PG&E may cut power to 850k California customers this weekend due to fire risk - <AUTHOR> https://www.pgecurrents.com/2019/10/25/forecasts-indicate-potential-for-historic-wind-event-this-weekend-approximately-850000-customers-notified-that-they-may-be-impacted-beginning-saturday-evening/ <comment><USER2> Welcome to the third world country known as California, where we can't even get reliable electric service.

Used to be the shining star of progress in the world, now this.

<comment><USER3> I'm moving back to SF on Nov 1 for work. It's bemusing to watch the fire, electrical and BART outages this week. I've had CA related travel stays cancelled twice for PG&E outages.

Looking for a place to stay/live, too.. if anyone here can help. Will be on Embarcadero, but I like the east bay, and beyond.

<comment><USER4> Check out AC Transit Transbay Bus routes and live near one of those in Alameda/Oakland/Berkeley.

Here in north oakland I have a 45 minute commute with a seat every day on the bus.

<comment><USER3> Yes. Back in the day, I commuted to SOMA from Lafayette -- had that worked out quite nicely.

I'll be starting from Oakland, found a spot to land that will give me a little time to work through market availabilities to find the right place.

But what you suggest is more or less what I'm aiming for, with Lafayette/WC as a possible extension if I can keep the home-to-BART commute easy.

I do like to get up at 430am and BART early, which opens things up a bit.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> PG&E was forced to spend an extra $1.5B to $4.5B per year on green energy, which almost doubled the electric rates in CA.

[https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2019/06/pges_bankruptcy...](https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2019/06/pges_bankruptcy_renewable_energy_costs_at_800_of_market_rates.html)

Perhaps the money would have been better directed at upgrading transmission lines, etc.

</comment><comment><USER6> Are they under pressure from regulators or courts to never start another fire again or something?

<comment><USER7> My guess is the ultimate end game is to get the state to pass a law shielding them from liability if they do start another. "Shield us from liability and we will stop the blackouts."

<comment><USER8> The state should (i.e. probably will not) counter by throwing a few of their execs in jail for their role in starting fires due to failure to maintain their stuff aka gross negligence.

<comment><USER9> But the houses were built next to this tinderbox. They were going to burn eventually.

<comment><USER10> That. Is that really case? I mean honestly. I really suspect that a large part of the problem is the desire for people to have a house in the woods but I'm unclear as to how you could quantify that suspicion. Or who has.

<comment><USER9> The fact that they burned is proof. As t -> infinity, the probability of a wildfire approaches 1, even without electricity.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Yes, I know. I may get a power shutoff.

It's not for all of California. In Silicon Valley, it's mostly west of I-280, although my own area, about 2 miles east of I-280 in San Mateo County, is on warning status.

<comment><USER12> Unless I'm reading it wrong it looks like the "Power shutoff potential" is elevated or higher for all of their CA territory

<comment><USER13> You're reading it wrong. Most of the denser urban areas are excluded, including SF and most of urbanized Silicon Valley; the reporter tweeting this sensationalized it.

Here's the actual map:

[https://www.arcgis.com/apps/View/index.html?appid=64ec74b4d4...](https://www.arcgis.com/apps/View/index.html?appid=64ec74b4d46f43eab0cbd813fdc80f4f)

<comment><USER14> that map is a lot more damning from a visual perspective, even if it doesnt capture that many people

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Ha! They are blocking users outside of the USA:

Block ID: GEO02 Block reason: Access from your Country was disabled by the administrator.

</comment><comment><USER16> Side note: I found it interesting to see the discussion from people who have solar panels and learned that without a whole house battery the panels are practically useless when the power is out.

I thought it was just worth noting as a time people think they have one thing, and discover it's something else entirely.

<comment><USER17> That's surprising to me. The need for capacitance is common sense to anyone with an understanding of electricity, which I would have assumed to include people who install solar panels on their homes.

Has deployments gotten broad enough that not just (curious) early adopters install them, now?

<comment><USER18> Capacitance is not the word you're looking for.

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

You mean electrical storage.

<comment><USER17> Capacitance is definitely the word I'm looking for. I'm thinking of the spikiness of current draw in electronics, as an extreme example, and the way we cope with that is precisely capacitors.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> PG&E: don't sue us or we will turn off power for you.

</comment><comment><USER20> Can we just get public utilities back? At least if a public utility is run poorly, we can attempt to fix it via legislation.

PG&E sucks, doesn't care, and probably the people responsible are still making bank.

<comment><USER21> What exactly should they do differently? How should you run a power company in a tinderbox?

<comment><USER22> I'm kind of astounded that you're framing the question in this manner, honestly. Perhaps you're simply unaware of the situation at hand.

>Six of the 10 most destructive fires in California history were started by electrical equipment. PG&E's equipment has sparked 19 major fires in 2017 and 2018. The utility was blamed for last year's Camp Fire that destroyed the town of Paradise and killed 86 people. SoCal Edison is under mounting scrutiny over potential links to the start of the Saddleridge fire in Sylmar. Edison's power lines also started the 2017 Thomas fire in Ventura and Santa Barbara counties that killed two people.

Maybe they can start by replacing old, faulty equipment that is causing literally millions in damage and fatalities?

<comment><USER23> just FYI the tower that started this fire was recently inspected and repaired. this it's not as simple as more maintenance when we have piss poor fire prevention

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Explanation from PG&E: [https://www.pgecurrents.com/2019/10/25/forecasts- indicate-po...](https://www.pgecurrents.com/2019/10/25/forecasts-indicate- potential-for-historic-wind-event-this-weekend-approximately-850000-customers- notified-that-they-may-be-impacted-beginning-saturday-evening/)

</comment><comment><USER24> Text at 10/25/2019 8:31 AM

        PG&E Safety Alert: Due to weather forecast, PG&E may turn off power in a portion of our service area. More info: pge.com/pspsupdates. Text UNENROLL to unsubscribe.

Text at 10/25/2019 7:27 PM (identical)

        PG&E Safety Alert: Due to weather forecast, PG&E may turn off power in a portion of our service area. More info: pge.com/pspsupdates. Text UNENROLL to unsubscribe.

There is a high wind advisory in effect from 10/25 8 PM to 10/26 10 PM.

Most likely, they will shut off the power sometime between now (9 pm) and 3 am. It seems they do it while people are asleep to minimize numbers of angry customers calling in.

PS: I have the generator out, fueled and cords laid down ready to continue runnig the refrigerator and Netflixing while Xfinity lasts the first 18-24 hours until they shutoff internet/phone (VOIP)/TV. We're lucky as we still have Dish that we are about to get rid of and rebundle with Xfinity.

</comment><comment><USER25> Won't be surprised to see sales of batteries (PowerWall, etc) and solar to tick up due to this.

<comment><USER26> We recently had a power outage at the 10 story building we are in. No idea how long it was in the works, but a week later they installed a giant array of Tesla of Tesla Powerpacks.

<comment><USER27> was that an array[array[Tesla Powerpack]] or array[Tesla[Tesla[Powerpacks]]]

<comment><USER28> 10^4 Powerpacks!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> > Block reason: Access from your Country was disabled by the administrator.

Canada is blocked?

<comment><USER30> Czech Republic, too.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> Hopefully this leads to the state getting good deal in the inevitable public takeover.

<comment><USER32> Honestly, I hope this leads to the state having cause to take it over with no cost. Stakeholders need to bear the burden of the organizations abysmal record.

<comment><USER21> I'm not blaming all of these fires on PGE. The state is simply not resilient to fire -- the smallest fires quickly become infernos.

They deserve some blame, of course. Clearly arson is wrong, and so is negligence. But how negligent are they really being? It seems like the latest fire was caused by a tower that was regularly inspected.

