choice (again, choice is not meant in the sense that I can choose what to eat for lunch), animals can affect gender birth ratios in order to maximize the number of grandchildren. (Here you can see the connection to game theory.)

It is very hard to study that empirically, which is why this study is receiving a lot of attention - after decades, it is among the first to actually give measurements.

> nor do I accept their statement that the study taking place in a zoo means > that their findings are somehow more likely to be present in the wild. That > would require a different experiment on its own.

This is indeed a weakness in their methodology, and surely being debated heavily.

<comment><USER9> So it's like comparative lit in biology?

Joking aside, the grand patent post is right, all the article does is get one consequence (not 50/50 sex split) and immediately assumes parent control.

in reptiles it's know that egg temperature determine offspring sex. But it's also believed that parents are ignorant of this fact.

<comment><USER8> It is not just a non-50/50 split. It is also that the bias, when present, is tuned to optimize for the number of grandchildren. That is the long-standing hypothesis which they have supported.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Much better coverage can be found here: [http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/07/130710182941.ht...](http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/07/130710182941.htm)

<comment><USER11> All that is being discovered is that sons mean more grandchildren, and a few groups (billionaires, top-ranking wives) are cherry-picked because they have more sons. Dung flies are mentioned but they are not even mammals, and they aren't sex selecting their sperm.

That said, though the article claims a mechanism is unknown, diet can influence whether a girl or boy is conceived:

[http://genderdreaming.com/2011/05/the-french-gender- diet/](http://genderdreaming.com/2011/05/the-french-gender-diet/)

[http://www.rbmojournal.com/article/S1472-6483(10)00549-3/abs...](http://www.rbmojournal.com/article/S1472-6483\(10\)00549-3/abstract)

My own wild guess is that the observed diet factors, or at least certain states of the body that diet can cause, account for any statistically significant distributions of sex, not a mysterious sperm-guiding mechanism.

<comment><USER12> Thank you for the links, very interesting.

There is also this: [http://genderdreaming.com/family-balancing/natural- gender-sw...](http://genderdreaming.com/family-balancing/natural-gender- swaying/science-behind-gender-swaying/ph-balance/)

I have noticed that in some small immigrant population pockets in the US the majority of offspring is boys, and I've been wondering about the biological causes for this phenomenon. The explanation I heard is that the acidity can be regulated by stress levels of the female, causing more boys to be born in a more stressful environment. At the time I thought it's pure pseudoscience.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I wanted to see some numbers and some stats.

</comment><comment><USER14> So everyone that majored in comp sci has daughters?</comment>


Millions of U.S. Jobs to Be Lost for Years, IRS Projections Show - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-08-20/millions-of-u-s-jobs-to-be-lost-for-years-irs-projections-show <comment><USER2> What's going to _happen_ when these 37.2 million jobs are lost? Are these people just going to starve on the streets? Do they have financial resources that they didn't know they had? I find myself frustrated whenever reading about the job losses because things are always phrased in the abstract, like "The agency expects that $METRIC will be down 40% in the next decade." I don't know what that means for the people who are actually going through this catastrophe.

I also seriously question these sorts of projections, especially out as far as a decade. There's so many variables and unknowns, and I'm not certain how the IRS arrives at this conclusion, and it's not clear what assumptions they're making in their projections.

What I really need is a recent comprehensive source on how COVID is affecting the economy. Right now all the information is coming in piece-meal and I have no idea what to make of it all.

<comment><USER3> We'll witness the birth of what I call the "Shadow Economy" evolve from the reputation economy. Since companies can't exist, they won't. Instead workers will find work where they don't pay income or sales taxes which could be a global federated crypto network. If you remove taxes from the equation and replace them with what might be next generation smart contracts that work like cash (offline) then really government will be the one out of a job. Credit card processors and banks are already anticipating this future with their recent crypto card standard. In the BLM riots my chase bank actually was burned to the ground. There definitely is a vacuum to be filled and I think most out of work just need a platform that works without trust.

<comment><USER4> Good luck convincing anybody that moving crypto through their bank is going to enable them to avoid taxes.

Their has always been a shadow economy, and it runs on cash.

<comment><USER3> I wasn't implying anything nefarious by the term "shadow", only that it stands in the shadow of the reputation economy. I also meant that two outcomes might exist: 1. Something like ether or 2. The banking system would corner the market.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> [https://outline.com/SsXtZq](https://outline.com/SsXtZq)

</comment><comment><USER6> They really painted themselves into a corner with the low interest rates, though I was never convinced that quarter basis point adjustments really made people magically withdraw money and go on a spending spree anyway. It always seemed more like a "we did something" placebo. Could just as easily be a ceremony where once a month the president goes to the treasury and pushes a big "Fix economy" button or maybe he'll push the "Ruin economy" button, cue speculation and suspense.

<comment><USER7> Interest rates can't fix a broken economy. Interest rates are like annoying parents nagging you to get a job, they accelerate an existing trend. If there are enough jobs then you will simply get a job earlier than you planned but you were going to get that job eventually. If there are no jobs then the only thing that changes is that your life is getting worse (=stagflation), not better, because your parents start hating you more and more.

Of course the government can always create jobs out of thin air through stimulation or a jobs program, but that's not the same thing as playing around with interest rates.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> 37.2 million less jobs seems crazy. What does that mean? That's not in line with BLS data which has much smaller peak job loss and quick recovery

[https://data.bls.gov/timeseries/LNS12000000](https://data.bls.gov/timeseries/LNS12000000)

Maybe employees with multiple employers?

</comment><comment><USER9> The crazy thing is that more jobs have come back than were created during the previous administration's two terms.</comment>


Raphael js Demo/tutorial - <AUTHOR>

It was really hard for me to understand the raphael js documentation, so I decided to start a github project to use demos so it'll help other students learn. Hopefully they'll have an easier time, and I'll add on to it as I learn. Raphael Js is cool stuff!
Github is here:
https://github.com/fersho311/Raphaeljs-Demo
View demo here: http://raphael.heroku.com/ <comment><USER2> Good idea. I know I was a bit intimidated too.. be interesting to see if this kicks off some interesting projects.</comment>


Golang on GitHub - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/golang/go <comment><USER2> This was announced in mid November: [https://groups.google.com/d/topic/golang- dev/sckirqOWepg/dis...](https://groups.google.com/d/topic/golang- dev/sckirqOWepg/discussion)

To be clear, Go is not "on" GitHub except for its issue tracker and wiki. The code is being developed, reviewed and submitted on [https://go.googlesource.com](https://go.googlesource.com), using similar infrastructure to Android and Chromium.

<comment><USER3> So, that c/go code I see in the repository isn't actual code or...?

<comment><USER4> It's a mirror, as I understand it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Did someone else notice the c joke (?) in the first 3-4 commits?

<comment><USER6> Unfortunately, this joke makes GitHub Graphs page much less useful, because graphs start from 1972.

[https://github.com/golang/go/graphs/contributors](https://github.com/golang/go/graphs/contributors)

Is there a way to get this fixed?

<comment><USER7> It's not that big a deal, is it? You can just narrow the span down like this: [http://cl.ly/image/3A12032B3Q2O](http://cl.ly/image/3A12032B3Q2O)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Its actually pretty cool that all the google code issues got turned GitHub issues, in the same exact order as the google code issues such that the issues numbers are still consistent on Github.

<comment><USER9> I'm guessing they did it with an import script - something like [http://www.iqandreas.com/github-issues- import/configuration/...](http://www.iqandreas.com/github-issues- import/configuration/#enterprise)

<comment><USER10> I went through a similar migration last month for PyInstaller, and we couldn't find a way to set the original date for issues/comments; the best solution was to add the date/time as part of the comment; see just one example here: [https://github.com/pyinstaller/pyinstaller/issues/830](https://github.com/pyinstaller/pyinstaller/issues/830)

The script you linked does the same (we used a different now). We even contacted GitHub and they said we were out of luck, very sorry.

Now, I see golang has perfectly migrated all the timestamps. I wonder how they did that. If they used some private APIs, I would be _very_ annoyed with GitHub support.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> It's unfortunate that it isn't possible to disable pull requests. There is already noise appearing there, which will always be a wart so long as pull requests can't be disabled.

<comment><USER12> Noise? That's how contributions are called now?

<comment><USER8> Go already has an established contributing process, and people who make PRs without bothering to understand that process are likely just making noise.

<comment><USER13> In that case why are they using GitHub?

<comment> vertex-four GitHub provides _the_ best web-based git repository browser, as well as various other useful features. The only other reasonable alternative for a large open-source project, aside from self-hosting, is bitbucket.

<comment><USER14> I disagree. GitHub looks cluttered and the contrast is too low for speed reading. I prefer the hg interface, for example:

[https://hg.python.org/cpython/](https://hg.python.org/cpython/)

Another interface I prefer is:

[http://cvsweb.openbsd.org/cgi-bin/cvsweb/](http://cvsweb.openbsd.org/cgi- bin/cvsweb/)

<comment><USER15> You like cvsweb? It's horrible. I'm here: [http://cvsweb.openbsd.org/cgi- bin/cvsweb/CVSROOT/](http://cvsweb.openbsd.org/cgi-bin/cvsweb/CVSROOT/). Why does not clicking a file open the file?!?!? Every freaking file browser in existence opens the file when I click it. It's been designed in the 90s and it shows :(

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I'm getting 404, has it been removed?

<comment><USER2> Unfortunately a significant problem was just found in the process for migrating the issues from code.google.com to GitHub. We're going to re-do the migration, but need to lock down the repo so we don't blow away anything that someone might enter.

It should be back soon-ish.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> This is the gerrit link, I believe: [https://go- review.googlesource.com](https://go-review.googlesource.com)

</comment><comment><USER18> Did anyone do anything special to get their contributions attributed to their GitHub account? Mine are not showing up here: [https://github.com/golang/go/graphs/contributors](https://github.com/golang/go/graphs/contributors)

<comment><USER2> See [https://help.github.com/articles/why-are-my-contributions- no...](https://help.github.com/articles/why-are-my-contributions-not-showing- up-on-my-profile/).

The most likely reasons are:

      - your email address used for your Go contribution is not associated with your GitHub account
      - your contribution is over a year old
      - you haven't starred the project

<comment><USER18> Interesting, I'll star the project and see what happens. I see other people's contributions showing up that are over 1 year old so I'm not sure if that is why.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I find it interesting that Rust has a lot more contributors compared to Go. Comparing [https://github.com/golang/go](https://github.com/golang/go) and [https://github.com/rust-lang/rust](https://github.com/rust-lang/rust), all contributors: 380 vs 695, contributors with more than 100 commits: 17 vs 35.

<comment><USER19> Keep in mind that contributing to Go requires that you sign a contributor license agreement, something people might not want to go through (no pun intended) for small changes.

<comment><USER20> I believe Rust requires a CLA as well. Might be wrong, but I seem to remember getting a mail about that a while back. A rust dev that knows for sure can correct me, if necessary.