<comment><USER33> _But how negligent are they really being?_

PG&E has a history of astounding incompetence and negligence, so probably very. PG&E blew up a San Bruno neighborhood because they were so lax about record keeping. I just heard something blow up about half an hour ago (sounded like a transformer). I still have power, but the last time this happened (a month or so ago) PG&E cut power for nearly 20 hours before even bothering to send anyone to investigate (overall I was without power for 22 hours).

 _It seems like the latest fire was caused by a tower that was regularly inspected._

The easy answer is that this infrastructure should be underground so that it can't cause these sorts of fires in the first place.

From reddit:

 _From OP 's article: "The utility says the transmission level outage on the power line relayed and did not reclose." _

Which means:

 _From OP 's article: "The utility says the transmission level outage on the power line relayed and did not reclose."

Unless I'm mistake, the "re-closing" refers to a line that becomes de- energized somehow- the circuit is broken, or "opened". Sometimes this is because a physical cable broke from wind or a tree branch, sometimes it's a technical malfunction; so PG&E sends some juice through the (potentially physically broken) line to see if the current returns, and attempts to restart the line.

Basically, the re-closing sends live current through a line that may be physically compromised, in order to see if it's not compromised and can be turned back on simply. So, in this case, it seems likely that a) wind broke one of PG&E's major transmission lines, causing it to fall onto the tinder- like brush below the tower, and then PG&E sent juice through that broken line, at least once (in the past the re-closers would make three attempts.)

PG&E apparently let one of their cables fall on dry brush, and then sent sparks through it, possibly multiple times, starting the fire. _

This poster goes on to point out that Southern California utility companies typically disable this behavior during fire season and other posters pointed out that typically older reclosing mechanisms were just dumb relays that you couldn't easily disable while newer infrastructure will be using SCADA devices that you could easily disable.

<comment><USER34> >The easy answer is that this infrastructure should be underground so that it can't cause these sorts of fires in the first place.

Is it feasible to put the very high voltage lines underground? I know it is done for residential areas.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> My understanding is that they have already filed for Chapter 11. Also the stock has fallen from 50 to 5.

Meaning, the "old" PG&E is already dead. We can beat said dead horse over exec bonuses and tree trimming failures all we like, but its somewhat beside the point. How to go forward?

Specifically, in Chapter 11 right now they're surely aggressively trying to re-negotiate every financial thing they can touch. Another fire opening up another lawsuit right now would almost instantly torpedo any deals in the works.

Its a remarkably lose-lose situation.

</comment><comment><USER36> Again?

BTW, I'd like to see how much they've spent retrofitting their website to handle the load of the customers trying to find out the details of the outage as it relates to their neighbourhood, and how soon after the start of the cutoffs that their website will go down again.

Prior discussion:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21212135](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21212135)

<comment><USER37> How hard can it be to put it behind Cloudflare caching really?

<comment><USER36> If they use cookies and lots of user tracking, I'd estimate the big 4 bidding to do it on a budget of just few dozen mils.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> After moving to the west coast, I've learned that PG&E is suprisingly shitty (and absurdly expensive). I actually had a blackout for over three hours in SF. It actually forced me to do some blackout planning by buying some high efficiency portable solar panels just in case.

<comment><USER33> In my thirty-odd year experience, PG&E is more reliable in San Francisco than elsewhere in the Bay Area.

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> Important note: San Francisco seems to be getting a pass for the blackout.

<comment><USER40> SF is not at risk for grass fires and forest fires. It's a big city.

<comment><USER33> While true, PG&E is going to cut power to a lot of urban parts of the Bay Area later today.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> Sounds like they're not really a utility anymore.

<comment><USER16> I'm not defending them... but what are the chances that the state mismanagement of forestry leading to an excess of fuel that WILL eventually burn, and their hefty fines for the previous fire have made the power company cautious to the point that delivering service is a dangerous business prospective?

Is a utility forced to make decisions that could put the entire company at risk? IDK. I'm asking.

<comment><USER42> [https://www.independent.co.uk/environment/california- wildfir...](https://www.independent.co.uk/environment/california-wildfires- trump-tweet-malibu-camp-fire-woolsey-hill-ventura-county-a8629801.html)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> Background on why california has so many fires: [https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/09/climate/why-california- fi...](https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/09/climate/why-california-fires.html)

Answer: Santa Ana Winds + above ground power lines + fire suppression. From the article:

It's counterintuitive, but the United States' history of suppressing wildfires has actually made present-day wildfires worse.

"For the last century we fought fire, and we did pretty well at it across all of the Western United States," Dr. Williams said. "And every time we fought a fire successfully, that means that a bunch of stuff that would have burned didn't burn. And so over the last hundred years we've had an accumulation of plants in a lot of areas.

"And so in a lot of California now when fires start, those fires are burning through places that have a lot more plants to burn than they would have if we had been allowing fires to burn for the last hundred years."

In recent years, the United States Forest Service has been trying to rectify the previous practice through the use of prescribed or "controlled" burns.

<comment><USER44> The distinction that may be lost on many people is that plants that were very common in these areas were plants that could tolerate low to moderate intensity fire. In some cases the plants are so adapted to fire that they only reproduce after a fire. No fire, no new plants. Plants that aren't fire resistant get substantial selective pressure against them after every fire, while the fire 'loving' plants have reduced competition.

But if you block the fires for a long time, you get not just more fuel building up, but more flammable plants building up. The whole process created hotter fires, that can damage or kill even the resistant plants. There is no phoenix to rise from those ashes.

Prescribed burns are done, in theory, when the fuel+heat+oxygen equation is barely favorable enough to sustain a burn. This clears the fuel and maladapted plants and leaving the rest more or less intact. But a sudden wind or a nearly certain rainstorm that doesn't happen and you have a lot of explaining to do to the public.

<comment><USER45> One point here where I readily criticize the state is that they have a very, very narrow window during which prescribed burns are allowed to happen due to air quality management rules. Those need to be relaxed and fixed like yesterday; certainly the air quality impacts of out-of-control wildfires is far worse than the air quality impacts of prescribed burns. ([https://www.sacbee.com/news/california/fires/article23048168...](https://www.sacbee.com/news/california/fires/article230481684.html))

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Title is hyperbole. If you look at the maps most of the major urban areas are excluded, notably all of SF and most of Silicon Valley:

[https://www.arcgis.com/apps/View/index.html?appid=64ec74b4d4...](https://www.arcgis.com/apps/View/index.html?appid=64ec74b4d46f43eab0cbd813fdc80f4f)

The announcement is for 850K customers, while if it were really for all of their CA territory it'd be tens of millions.

<comment><USER46> This comment should get more upvote. Thanks for the more accurate information.

Also, the page pointed you to this one [https://psps.ss.pge.com/](https://psps.ss.pge.com/) to check if your address is in the impact zone or not. Seems like it works this time.

</comment></comment><comment><USER47> Anyone know how much money they save by shutting off power for a large majority of their customers?

<comment><USER16> I would assume they aren't billing for kW/hr when kilowatts aren't being used. So, they seem to be turning off their income as well as some costs. Their expenses however still exist in the form of infrastructure, employees, etc.

I find it more likely they themselves are under contract to create, buy, transfer, use, so many megawatts over so much time than the customer will have to pay for service that was turned off.

<comment><USER48> > So, they seem to be turning off their income as well as some costs. Their > expenses however still exist in the form of infrastructure, employees, etc.

Yes, but they're weighing that loss of revenue against potentially having to pay out billions in damages if they cause another fire. It looks like the last fire is going to cost them over $18 billion, since that's what they're trying to cap it at last I saw. [https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2019-09-09/pge- looks-...](https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2019-09-09/pge-looks-to-cap- wildfire-costs)</comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: Privacy and Environmental Disclosures for the Web - <AUTHOR> https://privacylabel.tech <comment><AUTHOR> Hey all! I built this site after seeing Apple's WWDC Keynote this morning. Apple is announcing new Privacy Disclosures in iOS 14 and I thought it was such a great idea that I adopted it for the Web.