<comment><USER21> Rust does not require a CLA.

<comment><USER22> Not quite right. "Those with review privileges or direct push access are required to file a Mozilla "committer agreement". "

(FWIW: From a legal standpoint, this doesn't make any sense. Either all-in or all-out makes sense. There is no legal distinction to be drawn that the above captures, AFAIK)

<comment><USER23> See the committer agreement section 4, which covers this case: [https://static.mozilla.com/foundation/documents/commit- acces...](https://static.mozilla.com/foundation/documents/commit- access/committers-agreement.pdf)

All code committed to the Rust repository goes through someone who has signed a CLA, including this section.

Rust uses the same policies here as Firefox.

<comment><USER22> So does this mean all original code (IE not third party code) requires a CLA?

Or not?

If so, then Rust requires CLAs. Great, legally sound.

If not, this makes no legal sense. Simply having people with a CLA commit it buys you nothing, legally :)

As I said, all-in and all-out policies make sense. Pass through policies (IE i can commit code by another), you may as well have no CLA. It's just overhead with no legal benefit. The benefit of CLA's is to have legal assertions about ownership and patents, _from the people who wrote the code_.

So without having the people who _actually wrote the code_ make those assertions, you get nothing legally.

In those cases, or if it isn't your goal (like the DCO folks), you might as well move to the developers certificate of origin model, and get the same benefits, without any of the overhead.

<comment><USER24> The process is as follows:

1\. Any Github user submits a PR. This user is not required to have a name or a valid email address.

2\. Anyone with review access to the Rust repository (disclaimer: myself included) reviews the PR and leaves a comment on the commit. A bot sees the comment and queues the PR for integration.

I can't comment on the legal implications, but the effect of this process is that there is a very low barrier to entry to contributing and likely explains why the total number of contributors (as measured by Github) is so high.

As to the issue of potential relicensing, the Rust repo is already about as permissively licensed as it gets (a dual license of MIT/Apache 2.0). As far as I understand, this already means that anyone can take the code and relicense it at will (I believe this is exactly what LibreOffice did to OpenOffice). At that point you'd probably still need to distribute the MIT license with each of the original files, but new contributions (and the project as a whole) would be covered by GPL or what have you.

<comment><USER22> So, given this process, there is literally no advantage to having anyone sign legal agreements, at all. I don't expect Mozilla to change, of course. :)

As for relicensing:

Both MIT and Apache require copyright notices be reproduced when you ship binaries. I'll assume MIT since it is the more permissive (Apache also requires you give the user a copy of the license, etc).

Rust is statically linked by default, IIRC (and even shared linking often ends up with some runtime code statically linked in).

If Rust binaries include parts of the MIT code by default (I haven't looked at how the runtime and ABI support is structured), then anyone who ships those binaries would be required to reproduce the copyright notice somewhere.

You cannot take this code and relicense it at will, actually. But you can achieve the same practical effect as relicensing, as long as you reproduce the notice, so i won't get into it unless you really want me to :)

(But note that reproducing the notice is exactly the issue for runtime libraries, and without CLA's in place, you would hav to go and ask all contributors who have ever contributed to the runtime libraries in order to be able to remove that notice reproduction requirement)

<comment><USER24>
      > If Rust binaries include parts of the MIT code by default
      > (I haven't looked at how the runtime and ABI support is
      > structured), then anyone who ships those binaries would
      > be required to reproduce the copyright notice somewhere.

This contradicts other projects that I've seen. From LLVM's documentation ([http://llvm.org/docs/DeveloperPolicy.html#license](http://llvm.org/docs/DeveloperPolicy.html#license)):

 _" In addition to the UIUC license, the runtime library components of LLVM (compiler_rt, libc++, and libclc) are also licensed under the MIT License, which does not contain the binary redistribution clause. As a user of these runtime libraries, it means that you can choose to use the code under either license (and thus don't need the binary redistribution clause), and as a contributor to the code that you agree that any contributions to these libraries be licensed under both licenses. We feel that this is important for runtime libraries, because they are implicitly linked into applications and therefore should not subject those applications to the binary redistribution clause."_

The "binary redistribution clause" referenced from the UIUC license ([http://opensource.org/licenses/UoI- NCSA.php](http://opensource.org/licenses/UoI-NCSA.php)) reads as follows:

 _" Redistributions in binary form must reproduce the above copyright notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimers in the documentation and/or other materials provided with the distribution."_

Given that it seems that LLVM chose MIT specifically to sidestep any need for end users to distribute licenses with binaries compiled via LLVM, I'd be curious to know where the discrepancy here is.

<comment><USER22> I actually wrote that wording for LLVM, so i'm happy to explain the discrepancy.

Basically, we messed up when we changed the runtime license (I said MIT license when I meant zlib license, which only requires reproduction of notices in the source code), and had to issue a policy statement on the license to make people happy. It is not accurate, legally, in its description of the MIT license. Effectively, by this statement, we are giving permission to not reproduce the notice, even though the license would actually require it.

You don't have to take my word for it though, ask any other open source lawyer whether MIT requires notice reproduction for binaries.

:)

I would urge Rust not to make the same mistake. (This mistake is currently being fixed in a few other "new" languages, in fact)

<comment><USER24> What a hilarious coincidence. :)

I'm guessing you can't go giving out concrete legal advice for free, but could you point us towards languages that are fixing this? I see that Julia's stdlib uses MIT for non-external libraries,[1] and Go uses a BSD-style license that explicitly requires distributing the license with binaries,[2] so they're both in the same boat we are. AFAICT D's stdlib uses the Boost license[3] which explicitly allows one to forgo distributing the license with compiled artifacts, but I don't know if solving this issue entirely would require the entire compiler to be licensed under Boost as well. Presuming that interpreted languages can gracefully ignore this issue, I don't know which other "new" languages we could look at for inspiration.