I added in the environmental impact because it's important to me and I think more sites should start thinking about it. I myself have recently started migrating my services over to renewable-powered hosting.

Edit: typos</comment>


Ask HN: Wrist pain and recovery - <AUTHOR> Lately I've been experiencing wrist pain while using my mouse, something after 16 solid years and seeing numerous other stories of occurring I'd never had an issue with myself. The pain or more noticable discomfort continues beyond using the computer and seems to be on certain angles. I just purchased a trackball, the slow down in navigation is pretty noticeable and I feel is impacting my performance where I'd usually complete things quicker. I'm curious if others have experienced the same and what they did to manage or completely recover from it? <comment><USER2> Before you go on spending on Ergonomic what not setup. Try therapy. Google it first - kind of pain (sharp or constant ) you have , exactly where you have ( thumb side or ulnar side), what movements are restricted by affliction, is it nerves or muscle etc...spend sometime finding what you have. Consult doctor if you have to. Start therapy ...most of the time it's stretching/compressing exercise once or twice a day. You can easily see the improvements once you do therapy.

I recently suffered from ulnar entrapment syndrome ...googled it, watched videos, did suggested stretching for 2 weeks i guess. All healed.

<comment><USER3> This is really bad advise.

1) If you need therapy, see a specialist, don't just google it. Your google diagnosis is probably wrong.

2) Therapy is a last result, will ease pain in the short term. But the pain will come back if you don't stop doing whatever causd the pain in the first place.

<comment><USER4> EDIT: replied hastily, you of course said "don't JUST google it"

> 1) If you need therapy, see a specialist, don't just google it.

This is rather country (and wealth-profile) specific. In England, often you need to really push GPs to take anything seriously or even do a blood test (in your 5-10 minute appointment). Doing some basic research before visiting can be useful. (I've even done a "yes I'm stupid googling things...so prove me wrong" act).

<comment><USER3> I agree, GPs aren't always helpful. I was thinking more along the lines of an orthopedist, a neurologist, or a physical therapist — people that have a lot of experience with the kind of problem you have. They can usually tell you in seconds what's wrong with your google diagnosis that seemed to fit all the symptoms. That's my experience, at least.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Get a vertical mouse. Now. I used to get wrist pain and tennis elbow (lateral epicondylitis) and it was the difference between working, or not. I highly recommend anything from Evoluent.

And use the pomodoro technique where you can (20 mins on, 5 mins off).

<comment><USER6> I can recommend the Anker vertical mouse as a budget option. I use that at home and a large trackball (Kensington Expert Mouse) at work, with a block of foam under one side so it sits at an angle. I found a small trackball to be more painful than a normal mouse, but the large one is an improvement and I didn't have any trouble adjusting to it. But YMMV.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I had exactly the same issue about 2 years ago. Long hours of mouse use and I was suddenly getting pain in my wrist.

I did the following:

1\. Use the trackball, but do it left handed.

It doesn't slow you down any more than it does learning to use it right handed, but it gives your right hand a break (and yes, it totally SUCKS for about 3 weeks, and then you're roughly as productive).

2\. Take a serious look at your mouse.

If you have any of the "magic mice" that support gestures, ditch that shit as fast as possible. Holding your fingers arched like that for long periods does damage.

If you don't have that mouse, look for two things:

\- Very light weight (yes, a super cheap lightweight mouse is better than a heavy "ergonomic" mouse in most cases).

\- Able to rest your fingers. You need to be able to relax the tendons in your hand/wrist, and you can't do that if you're supporting your fingers in the air (part of why the magic mouse is literally the devil).

3\. After a month or two of using the trackball, feel free to switch back to using a decent mouse like normal. In my case, eliminating a magic mouse and giving my hand/wrist a few months to heal did the trick.

4\. If none of the above helps, contact a therapist.

</comment><comment><USER3> I started to have pain in my finger tips, wrist and in my back, resulting from bad posture and devices with poor ergonomics (Apple mouse + laptop).

Realising that at age 30 this is a bad sign, I invested around 2000€ on a more ergonomic setup:

\- a proper chair (I got a Vitra ID, but there are lots of good options out there)

\- an electric height-adjustable desk

\- an external display mounted on an Ergotron LX monitor mount

\- a mechanical split ergonomic keyboard (Matias)

\- an ergonomic mouse (Logitech MX Master)

My setup allows me to stand (which I occasionally do), but it's amazing how much difference it makes even when sitting. I can adjust desk / chair / monitor so my arms and neck are in a relaxed position. After a few weeks, the pain in my hand went away.

Getting the right equipment is really important. I have short legs, so standard desks are too high for me. A lot of cheap chairs are not adjustable enough (too high on their lowest setting).

Invest in ergonomics, and consider your entire setup. A trackpad instead of a mouse won't help if your wrist is at the wrong angle because of a desk that has the wrong height.

</comment><comment><USER8> I had wrist/hand pains twice, especially during using mouse, and in both cases, it was my own fault.

The first time, I think, it was because of me over-using AC during the commute. It would blow on my hands, and it struck me as a possible fault one day. After I changed my behavior, the discomfort started to go away in a matter of days, disappearing completely in a week or so.

The second time, it was due to a standing desk at new day-job. I've noticed that I have a bad habit of leaning on my hands when standing at the desk and putting some stress on them. I limited the time I am standing, and I'm more careful about it now.

My point is: watch your body, watch what you're doing, and think what could be affecting you. There is plenty of possible causes, and it's most efficient if you get a good sense of what makes your body hurt. It might be something more medical too, but doesn't have to be.

</comment><comment><USER9> I had really bad wrist pain from having a computer-related job for >10 years and spending my nights gaming on my PC (probably also from bad posture). One thing that helped me a lot was switching to my left hand for mousing. At first it was horrible, because I'm definitely not ambidextrous, but after several weeks I got good enough with it such that it didn't make much of a difference anymore. I would switch back to my right hand if something was urgent and I needed to be fast.

Now after a few years I can left-hand mouse as if it was my right hand and my right wrist feels fine. When my left wrist starts to feel a bit sore, I just switch back to the right hand for a few days/weeks. Variety of movements helps a lot.

If I was you I would also try to take frequent breaks and do exercise regularly, if you don't already. You will just feel better overall if you're in good shape.

Good luck!

</comment><comment><USER10> I've had so many ergo problems. Here's some things I'd suggest:

1\. Try different mice, as people suggested

2\. Watch the height of your desk. Is your desk too high? Is your wrist kinked? I love my sit stand desk for this, sometimes just moving the surface up or down half an inch makes a huge difference. Keep it moving over time so you don't get locked in.

3\. Wrist exercises, both stretching and grip strength. Get a pair of grippers from amazon ([https://www.amazon.com/Captains-Crush-Hand-Gripper- Point/dp/...](https://www.amazon.com/Captains-Crush-Hand-Gripper- Point/dp/B006G377UQ/ref=sr_1_8?s=sports-and- fitness&ie=UTF8&qid=1504724656&sr=1-8&keywords=grip+strength+trainer))

Working on strengthening your forearm might help as well.

</comment><comment><USER11> Two things have worked for me.

(a) Switching hands.

(b) Trying to use the mouse and the keyboard without constantly forcing the hand into a horizontal position (right hand thumb pointing left). Instead I got into a habit of holding the mouse in a more (not completely) vertical position (thumb up) and pressing the mouse button with the side of my finger.

</comment><comment><USER12> My solution (on a desktop) was to temporarily switch from a right handed mouse to using an ambidextrous trackball with my left hand, and a wrist rest for both my keyboard and trackball. I am _not_ ambidextrous. I also wore a custom made wrist rest-splint while working and sleeping. After a year or so, I returned to a right handed mouse and continue to use a gel filled wrist rest for both the keyboard and mouse. If using a full sized keyboard, get one without a numpad.