[1] [https://github.com/JuliaLang/julia/blob/master/LICENSE.md](https://github.com/JuliaLang/julia/blob/master/LICENSE.md)

[2] [https://github.com/golang/go/blob/master/LICENSE](https://github.com/golang/go/blob/master/LICENSE)

[3] [https://github.com/D-Programming- Language/phobos/blob/master...](https://github.com/D-Programming- Language/phobos/blob/master/LICENSE_1_0.txt)

<comment><USER23> > I'm guessing you can't go giving out concrete legal advice for free, but > could you point us towards languages that are fixing this?

Please note that kibwen is not part of the core Rust team.

<comment><USER22> Sure, but note:

If you don't fix this, you end up with two situations:

1\. You accidentally create copyright infringers out of a lot of folks, because the number of people who will properly reproduce the license with static binaries is small.

2\. Because of #1, you expose folks to a bunch of liability they weren't expecting.

Neither is a great thing to do to your users.

Combined with the fact that you don't have CLA's that grant you explicit sublicensing rights, anyone who contributes could go off and easily have a sane case against someone for not reproducing the notice. Statutory damages for copyright infringement are up to 150k in the US, sadly.

Anyway, as for other languages, this is being fixed for Go's runtime bits (and possibly stdlib), which i can talk about, but it's not really my secret to share in the case of the other languages I know about fixing it.

<comment><USER24>
      > Anyway, as for other languages, this is being fixed for
      > Go's runtime bits (and possibly stdlib), which i can talk
      > about

Even if I have no power to change anything about Rust myself, if you care to advise I'd love to listen and potentially pass on your wisdom to the core team. And if you'd prefer a different medium than HN comments, you can find my email in my profile. :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Hmm - how did they manage to backdate the issue/issue comment creation? I don't see it in the GitHub API documentation.

<comment><USER26> Special process, working with email@example.com. They have an internal tool that will migrate a special format (which we had to prepare). After 14 tries, we got it right. Mostly. We still couldn't do lots of things we wanted, but it was way better than our first version where we did it all via API calls.

<comment><USER25> A (much smaller) project I contribute to might want to similarly migrate issues from Google Code to GitHub. It would be nice if backdating were available via a standard API, but I guess it's not terribly important for us. A bigger problem is that we'd like issue numbers to have a 1:1 mapping, but we're already using GitHub for pull requests, and pull requests are issues, so something would have to give... however, if we could specify arbitrary (unused) IDs, we could do something like add 100000 to the old issue numbers. Just thinking out loud.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> If you go to that link you might get 404. You can go to [https://github.com/golang/](https://github.com/golang/) to explore. Once you go there, you might see go as a project too.

Go overuse is purely intended.

</comment><comment><USER28> How come the number of issues is that high ?

<comment><USER29> The number is not that high at all. I only see 1,289 open issues. To compare the D issue tracker has 3,677 open issues right now and the D user and developer community is tiny compared to the Go community.

Also note that "issue" does not necessary mean "bug". Such trackers are also used to request features just like in this case. Many of the D and Go "issues" are actually feature requests.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> ...aaaand it's gone

</comment><comment><USER31> I'd like to mention that for me personally the biggest issues with the language so far is its unappealing name.

'Go' sounds like a bad sports drink.

Does anyone think the same?

Is it for the greater good to be inviting for more pragmatic thinkers (instead of people who care about aesthetics)?

<comment><USER32> If you choose your tools based on the naming you're going to have very few left to work with.</comment></comment>


Inside the Cult of Nike - <AUTHOR> http://www.wmagazine.com/story/nike-march-madness-sneakers-smart-design <comment><USER2> I'm actually surprised they let this much out. Nike is incredibly tight with just about everything. Amazing place to work though.

<comment><USER3> > Amazing place to work though.

I found it to be a terrible place to work. Highly political, bait-n-switch hiring tactics, constant re-orgs, no project ownership, lots of silver bullets... It had 1 redeeming quality, they paid well. Hated the place and so glad to have moved on.

<comment><USER4> what means "lots of silver bullets" in this context?

<comment><USER3> For general background if you haven't heard the term. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_Silver_Bullet](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_Silver_Bullet)

More specifically they'd buy into the idea that everything would be better if they just did/bought/adopted X. And they did this a lot with everything; technology, processes, organization principles, etc. During my short time there they adopted scrum, then extreme programming, then back to scrum, they switched their development from monoliths to extreme micro-services (one verb/service), they reorganized the teams 3 different times based on different principes... this continued ad nauseam.

<comment><USER5> I'm not sure IT is their core competence.

<comment><USER6> Nope. That'd be marketing.

<comment><USER7> I know this is a day old, but...

I'm not sure that's true. Strong marketing for sure, but I think they're more akin to Apple in this regard.

Where (to use Steve Jobs' comparison) Pepsi's core competency is marketing (they rarely put out "new" products, so revenue is driven almost entirely by marketing), Nike's core competency is probably more apparel (specifically athletic) design - since, essentially, every new thing they release is a new product, and they release a lot of new things.

<comment><USER6> One first-hand anecdote: the women's track team at a university was given a generous sponsorship and all they had to do was wear free high-end Nike shoes. Unfortunately, the shoes caused physical discomfort for almost everyone, so the team collectively decided to only wear them in competition.