Get a rest-splint for your wrist. Your injuries will not heal without rest.

EDIT: remembered my wrist-splint was bespoke

</comment><comment><USER13> Ive had severe wrist pain before, saw occupational therapists, was diagnosed with repetitive stress disorder, changed hands for the mice, tried trackballs, trackpads, ergonomic mice, the only thing that worked for me was getting a Wacom tablet. It turned out that it was clicking the mouse button that aggravated my wrist. Been pain free for years except when I play too much with my phone. It takes about a week to get used to the tablet but I actually prefer it to the mouse now, even when not taking into account the wrist pain. Good luck.

</comment><comment><USER14> 1\. Take a break for a week or two. I used the time to learn stuff and write down everything by hand. Every gadget you acquire is for after you have recovered. Don't exercise either ... you'll only worsen the inflammation.

2\. Google "wrist pain stretches". Do them religiously, regularly (every time you have a break) and carefully.

3\. Alternate ice and hot towels a few times a day. This really improves recovery time.

4\. Work on your posture. Check Esther Gokhale's TED talk.

<comment><USER15> Stop using the mouse, switch to trackpad centered below your spacebar so it's less wrist movement. Try using your other hand for a few weeks.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Been there. One set of (otherwise paired) muscles gets inflamed.

The two things that helped me were: (a) Microsoft Trackball Explorer which is a lovely ergonomically shaped mouse - providing you are right-handed. (b) Tennis ball (or similar) to squeeze which helps build up both sets of muscles and thereby helping "rebalance" your wrist muscles.

</comment><comment><USER17> Vertical or tilted mice help a lot, and keeping your arm nearly level so you're not bending your wrist a lot. Also, personally I prefer a wider grip mouse for gaming, because I have a tendency to death grip smaller mice, but that's probably only relevant if you game

</comment><comment><USER18> Never having experienced any discomfort myself, but maybe you could try to buy an ergonomic mouse, which are basically "vertical" move. It is apparently better because you don't have to "twist" your hand. And it is probably closer to a real mouse.

</comment><comment><USER19> Testing mobile apps in the emulator caused my pain. I mapped the mouse-button to keyboard key for my left hand.

For browsing I use browser plugins that help navigating wtih the keyboard (saka keys e.g.)

</comment><comment><USER20> Lots of good advice here. I'll try in an additional left field one - get a good backpack. Use both straps. Don't carry too much weight.

</comment><comment><USER21> Has anyone who has been regularly lifting and exercising experienced wrist pain due to computer overuse?

<comment><USER22> No, but I've experienced wrist pain due to weight overuse. On heavy push exercises, I use these now [https://www.roguefitness.com/rogue-wrist-wraps- red-black](https://www.roguefitness.com/rogue-wrist-wraps-red-black). Additionally, when possible, I use a false grip to give my thumbs a break.

To answer OP's question, I've worn this for two years when I do long duration typing and mouse (non-trackball style) work. Its portable and discreet. Its helped me and I recommend it to everyone who has carpal tunnel syndrome. [https://www.amazon.com/Carpal-Mate-Wrist-Support- Black/dp/B0...](https://www.amazon.com/Carpal-Mate-Wrist-Support- Black/dp/B000ME3MMM?th=1)

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Try a wacom pen. Different grip.

</comment><comment><USER24> I've experienced various types of computing ergonomic pains since I started using computers. I bought my first computer with a mouse in 1988. Within the first couple of years, I bought my first trackball.[1] It was my main mouse, for a couple of years, but I was spending a lot of time with regular mice at school and then work. A decade later, I got my second trackball [2]. In between I had settled on a particular Logitech mouse that ceased manufacture. My reason for describing my trackballs[3] is context for my random internet advice:

 _Large scale ergonomic are more likely to be the long term problem than the small scale ergonomics of mouse versus trackball._

My second trackball relieved mouse pain for a while, but long sessions at the computer still could produce pain in my mouse hand...or trackball hand as the case may be. Big long lasting improvement came from purchasing a new desk [4] with a well rounded corners where the top plane of the work surface meets the side edges. The large radius (say 1cm or more) eliminates the pressure point where my forearm starts to rest on the desktop.

The folding table pretty much solved my problems with mouse hand pain...when I could use it, but most of the workplaces I've worked in had bring your own desk policies...and one actively upgraded all of us to glass desktops while I worked there because glass desks looked stylish.[5]

So these days, I don't have mouse hand pain because I don't use a mouse (in anger for long periods). I use a laptop with a trackpoint and trackpad. I use as many keyboard shortcuts as I can remember. I try to learn the command line. If I had a touchscreen on my laptop, I'd use that too.

Which of course means I use a laptop to eliminate mouse hand pain. I also use it to eliminate keyboard related pain by sitting the laptop in my lap. Because it sits in my lap, I eliminate the pains associated with finding the perfect office chair and desk combination...and lighting, don't forget the effects of dealing with bad lighting on posture and display positioning. I primarily use a lounge chair [6] instead of a desk.

Finally, I still experience pain from bad ergonomics from time to time. When I do:

\+ I identify the coarser grained ergonomic issues.

\+ I stretch my hands. Arm extended palm down. With the other hand, bend all the fingers together up and back to and past a right angle. Googling "carpal tunnel stretch" was how I found that.

Good luck.

[1]: Like this with a cheap tiny extra push button added for the second mouse button. [http://www.richardlagendijk.nl/foto/cip/joystick_wico_trackb...](http://www.richardlagendijk.nl/foto/cip/joystick_wico_trackball_01.jpg)

[2]: Yes, that's a PS/2 Mouseport. It probably shipped with a DB9 serial port adapter as well. [https://d2ydh70d4b5xgv.cloudfront.net/images/e/a/logitech- tr...](https://d2ydh70d4b5xgv.cloudfront.net/images/e/a/logitech-trackman-t- ch11-wired-trackball-ps2-mouse-tested-and-working-free- ship-f341ae7edbca2c4f445998ddf377ec7c.jpg)

[3]: Besides get off my lawn nostalgia and a strange kind of joy that suddenly recollecting the old Amiga trackball brought me seven minutes into the in-head composition of this comment.

[4]: Well actually a folding table with a molded top. Probably similar to this, but I would inspect the corner in person: [http://www.globalindustrial.com/p/office/tables/folding/port...](http://www.globalindustrial.com/p/office/tables/folding/portable- plastic-folding- table?infoParam.campaignId=T9F&gclid=EAIaIQobChMItqy80cqQ1gIVWVgNCh1UKQKiEAYYASABEgJKwfD_BwE)

[5]: That's what you get working for a corporate VP of design in an organization where design is pretty pictures.

[6]: Ikea Poang with Ottoman

</comment><comment><USER25> I haven't had problems with my wrist, however I have had with my shoulders as I am fairly large my arms are even further out than many causing the bend back of the wrist onto a traditional keyboard to be problematic. It's the same problem as causing wrist issues for many but I found the impact on my shoulders greater in my case.

Though excited by a number of custom ergonomic keyboard designs (a la ergodox etc), I started using the Microsoft Ergonomic keyboards about 2y ago, specifically the Sculpt Ergonomic and later the Surface Ergonomic. That has helped my comfort in that area a lot - and had a relatively low entry price ($100-200 AUD) versus some of the crazier keyboards. I would highly recommend them. The sculpt ergonomic (older version) also had a front rest to raise it to a kind of back angle. The newer Surface Ergonomic does not have that which I miss, but it does have proper arrow keys, home/end/pgup/pgdown and function keys. It also has a number pad which I dislike as it puts my trackpad further to the right, the original Sculpt did not. Either way both of them were a huge improvement and I would recommend either.

Secondarily laptops are DREADFUL for posture, because the screen is very low and the keyboard often quite deep into the desk. I've found this causes both slouching of myself to get to the keyboard and then my neck to look at the monitor. So I gave up using a laptop and now use a desktop - though a keyboard & mouse for your laptop is also a perfectly good solution! I have my monitors raised up off the desk about 10-15cm more than the default stands would allow (even a Dell fancy pants one) and find that is the best comfort for me. There are also various guides online for how to best setup your keyboard & monitor position, relatively also to your chair position. Arm angles etc. I'd suggest finding an authoritative guide and following that.

I also use a trackpad - but not because of wrist issues - I have no idea if that would help or hinder wrist issues (Google might know?). But from using a Mac Laptop with a very good trackpad for many years, I much prefer them to mice (actually I really dislike Mice) and so now I use a Logitech T650 trackpad on my desktop.

I would really like to move to a standing desk but I am a bit prohibited on cost for that one right now. I need to save a little as I think its a worthwild investment - but I think I want a desk that raises and lowers the entire thing as opposed to the vari-desk style systems - partly related to the fact I have 3x24-27" monitors. But it also needs to be fast & quiet.. mmm.... next project.

Lastly I would feel remiss not to refer you to your GP or some other kind of specialist in this area. There are serious problems that can occur and require treatment (a la Carpal Tunnel). You can read all the opinions you like but I was never having real pain of any kind personally, just a bit of discomfort. I decided to tweak my setup for the better. If you're already into the area of pain, having someone look at it and potentially do some scans etc seems like a highly valuable investment into both y our working future and your personal comfort - I am fairly sure these issues can escalate if untreated. Your hands are valuable.. don't mess around and at least investig ate it with professional help!

</comment><comment><USER26> I purchased a device called the Ultimate Zapper which has completely eliminated any joint pain I've had throughout my entire body, including extreme wrist joint pain & lower back pain related to my career as a full stack web developer. It cured the pain within 48 hours of using the device, and it has so far had permanent effects.</comment>


WD Sets the Record Straight: Lists All Drives That Use Slower SMR Tech - <AUTHOR> https://www.tomshardware.com/news/wd-lists-all-drives-slower-smr-techNOLOGY <comment><USER2> We had to drag them kicking and screaming, but we got them to do it. Good job internet.

I wonder where they keep the voices of common sense at most companies- the ones that realize a company is stronger in the long term if they are upfront with their customers rather than playing games with misdirection and delay tactics.

<comment><USER3> By the time the decision is made and the reasoning is something like money it's got momentum.

I was in a meeting once where some new support / warranty policies were announced. Now this wasn't a decision making meeting so I've no idea what happened there. The policy change was a straight up violation of some contracts we had with some customers. You didn't have to understand law or anything, it was pretty obvious. I spoke up if only out of curiosity to see what would happen.

Everyone with any level of power in the room seemed convinced that it couldn't be illegal, because the folks higher up the chain made that decision....

Everyone had delegated common sense to the folks upstairs.

Often when I hear of these decision I think "Someone had to say something at a meeting right?" but actually, I suspect that isn't the case.

Epilogue: Company got sued by customers first, then a state AG got in on the action, then the feds came after them. The law firm hired by the company actually quit on them before they finally settled.

<comment><USER4> That sounds so beautiful

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> It's probably worth changing the link to the official blog post: [https://blog.westerndigital.com/wd-red-nas- drives/](https://blog.westerndigital.com/wd-red-nas-drives/)

Anyway, this is all I wanted from them. "Here are what technologies each drive uses, and we'll be more transparent in the future."

Now I can be confident in what I'm getting when I buy a Western Digital drive. Good for them!

<comment><USER6> Hopefully Seagate and the other manufacturers that've been caught doing this will follow suit. It sucks to be a tech consumer buying expensive hardware like this and not feeling like you can trust the company selling it.

<comment><USER5> Which is precisely I was surprised when Western Digital's initial response didn't include a list like this one.

From my perspective as a consumer, WD has turned a disaster into an advantage. I now know that WD drives will disclose which technology they use—just like I know that Apple will bend over backwards to not secretly throttle battery performance. I can't say as much for other manufacturers.

<comment><USER7> > From my perspective as a consumer, WD has turned a disaster into an > advantage.

I disagree. They explicitly denied it for months until the tech press started reporting on it. They showed nothing but contempt for their customers.

Edit: I'm never going to forget this: "Well the higher team contacted me back and informed me that the information I requested about whether or not the WD60EFAX was a SMR or PMR would not be provided to me. They said that information is not disclosed to consumers. LOL. WOW."

From: [https://blocksandfiles.com/2020/04/14/wd-red-nas-drives- shin...](https://blocksandfiles.com/2020/04/14/wd-red-nas-drives-shingled- magnetic-recording/)

<comment><USER8> Vote with your money and don't buy WD.

<comment><USER9> All HDD manufacturers shipped SMR drives without telling anyone, WD was just the one that got the press because they tried lying about it first.

<comment><USER10> No, Western Digital is the only one that advertised (and continues to advertise!) SMR drives as optimized for RAID. The drives are failing in RAID rebuilds, that's why this is getting press. Seagate and Toshiba are not using SMR in their NAS drives.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> What is crazy about this, is that there are real technical reasons why you shouldn't put a SMR drive (even with drive managed SMR) in a generic RAID. The fact that they thought they could get away with this for a _NAS_ marketed drive means that the technical people are being kept far away from the actual marketing/sales people. You wonder what other gocha's they have left lying about.

</comment><comment><USER12> Why would a WD "BLACK" that is supposed to be high performance ever use SMR? Of course if the product placement of high/low performance makes no sense, how are people supposed to know what to buy?

<comment><USER13> As I understand it they've borrowed techniques from SSD firmware. Random writes are written to a linear cache area of the drive and transparently remapped. When the drive gets idle time it will rewrite the SMR zones where those blocks are supposed to go.

As a result the write speed of the drive is even faster than a non-SMR drive until the cache area fills up. If your workload does not try to write gigabytes of random junk without giving the drive any idle time, it will work great.

<comment><USER14> > As a result the write speed of the drive is even faster than a non-SMR drive > until the cache area fills up

I'm interested if there's a benchmark showing that?

<comment><USER15> Could the cache be flash based?

<comment><USER14> No, cache is reserved as a non-SMR area on platters.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> This looks like another non-apology from a PR person, just a slightly more competent PR person than whoever wrote the epic failure that was their previous blog post on this subject.

If someone tries to steal your car and gets caught, then says they only meant to steal your TV, and then when challenged says they understand that they should have been more upfront with you that they were going to try to harm you, they are not a good person. Sadly, I don't perceive any more legitimate remorse or sincerity about fixing the root cause here than there was last time.

The fact is that right now, several days after this all kicked off, if you go to WD's site and choose Products and then NAS internal drives from the menu, it still links to Reds and says (in very big letters, repeatedly) things like:

"Designed and Optimized for NAS Compatibility"

and

"WD Red Provides Storage Compatible with Leading NAS Systems"

Based on that, it appears that _they are still selling drives that are not fit for their stated purpose._ Everything else is just spin.

<comment><USER17> All I want to see is "WD recalls SMR drives for all customers who affirm that the drive gave them trouble, gives full retail price credit toward any other WD drive purchase". A percentage bonus for our trouble would be nice but unlikely.

It's not perfect, but it's a compromise. People who care get new drives; WD pays a cost for their mistake.

<comment><USER5> They wrote:

> If you have purchased a drive, please call our customer care if you are > experiencing performance or any other technical issues. We will have options > for you. We are here to help.

<comment><USER8> Which is just smoke and mirrors. I bet you they will push back hard.

If they were here to help they would have done so already. It's just a distraction.

<comment><USER5> Shouldn't we wait and see what reports are before jumping to that conclusion? I'm generally willing to assume good faith until a company gives me reason to believe otherwise.

Expecting them to proactively contact customers and to recall all existing drives seems like an unreasonable ask.