My impression is that Nike apparel is designed to support the brand, not the athlete.

<comment><USER7> Would love to read more about this anecdote.

Either way, I'm not sure that it points to marketing as a core competence over apparel design (though it may point the focus of the design away from the athlete).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Make sure you check out the Nike documentary on Netflix:

[https://www.netflix.com/watch/80093805](https://www.netflix.com/watch/80093805)

<comment><USER9> And read Phil Knight's memoir, "Shoe Dog." [https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0176M1A44](https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0176M1A44)

<comment><USER10> It is a very funny and fascinating book, the kind you get stuck on it and can't let go.

From the start until the IPO, Nike was constantly on the verge of bankruptcy. It is a fascinating story with lots of backstabbing, desperate moves, improvisation and insanity. It is a company created by, pretty much, manic obsession.

The only defect of this book is that it finishes, you keep wanting more when you're over.

<comment><USER11> >It is a very funny and fascinating book, the kind you get stuck on it and can't let go.

I made the mistake of starting it late in the day on Saturday. Chewed up my entire weekend between reading it and not being able to put it down until way too late at night. I also found the portions when he talks about his dealing with the Japanese companies fascinating.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> The way they get made in exploitative sweatshops in Indonesia for barely anything is not so romantic.

</comment><comment><USER13> What amazes me about Nike is how they are great masters of design and yet the whole barefoot minimal shoe movement has completely passed them by. If they know so much about what people need from shoes then why don't they even have any options comperable to anything from Vibram or Vivobarefoot? For me their shoes have always been aesthetically impressive and unusably uncomfortable.

<comment><USER14> This is not strictly true. They've just not done it quite he same way. Their Free Run is flexible, light and with zero stack. It's thicker than, say, Innov8 or VFFs but they compact down. Astonishingly comfortable shoes for me and, via NikeID, the only truly wide running shoes other than maybe some models of Vivos.</comment></comment>


You will live for longer than 1% of the entire history of human civilization. - <AUTHOR> The first civilization started in Mesopotamia around 5000 BCE (more or less), which is 7,000 years ago. If you live until age 80, that's more than 1% of the history of civilization.<p>Just throwing it out there for anyone else who'd never thought about it before. Certainly changed my perspective a bit. <comment><USER2> Yes, but there's a catch. The human race has existed for 140,000 years _or so (edit)_ , but has only been civilized for 7000.

The population of nomadic humans was lower, but there's evidence that they were much healthier than those who settled down to grow crops full-time. Agriculture was a win because it allowed for many more people to be born, but it's not a life for which we're well adapted.

ADDED: If this guy is right, 99% could turn out to be an underestimate or an overestimate:

[http://www.ted.com/talks/aubrey_de_grey_says_we_can_avoid_ag...](http://www.ted.com/talks/aubrey_de_grey_says_we_can_avoid_aging.html)

<comment><USER3> What evidence is that? The average lifespan is on the increase, not the decrease.

Or are you using some other metric to measure what you call "healthier"?

<comment><USER2> There's always wikipedia:

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

The first subsection is "variation over time". The drop between the paleolithic and neolithic coincides with the development of agriculture.

This is a pretty contentious issue. The idea that humanity's single most (evolutionarily) successful technology caused a massive decline in individual quality of life is pretty disturbing, and some of the evidence is contradictory. It seems like a debate best left to experts, but I thought it was worth mentioning.

I still agree with the original post -- we're very lucky to be alive now.

<comment><USER4> Check out Jared Diamond's "The Worst Mistake in the History of the Human Race": <http://www.awok.org/worst-mistake/>

<comment><USER5> I was actually going to point to Jared Diamond as well! In his book The Third Chimpanzeem Jared writes about the immediate decline of health that followed the introduction of agriculture. By measuring the health of teeth, and etc we can see a noticeable drop in the years immediately following agriculture.

Looks like the article you linked to covers the same material.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> You will also probably outlive three nines of humans historically. A woman at my church passed away recently, tragically young at 68. (That is about a decade below the life expectancy of Japanese women of her generation.)

Also, while I generally scoff at scifi, it is entirely possible that we will make big strides against aging this century. I expect my chilren will grow up with their grandparents. I expect their grandkids will not even understand the import of that sentence.

<comment><USER7> _My_ grandparents are still alive, and are actually doing quite well.

I'm 19 years old, and I hold a strong hope that they will hold my children in their time.

I can't explain how much that would mean to me.

<comment><USER8> I still have a great-grandmother who is almost 100. It was a very surreal experience when her daughter died, at about 68 or so, and she hosted the viewing.

Can you imagine burying your own elderly daughter?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Longer generations mean we stay mired in the past, and our elders are around to advocate for the world views of their era in a way that can be good and bad, my guess that its leans more toward the latter.

Also, considering how much time I waste now, who's to say I won't just take more resources to complete what I'd have done in a shorter span?

<comment><USER10> The goal of life is to live it, not to go anywhere particular. No matter what we as a species do or where we go, we're trapped in the universe. There's no escape, ultimately.

Yet you're arguing that people should hurry up and die so 'we' can move on and not stay 'mired in the past' and 'wasting time'. What do they matter? Where are we moving to that's so important?

If we can live until we choose to die or die by accident, feed everyone, keep the planet in good condition, hit virtually 100% nanomechanical recycling / construction and have enough resources for people or virtual people to set off exploring the universe, what else matters? Why do we need everyone to be young? And we might be able to step usefully close to those things in a thousand years or so - and if you agree with Kurzweil, 1000 years of progress will happen in much less than 1000 years. We might even live to see it.