<comment><USER16> _I 'm generally willing to assume good faith until a company gives me reason to believe otherwise._

I think the point is that in this case, WD have already given us plenty of reason to believe otherwise. There isn't much doubt left now to give them its benefit.

<comment><USER5> What would you expect a sufficient response to look like?

As I said above, I don't think it's reasonable to ask WD to proactively contact everyone who bought one of these drives, so a message on their official corporate blog which reads "please reach out to customer care if you're experiencing performance problems" seems like exactly the right action to take.

So, that's the lens I'm looking through: what I'm seeing, versus what would I expect to see from a company reacting appropriately. Right now, they match.

Now, if WD had a history of posting such explicit, official messages publicly and then refusing to help customers privately, I would no longer be willing to give WD the benefit of the doubt. As far as I'm aware, we're not there yet.

I would present Facebook as an example of a company that has lost this trust. I unfortunately can no believe a single thing they say in any capacity. They have issued far, far too many apologies.

<comment><USER18> When the GTX 970 was released and it turned out that 500MB of its 4GB memory ran at a much slower speed they were sued. They settled the suit and paid out $30/card.

I think WD ought to offer some compensation for everyone who bought drives with worse performance than advertised. Likely they will be sued and be forced to pay something like that anyways.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I can't believe they put SMR into a WD Black drive considering its "performance" designation.

<comment><USER14> Apparently nothing is sacred if they can squeeze few bucks out of it

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> It's interesting that the Purple (surveillance) line are all listed as CMR since I was just looking up Seagate's Surveillance drives, which are apparently SMR.

Might grab me a couple of Purples as they're more available locally to me than Seagate's IronWolf CMR NAS drives.

<comment><USER20> I would of thought the Purples would have been one of the least bad places for SMR in consumer drives, since it's pretty much just all sequential load.

On the other hand, the Black with SMR is just shocking, considering that's their "performance" line.

<comment><USER21> Surveillance is sequential write load with hard real-time requirements, though. The unpredictable delays inherent to SMR could present serious problems.

<comment><USER22> No, the write load is nearly constant. With a fixed-size buffer in the drive, you're pretty close to optimal use case for SMR. There's no source of variance except for where the SMR mechanism adds it, and that's analogous to a garbage collector sweep. Size and frequency depend on dirty rate.

<comment><USER23> The write load will be nearly constant but it won't be sequential. The host device is going to have to update file system data structures periodically as it is writing the video stream; those structures will be at various different places on the drive. So the write load will look like 99% sequential, 1% random. That small amount of random writes in a non-contiguous stream is enough to cause SMR-related rewrite stuttering, especially since with DMSMR the host has no idea how logical blocks presented by the drive map to SMR regions.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> I don't understand why the WD Red 2-6 TB range was specifically assigned to SMR, not the smaller or larger drives in that line.

Is it especially price competitive?

<comment><USER25> Just spitballing, but it's probably the size range where the difference between one and two physical platters is whether they use SMR or not. A cost- cutting measure.

<comment><USER20> But also they've segmented away business users to Red Pro, Gold and Ultrastar drives for a few years, so I'd imagine sales of Reds today mostly fall in that range so more motivation to shave costs. With SSD pricing these days, <2TB hard drives just don't really make sense, but also I'm guessing very few home users need/want more than 8TB of storage.

<comment><USER17> There's a large market for "power" users who want high specs on paper but don't need them. The market response is to fake the specs or make compromising tradeoffs in lesser known specs. Often it works out fine and everyone is happy, but sometimes a bunch of customer use cases get broken.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Is the core issue with RAID rebuilds that the RAID rebuild timeouts are too low for what happens when an SMR drive's buffer overflows during a rebuild?

Are these "5 seconds", or "60 seconds", or "300+ seconds" timeouts that are triggering the rebuild failure?

<comment><USER7> It sounds like at least 60 seconds. Even with no timeouts RAID rebuilds go from a day with CMR to over a week with SMR.

<comment><USER26> Okay, so they do succeed, they just take a long time. Good to know! Thanks.

<comment><USER27> Only if your RAID software/hardware is exceptionally tolerant of the drive.

Don't forget the reason "NAS" drives exist in the first place is that several years ago drive manufacturers added a feature where if a read failed they would go into an extremely thorough but long (60+ second) recovery effort to get the sector back. RAID controllers would just see the drive stop responding to commands and mark it dead. So the NAS drives come with firmware that doesn't do the extreme recovery and instead just returns "read error" and lets the RAID controller rebuild it with the parity information.

If the drives go out to lunch due to a SMR writeback bottleneck then they will have lost their main selling point. Presumably in the normal case the drive will write the data just fine, but at a slower rate so you can rebuild your array but it will take all week. However, if one of the sectors fails the CRC check after the write and it has to try several times to get it I can definitely see the RAID controller getting frustrated and kicking it out.

I would be interested to see if any RAID software comes with a "SMR" mode where if a drive stops responding to commands during a rebuild the controller lets the drive take a 20 minute break before resuming the rebuild.

<comment><USER9> > So the NAS drives come with firmware that doesn't do the extreme recovery > and instead just returns "read error" and lets the RAID controller rebuild > it with the parity information.

Hang on a sec. Is this documented somewhere?

I bought a WD Red to plug into my Raspberry Pi which I use as a file server. There's no RAID, just the one disk. I thought I was buying a more energy efficient or bulk-storage-oriented drive.

But if what you say is true, then the "NAS" or "Red" drives should _never_ be used outside of a RAID because robust error correction was removed from them by design. Do I have that right?

<comment><USER16> Yes, that's the right idea. NAS/RAID drives have a different error recovery strategy, because the assumption is that they'll be part of a multi-drive arrangement where failing fast (and allowing the containing system to handle recovery) is preferable to avoiding failure if at all possible (but potentially taking a long time and thus causing the containing system to think the drive has stopped functioning properly and fail the whole thing out). I can't point you to any specific documentation off the top of my head, but this is a well-known position that I've seen described explicitly several times.

I'm afraid that does mean your choice of a Red for a single-disk system was not ideal. Presumably you keep backups of any valuable data anyway, but if downtime for recovery would be a significant problem for you then you might want to consider replacing that drive with something more suitable for your situation.

<comment><USER9> I should hand in my geek card, this feels like something I should have known about. In my defense, though, the HD manufacturers offer little to no information about the _technical_ differences between their drive lines. All of their documentation just says, "designed for X use case".

I do have backups, that's not my concern. My concern is that _when_ there is a read/write error (which are completely normal events with today's hard drive technology), the drive just gives up right away instead of making a few attempts. This could easily translate into (silently!) lost data in a single- disk scenario.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> For those unwilling to disable their Adblocker, here is the official WD blog post with PDF containing make and model numbers:

[https://blog.westerndigital.com/wd-red-nas- drives/](https://blog.westerndigital.com/wd-red-nas-drives/)

<comment><USER29> I had zero issues with uBlock Origin on the Tom's Hardware site. I do also use Privacy Badger, though I doubt that would make it more likely to work.

One thing I have started doing is running NoScript but by default I allow scripts. But when a site puts up notices about adblocking or other annoying things I disable scripts for them. Surprisingly it often allows me to read the website without issues. I did not do that with Tom's Hardware though.

<comment><USER28> I am using uBO. Blocking 3rd party scripts is what triggers it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> > "...Thank you for letting us know how we can do better. We will update our > marketing materials, as well as provide more information about SMR > technology, including benchmarks and ideal use cases."

I'd love to see the CEO read that with a straight face.

<comment><USER31> CEO's become CEO's for a reason.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> I am annoyed that they missed an opportunity here to fix SMR support in the non-GooFaceAmaSoft DC ecosystem.

Announce a trade-in for anyone who has a Red and has a problem with device- managed SMR, with a CMR Red. Many, many people won't notice or care (RAID1 users who don't do massive writes) Then reflash the SMR reds with the host- managed firmware they already have for the megascalers (who of course have their own highly proprietary software management layers to handle SMR) and sell those at some deep discount to anyone who wants them.