<comment><USER9> I didn't say that we should all die young, but instead that aiming relentlessly to extend the quantity of life misses the qualities that make it worth living, including hope and the stunning curiosity that comes with youth.

There's beauty that no matter how burdened an individual is by experience, they will die and the next generation will get to try again, hopefully without too much of the negative baggage passed on.

<comment><USER10> _instead that aiming relentlessly to extend the quantity of life misses the qualities that make it worth living, including hope and the stunning curiosity that comes with youth._

Misses the qualities that make it worth living? Have you checked out what death is? The only way you can have hope and curiosity is by being alive to experience them. Prolonging the state of being alive is a much much better way to address "quality of life" than saying "death is for your own good - you'd probably be miserable otherwise anyway".

 _There's beauty that no matter how burdened an individual is by experience, they will die_

I think not, because there is nobody outside "people who are alive" to be experiencing the alleged beauty. The next generation don't get to try "again", they get to try ... full stop.

Try what, though? Humanity as a whole isn't trying to do anything. There's no outsider giving points for space exploration and underwater colonies and disease eradication. The only point to progress is to progress the lives of people who _are alive_ , and anything other than that about "the next generation" is a holdover from the fact that we don't have enough power to affect big changes in one lifetime but we can argue that they are worth changing for the next generation. It would be even better, not worse, if we could be changing things to improve our own lives a hundred years on.

<comment><USER9> haha, I'm hardly saying that "you'd be miserable otherwise anyway."

I'm saying that death and birth together, but only together, allow new starts. Any wild deviations in individuals, be they bad, such as depression, or great, like genius, end with that individual. We lose some wonderful and some damaged people, but the steady stream of endings and beginnings permits us to continuously renew and reassess our values and direction as a society and species.

Yes, you will not get to live forever, but it also means that human beings are healthier for having had so much variety of experience.

<comment><USER10> _I'm saying that death and birth together, but only together, allow new starts_

OK - but why is that desirable?

 _Yes, you will not get to live forever, but it also means that human beings are healthier for having had so much variety of experience._

What do you mean to say human beings are healthier?

I'd hope the species as a whole is benefitting _a lot_ from the 150,000 people who die every _day_. How is the species benefitting (in ways that could not happen without mass unplanned death)?

<comment><USER9> I'd hardly say those deaths are unexpected. And planned/unplanned deaths is another discussion entirely. They're quite normal for the most part, and in fact significantly lower than the rate of death in most other species.

Human beings benefit because of resource use and culture change. Imagine if we double the lifespan of the majority of people on earth how insane things would quickly become.

Or are we only talking about doubling the lifespan of those who can afford it? In which case wouldn't it be better to focus these research resources into raising universal quality of life (ie developing malaria drugs), rather than further raising QoL for the rich in the 1st world?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I plan for the entire history of human civilization to be less than 1% of my lifespan.

<comment><USER12> That sounds like an awfully boring existence. What will you do for the remaining 99% of your uncivilized life?

<comment><USER13> Anything he wants? There is a whole universe of things to do. So many books to read, so much music to listen to, so many things to learn and build and understand.

I just can't imagine being bored, not in a million lifetimes.

<comment><USER14> Ahum, no civilization: no books, no music, no building.

<comment><USER15> No, just no new books. Still plenty already written for a few hundred lifetimes' worth of reading, though.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> And change happened at a much slower pace for most of that 7,000 years. The 21st century is going to be _very_ interesting.

<comment><USER17> I think we've hit local maximum in civilisation (perhaps we're just beyond the cusp). If the last century was defined by technological innovation, this one unfortunately I think will be defined by over-population crises.

If we haven't solved the over-population issues by 2100 then I think the 22nd Century will be defined by ecological disaster.

I'm not sure if I'm being too pessimistic or not!

<comment><USER18> Pessimism IMO. Generally brought about through age (older people are generally more negative about the future) or fears of immigration. I'd bet we can sustain WAY more people then we have at the moment.

<comment><USER19> Its not the older people are generally negative about the future.

Its that the more experienced people of ANY organization are generally negative. The world pop is an organization, but you can put this idea towards any organization that exists.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> More perspective change: according to the 1903 Ladies Home Journal, half of people then died before they were sixteen. One in a hundred lived to 65.

Something else to mention to people who ignore science.

[http://craigiest.googlepages.com/ThisWonderfulWorldofOurs.pd...](http://craigiest.googlepages.com/ThisWonderfulWorldofOurs.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER21> since this is all about the past evolution of the species, let me throw in a few proposals about the future evolution:

[http://geaugailluminati.wordpress.com/2009/07/01/the- human-r...](http://geaugailluminati.wordpress.com/2009/07/01/the-human-race- is-almost-finished/) (and) The Moral Imperative of Our Future Evolution: <http://www.prometheism.net/moral.html>

</comment><comment><USER22> more things were invented in the last 100 years, than during the entire world history combined

note: I'm note sure if that's right or not, but it sounds like it might be

<comment><USER23> There's a most excellent vintage 1980s lecture by Robert Anton Wilson titled "The Jumping Jesus Phenomenon". The gist of it can be found at the rawilson.com website as well as elsewhere.

Wilson defines the "jesus" (small j) as the number of scientific facts known at the time of Jesus. Then he goes on to count how many years it takes to double that number. By his count, humanity accumulated 2j by about the year 1500. Then 4j by the year 1750, and so on. I forget the exact numbers but the point of the lecture was that our j-factor was increasing at an ever- increasing rate. By Wilson's estimation the curve would go vertical sometime around ... wait for it ... the year 2012.

This reads a lot like Kurzweil's singularity hypothesis (among others) but I'm not sure who developed the concept first.

<comment><USER24> It's Terence Mckenna's Timewave theory (from the 1970s).

Kurzweil was following along after a lot of other people.

Vernor Vinge, for instance, came up with the term Technological Singularity in 1993, Teilhard de Chardin had the Omega Point in 1950, etc.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> You're saying this is the end of civilization?

</comment><comment><USER26> I have multiple relatives that are 100+. I wonder what percentage of all people they have lived longer than.

</comment><comment><USER27> This gets at the root cause of what is wrong in our civilizations today. Most of our genes were evolved pre-civilization. Civilization itself is just an experiment. An experiment that hasn't been going all that well if judged by what has been happening to our planet. There is wisdom from the pre- civilization days I hope we can tap into while using new technologies to actually have sustainable civilization.</comment>


Ask HN: Jacque Fresco and Sustainable Future - <AUTHOR> I have been reading a lot in all kinds of places about what the future might hold for us a species, how we could go about becoming sustainable, do less harm to nature, fix the environment, help the poor, etc.
I understand that the fix is not something that can be applied to certain areas but rather a chain fix
For this post (one of many to come) i would like to know has anyone had the chance to:
-Read about Jacque Fresco and his work
 -https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacque Fresco
-https://www.thevenusproject.com/the-venus-project/jacque-fresco/
-Check out the Venus Project -https://www.thevenusproject.com/
-Watch his interview with Larry King 1974
 -https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lBIdk-fgCeQ
-What are your thoughts on Jacque
-Are you familiar with any similar projects or anything related with the same topic (please share resources)
-Do you think we could achieve the Venus Project or Star Trek economics:
 -https://www.amazon.com/Trekonomics-Economics-Star-Manu-Saadia/dp/1941758754
-Feel free to add anything that might be of value to the discussion
I am aware that there is so much in this web of life that we can't just simple switch to a new way of life, or maybe even thinking about it is hard or not?
would you say that perhaps the way for a better tomorrow would start with a new way of education system? one which transcends borders, nationalities or anything else that might, how should say, in way cripple the logical and what is right thinking.
I understand it's a bit broader topic, but it's my first try so feel free to share constructive feedback on both the question and how to improve this and future questions to get the most out of it.
Thank you all! <comment><AUTHOR> OP here just to add: Hello HN folks, i have been lurking around for a long time, before i start with the main topic as i would like to engage in more of these in the future, please feel free to correct me when it comes to posting guidelines or perhaps if there is some guide already share, i would like to get the maximum possible out of these engagements.

I am always amazed at the great response and different points of view and the resources that people provide in the comments, please let me know if the post needs to be edited as to attract the maximum in viewership and thus responses which i am most excited about. had a character limit :) Thank you

</comment><comment><USER2> Ad hominem attacks to Jacque Fresco in 3, 2, 1...</comment>


Some rather insane Python hacks: 5y of bad ideas by Armin Ronacher [slides+vid] - <AUTHOR> https://ep2012.europython.eu/conference/talks/5-years-of-bad-ideas

<comment><AUTHOR> Slides here: <http://pocoo.org/~mitsuhiko/badideas.pdf>

More talks here: <http://lucumr.pocoo.org/talks/>

I came across the PDF with the slides a couple of days ago, might have been HN or somewhere else, but after I finished reading them, there was a link to the video presentation at the end of the PDF :) Which is of course way more informative than some terse slides!</comment>


Ask HN: why "scrolling" prevail on the web  - <AUTHOR>

I've just heard a lecture on the carolingian renaissance in which it is explained that somewhere in the early middle ages the scroll format was completely abandoned in favor of others forms (pages). however, virtually all web pages reverts back to scrolling. If I were a web designer at the early days of the web, I would think that a page-by-page approach is a more natural format.
Why did scrolling win in the end?<p>(http://itunes.apple.com/il/itunes-u/20.-early-middle-ages-284/id515946405?i=112575720) <comment><USER2> Scrolls were abandoned because they became unwieldy much faster than a codex. Essentially, they were much more work for the user (in terms of reading, holding and storage). The opposite is true of text on the Web — navigating between pages is more trouble than scrolling downward. In the worst case, scrolling down a page in a digital document is as much work as navigating to a different page, and there are a lot of ways it can be easier. One long document doesn't necessarily take up much more physical space or cognitive resources than a short one, but a whole bunch of related documents are often harder to navigate than a single one.

Remember, scrolling was the dominant way of reading documents on a computer long before the Web came along. Some programs used a page interface, but again, it was generally more trouble, and scrolling won out on its merits. The only areas where paging dominates over scrolling are those meant to emulate physical media (e.g. ebook readers) and those where reader satisfaction is a secondary goal (e.g. news sites that divide stories up to boost ad views).

</comment><comment><USER3> I would presume it's more intuitive. Also with a physical scroll you have an annoyingly huge amount of paper in one roll, where as on computers any part of the 'scroll' which isn't shown on the screen is taken care of automatically. Pages aren't completely non-existent either, you often see large news articles broken into 3 or 4 pages.