Announce a $100,000 bounty to anyone who adds host-managed SMR support (with some slightly ambitious perf target vs CMR) to ZFS, bcachefs, whatever.

They come out of this looking good (eventually) instead of looking like complete assholes. And end up with an expanded ecosystem that allows them to create a new product family using firmware work that they've already done years go!

<comment><USER11> Drive managed SMR is borderline. Host managed is stupid and only worth the effort if your a hyperscaler with a particular workload. A workload that happens to look a lot like old school tape workloads, which is probably what they should have sold SMR as.. Hard drives that look like tapes.

Which is why beyond some basic hinting its not worth putting in mainstream filesystems.

<comment><USER32> > Hard drives that look like tapes.

Tapes don't have fast (by spinning rust standards) random reads.

Hinting in ext4 or NTFS is of course a waste of time, but CoW filesystems like ZFS or btrfs are in a much better position to handle host-managed SMR.

And a generic "SMRTL" layer that utilizes (hopefully mirrored) SSDs as a write staging area could do _massively_ better than the dumb host-managed SMR on these drives.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> Sorry, but Black and Red labelled drives should NEVER be SMR... they're specifically labelled for a purpose... Blue, sure... but their High Performance Black, and NAS labelled drives should not be using this tech.

</comment><comment><USER34> I really want to hear from someone inside WD (outside the marketing/PR department). The level of organizational dysfunction that must exist for this to have happened would be a real spectacle.

</comment><comment><USER35> >Some users claim that SMR drives also do not work correctly when rebuilding ZFS arrays,

Is this true? On the assumption of the drive Firmware working correctly as intended, why would this be a problem?

I have not been following the problem closely as I dont quite understand what the fuss is about. I expect HDD to be slow, so not much of a problem to me. I only cares about its reliability. ( Which is something that theoretically SMR should be worst, there are no data to back it up yet )

<comment><USER36> >I expect HDD to be slow

The problem is how slow. 10MB/s sounds ok since it's faster than many home internet connections. But it's going to take you 3 weeks to re-build a 15TB drive in a raid array. Much longer again if the array is used at all (causing non-linear access as it has to rewrite changed blocks.)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15623937](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15623937)

<comment><USER37> And not knowing that rebuild time can cause you to incorrectly allocate physical drives to the array (based on AFR, size, and rebuild speeds). Changing the drive allocation for zfs requires destruction of the array.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> How can I tell whether a non-WD drive - say, Seagate - uses SMR or CMR?

</comment><comment><USER39> [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22935563](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22935563)

<comment><USER5> Dang, this is confusing, but it shouldn't be a dupe even though the URL is the same!

WD added new information. Their previous post didn't say which drives actually used SMR, and took a considerably different tone.

Why WD decided to keep the same URL is anyone's guess, but it's different content now.

<comment><USER39> Thanks for clearing that up! I've taken "[dupe]" off the submission.

<comment><USER5> Thanks, it's still worth changing the link though! Not sure what to do with the title.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


A Day in the Life of a Stolen Healthcare Record - <AUTHOR> http://krebsonsecurity.com/2015/04/a-day-in-the-life-of-a-stolen-healthcare-record/

<comment><USER2> It really annoys me that in this day and age there is no system that exists that allows ME to be in control of MY medical data which I can give access to on a per-physician basis (think FB/Google permissions). Apple Health is a step in the right direction (though even as a fanboy I hate that it's Apple-only) and I love how I can share that data back out on a per-app basis.

I personally love the graphs/stats that I can pull from this data all being in one place and I'd love to have the same for ALL my medical records so that when I got to a new doctor I can easily give them all my records.

<comment><USER3> The problem with that is managing the granularity: you'd need to also grant access to the clinician's administrators, clinical coders, some administrative pipeline...

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Won't someone please give me Secure, Private health care records controlled by Me and not the hospital, and retroactively apply this to all my records to date?

How do I even GET my healthcare record? I'd pay $500-1000 for this, easily. And I'm POOR.

<comment><USER5> Your healthcare record does not exist as an entity anywhere; it is an amalgam of all the records different physicians and medical service providers have on you. It is not uncommon to need to gather all these records if, for example, you go to a research hospital for treatment.

The only practical method today is to keep your records yourself as they accumulate. When you see a doctor, ask for a copy of his consultation notes. If any tests are done, ask for copies of the full results. If you have imaging done, request a copy. Most medical imaging facilities can provide CD-ROMs with files in standard formats or that come packaged with viewing software.

Most importantly, make your own notes on what has transpired and what the doctor said.

If you ever do request all your records, you will discover that many physicians keep TERRIBLE notes. Sometimes the only record of a consultation is a hand-written form containing a few impressions and notes on vital signs. Thankfully, this is becoming less common, but even doctors that have implemented an electronic health record system that forces them to enter standard consultation records don't always put the full depth of the discussion you had in those records. It will also often be difficult to reconstruct start and stop dates for medications unless you keep track of that yourself.</comment></comment>


Patterns for Managing Large Scale Backbone Applications - <AUTHOR> http://benhowdle.im/2013/03/24/patterns-for-managing-large-scale-backbone-applications/ <comment><USER2> I honestly don't feel like any of the "large scale (JS|Backbone) applications" posts really addresses the difficulties you run into when scaling JS applications. Most of these things are common sense (eg. "use namespaces", "make use of consistent naming conventions" etc.) and should hold for any kind of application development.

For me, one of the main problems when scaling the Backbone app I work with is decoupling View interactions. Now the usual recommendation you receive is using an event bus. In the link @analog just posted [1], Addy Osmani talks about using the Mediator pattern to achieve the decoupling, which certainly does help, but imho his example does not fully reflect the purpose of the Mediator pattern. His Mediator is barely more than just an event bus.

A Mediator can make use of an event bus, but an event bus is not automatically a mediator. It still forces the views to know about events triggered from other views and react to them. This still causes coupling, and even worse, it keeps the coupling in the views. The mediator should exist to take care of that coupling and pull it out of the views.

Let's take for example a checkout page. The checkout page has a view containing a form for address data. It also has a view that lets you pick the payment provider, a view that allows you to enter a coupon and a view that shows the order total.

Here are some of the required view-to-view interactions:

* If the user email changed, revalidate the coupon to make sure the "new users only" constraint applies and show the status

* If the payment type is changed to Paypal, add an additional charge to the order total and display it.

* If a coupon is entered, update the order total

This means that in many cases, views need to know exactly how the public event interfaces of the other views look, even if they communicate by an event bus and not by direct references and method calls. To make the application maintainable, we need to get rid of the knowledge about the other views' events as well.

This is where the Mediator comes into play. We make the mediator aware of the different event interfaces of the Views and have it decide which events to retrigger or which methods to call in what View. Instead of having the views subscribe to the other Views' events, the Mediator wires them up and encapsulates the View interactions. The Mediator now knows that the `change:email` event from the AddressForm triggers the `validateCoupon` method on the CouponView or the `validate:coupon` event to which the CouponView listens. The CouponView no longer needs to know about the existence of the `change:email` event.

Now the Views only need to specify their public (event) interfaces and the Mediator knows about how the different Views interact. This is a lot more scalable than the naive event bus approach.

I really wish there were more articles about scaling really big JS applications. In the end they will probably heavily borrow from GoF's Design Patterns book, but it always helps to see the patterns in action. I appreciate the author's effort, but I always feel disappointed when I read "Large Scale (Backbone|JS) Applications" and don't find advice to solve and real problems what come up with scaling "Large Scale (Backbone|JS) Applications".

[1] <http://addyosmani.com/largescalejavascript/>

<comment><USER3> The example you give is the kind of thing that Ember is really good at.

You would implement all those interrelationships with computed properties. Each computed property updates automatically if its dependencies change, and each view redraws automatically when the corresponding properties change. All that work of defining events and propagating them through the mediator is stuff that Ember does for you automatically, once you've declared what depends on what.