</comment><comment><USER4> Scrolling won because it doesn't require typesetting (or its web analog); not worrying about page length makes publishing easier; and scrolling provides a consistent user interface in a way that digital paging does not (e.g. links versus tabs versus "next" buttons).</comment>


Food and Water - FEMA [pdf] - <AUTHOR> http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=food%20for%20emergency&source=web&cd=1&cad=rja&ved=0CEEQFjAA&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.fema.gov%2Fpdf%2Flibrary%2Ff%26web.pdf&ei=nP-NUO6dG--r0AH72IHYBQ&usg=AFQjCNFVtR0zBnAu55hp7a9q0xKVpWW9Dw

<comment><AUTHOR> If you're one of the 60 million Americans whose going to be affected by hurricane Sandy, you probably want to give this a look through.</comment>


Normalized Gini Index of All US Counties - <AUTHOR> http://lucianoiscool.github.io/mini-graph/ <comment><USER2> The extremes values occur at Clark County, Idaho, with a normalized Gini Index of -3.056 (Gini 0.33), and Randolph County, Georgia, with a normalized Gini Index of 6.13 (Gini 0.65). I didn't try hard to see if any other counties tie those.</comment>


Ask HN: What buzzwords or expressions do you dislike the most? - <AUTHOR> I always hear people say "I'll talk to you offline" during meetings, but logically it never made sense to me. <comment><USER2> "Machine Learning" and "AI": when used by people clueless of basic logic or stats

"Synergy": Management uses this word a lot, often to appear not clueless (or helpless) of how business processes work

"Techie": Too broad a term to describe anyone. From a rich kid with lots of gadgets to a world renowned authority on a subject.

"20 years of experience between us" or "Combined 20 years of experience in xx Technology": When 10 kids are running a startup after working two years part time during college.

</comment><comment><USER3> "optics". when used instead of "perception". As in "Blah Blah created bad optics for our department".

"head count" when used by mid-level managers, who want to look cool, instead of word "position" or "open position". Annoys me when I hear: "We have 3 open head-counts" \- we are not cattle, we are people.

</comment><comment><USER4> CI/CD - most companies say they do it, but in reality they don't

Cloud - hate this world even after all these years

Senior Developer - a rank that can be anything from 3 years to 10 years experience

This is one of my favourite clips from Silicon Valley TV show, it is very relevant to this topic.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J-GVd_HLlps](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J-GVd_HLlps)

</comment><comment><USER5> I know I'll probably get a lot of flack for this but: "start up".

No, just because I have a small tech business does not mean I have a start up. We actually make things that people buy, develop cool (in my opinion) technology, have interesting unique customers AND are commercially profitable.

</comment><comment><USER6> "Disruptive" \- It's a term that used to describe an annoying school child, but now all of the startup junkies use it to push their grandiose ideas that they claim will upend major industries.

<comment><USER7> Schumpeter used this term in 1942 to describe startups destroying incumbents.

"In Schumpeter's vision of capitalism, innovative entry by entrepreneurs was the disruptive force that sustained economic growth, even as it destroyed the value of established companies and laborers that enjoyed some degree of monopoly power."

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

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> DC when used to mean Data Centre and Domain Controller.

IP when used to mean Intellectual Property and Internet Protocol.

There are more examples of this that I can't think of right now. Acronyms should be defined the first time you use them and should never change meaning for the rest of the conversation.

</comment><comment><USER9> "Productivity" as the only measure of success or team performance. I'm wondering if other industries are as concerned with productivity.

"Resources" to talk about people/skills/talent

"Cloud" when used by management

"Cyber security" (Yeh)

"Steal the IP" (it gained traction at one point)

</comment><comment><USER10> Bullish - i'm feeling bullish

Personas - we have to recreate product material for the different personas (before it was for departments, postions, industry, etc..)

<comment><USER7> Personas go beyond the things you mentioned, they should also consider motivations, objections, fears, etc.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> This one is a little silly, but I don't like when people use "exponentially" to mean just really big. Like when someone says version 2.0 is exponentially better than version 1.0.

I realize I'm being pedantic here but for some reason I still don't like it!

</comment><comment><USER12> \- Cognitive

\- Solutioning

\- Learning as a noun, as in "these are some good learnings"

\- Most things mentioned in Weird Al's brilliant lampoon of Judy Blue Eyes using corporate-speak: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GyV_UG60dD4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GyV_UG60dD4)

</comment><comment><USER13> Hacks. Cutting-edge. Bleeding AI. Cognitive ML. Deep Learning. Decentralized. Blockchain. Crypto.

Some guy with name "X" expressing personal opinions as "Xology" :p

</comment><comment><USER14> 'quick question'

</comment><comment><USER15> 'hack' really annoys me when used like this: 'life hack'. In this context: 'anyone got any good life hacks?'.

Your asking to tips or suggestions not fucking hacks.

<comment><USER5> I'd go even further and include "hacker" and "hacking" No, a hacker hacking does not necessarily mean a bad guy doing bad stuff with computers.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Decentralized, especially when there's a single company behind it.

</comment><comment><USER17> Human "resources." Comparing people to metal ore that you can mine out of the ground is dumb.

</comment><comment><USER18> not IT related but...

Artisan Hand Crafted * to table etc

any adjective food

More on topic is web bullshit generator [0]. When you need a good verb adjective and noun all in one.

[0] [https://www.dack.com/web/bullshit.html](https://www.dack.com/web/bullshit.html)

</comment><comment><USER19> Sometimes

 _private cloud_

 _machine learning_ becomes a buzzword;

Well, even DevOps has become one...

</comment><comment><USER20> "With Biological Ingredients"

"Organic Cotton"

</comment><comment><USER21> Realtime for anything that isn't...

</comment><comment><USER22> "ask" as a noun.

</comment><comment><USER23> Cloud native</comment>