I'm one of the early adopters who built a rather big application in pre-1.0 Ember. It definitely pays off as the application grows larger.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Ben -- since you're around, and it seems to be "struggle with getting started with X.js week" around these parts ... I figure I should ask you about this:

        > which is what causes problems for a lot of people
        > when getting to grips with it (myself included).

What exactly did you have a hard time coming to grips with?

<comment><USER5> Jeremy, what I've seen most people struggle with (including myself in the beginning) is those first couple of hundred lines of code. How does everything fit together? How should I handle templates? How to I create nested models? How do I stop thinking "in jQuery" and start thinking "in Backbone"?

I guess the thing is that the current documentation works really well when you understand Backbone. Before you understand it, getting started is really difficult. That's why we see so many getting started guides all around — the problem of course being that most of them are barely just ok. Backbone should have a really, really good getting started guide, which (I think) should be more opinionated than Backbone itself — i.e. it shows one (really good) way of doing things (that works well when you scale up your application). Or at least link to one.

I've heard many say "look at the todo example", but I think that it's so far away from a real app that it's difficult to use as a starting point. It doesn't use ajax, it relies heavily on global state, it puts templates in the HTML, lots of global `$` stuff, no routing, etcetc. Ok-ish choices, but not a great example for those getting started. E.g. having templates in the DOM is ok when you have 5 views. When you have more it's problematic, especially for testing and for precompiling templates.

Backbone is great when you grok it, but it takes a lot of time to find your own patterns that works really well. (Marionette and Chaplin are awesome, but still, first when you have some basic understanding of Backbone itself)

<comment><USER6> >> How does everything fit together?

initialize models and controllers, then pass that data to newly initialized views. at any scale, this hardly differs.

>> How should I handle templates?

backbone is template agnostic so the answer is "however you'd like". because I use r.js, my preference is loading the templates as separate text modules and defining them on my view. when our production script is build, the templates are inlined into the javascript through r.js.

your qualms with the todo example (no AJAX, global variables, strange template handling) are things that are not at all pertinent to Backbone and are solved by other patterns. point being, Backbone has it's own model/view pattern, but you can look at it in isolation. your other concerns are things solved by patterns with no pertinent relation to Backbone.

<comment><USER5> I wasn't commenting on Backbone itself, I was commenting on getting started with Backbone. I've held 15+ workshops and presentations on Backbone and helped a lot of people getting started. These are the issues I have most often heard from them.

<comment><USER6> my point is that these questions seem either misdirected or simply answered. that is to say, it's not a framework. it's a set of classes. how you handle templates, how these classes fit together, etc is hardly a function of Backbone.

don't get me wrong. i've been there. i've had the same questions. but i think the answers i gave would have satisfied me when i was starting, had i had a mentor.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I recommend anyone getting into building web apps (regardless of framework) to read Mixu's "Single page apps in depth" <http://singlepageappbook.com/single- page.html>

It's a short read, it's opinionated and will make you think, especially if you're a novice / intermediate programmer. In particular, the "Writing maintainable code" chapter.

Focusing on things like namespacing is not necessarily a bad thing, but it doesn't address the real goal - writing modular, testable, maintainable code. If your components know where other components are in the namespace and depend on them internally, the namespace hierarchy does nothing to help your design.

The main difficulty in designing complex web applications is managing dependencies between objects, just like any large object-oriented piece of software (assuming that is the paradigm you choose).

</comment><comment><USER8> Oh, _that_ backbone...

\-- disappointed network engineer

<comment><USER9> Same here, though I'm not a network engineer.

Can we please, please say "backbone.js" when we're not talking about that "other" backbone (which has a much older claim on this name)?

<comment><USER10> You should get used to it.. More and more non-CS programmers are coming with "JS is everything" and without any other tips.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Nitpick: App and Models are singleton instances. Shouldn't they be lowercased ?

<comment><AUTHOR> Truly nitpicking ;), you're probably right, but as a convention it makes sense for me and hopefully others!

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> a bit of a side track here, I've been seen a lot of blogs with this same layout, is it a blogging platform or just people copying around?

If it is a blogging platform, which one is it?

<comment><AUTHOR> Are you thinking of <https://svbtle.com/> ? Yeah mine looks similar but I assure you, it wasn't ripped at all!

<comment><USER12> Sorry Ben, I didn't mean to accuse you of anything. Sorry if it came out that way. And yeah, that's what I was looking for :) thanks!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> The big piece missing from this is RequireJs as the author mentions. We should all know it's good practice not to use global variables so that should be reason enough to use it in itself.

As an example an app we built had a conflict between a jQuery plugin that the frontend devs had included, and a library that we had added with require. Having the conflict only show up in one place rather than the whole app certainly made it quicker to diagnose.

Addy Osmani's tutorials should be required reading if you're just starting out. [1] [2]

The only downside that we saw was that you will have to provide AMD versions of each library you use if you want to use jQuery from a CDN.

As well as being good practice it just feels really nice to have everything you're using declared at the top of the file you're in. The sugared require syntax helps with this. [3]

[1] <https://github.com/addyosmani/backbone-fundamentals>

[2] <http://addyosmani.com/largescalejavascript>

[3] <http://requirejs.org/docs/whyamd.html#sugar>

<comment><USER14> I have found it is convenient to use RequireJS's shim features to load libraries that use AMD rather than looking for AMD versions. For example, we use MathJax off their CDN and they do not provide an AMD version.

<comment><USER13> Are you using the r.js optimiser though? We definitely couldn't use a local non-AMD version with other CDN libraries when using the optimiser to build our js out for production.</comment></comment></comment>


A Summer in Techstars - <AUTHOR> http://blog.accelgolf.com/2009/09/21/boston-techstars-musings

<comment><USER2> "If you want to build cool technologies, go to YC; if you want to build big businesses, go to TechStars."

I would love to see a discussion around this quote.

<comment><USER3> _I would love to see a discussion around this quote._

Okay. You can't blame these guys for being enthusiastic about the program that accepted them. But this line is bogus.

First, it's anonymous and stated without any evidence, which is not surprising since the evidence refutes it. (1) Have TechStars so far produced a single company on the scale of Justin.tv, Reddit, Loopt, Scribd, etc.? (2) What statements by PG or any YC founder manifest the bias alleged by the quote? (One could easily find hundreds the other way.) What part of "Make something people want" doesn't Anonymous understand?

Second, it's a not-particularly-subtle putdown that is tantamount to saying "YC don't know what they're doing". Investing in startups that can become big businesses is the whole game. To prioritize anything over that would be incompetence.

Third, it's a not-particularly-subtle attempt to claim mental territory of the sort readily familiar to any reader of [http://www.amazon.com/Positioning- Battle-Overcrowded-Marketp...](http://www.amazon.com/Positioning-Battle- Overcrowded-Marketplace-POSITIONING/dp/B001T3WJYW/).

TechStars copied YC and want to distinguish themselves as something other than second-in-class. One can appreciate the difficulty, but insulting people's intelligence is probably not the most effective way to go about it -- especially in this business, where those you most need to convince will least appreciate it.</comment></comment>


Yahoo: A portal to nowhere - <AUTHOR> http://www.economist.com/news/business/21676808-marissa-mayer-has-failed-revive-internet-sloth-portal-nowhere <comment><USER2> Yahoo was in the vanguard of the advertising meltdown years ahead of everyone else.

At least sometimes you see a Google ad that is relevant, but Yahoo always shows you the same scam ads they've been showing for years -- the "limitless pill" that is banned in 49 states except New York. (uhhh...) the senior with his head exploding because he doesn't know he can get free stuff from medicaid, etc. A lot of this stuff should be illegal but you see it every day on Yahoo and it really poisons the well for advertising because it chases away anything legimitate.</comment>