LASIK 6 months later - <AUTHOR> http://www.bemmu.com/lasik-6-months-later <comment><USER2> I had wavefront-guided all-laser LASIK ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lasiks#Wavefront- guided_LASIK](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lasiks#Wavefront-guided_LASIK)) 6 years ago and the 'problems' I have with my eyesight are completely comparable to 'problems' I had when I wore glasses and/or contact lenses: that is, I have minor 'problems' that aren't worth writing a blog post about.

I go see the eye doctor once a year for a regular check up. My vision remains 6/3 (UK scale) which is 20/10 on the US scale.

I was about to recommend the doctor who performed my surgery. I Googled him only to find that he died a few months ago of cancer.

RIP Professor Joseph Colin: [http://www.aao.org/member/obituaries.cfm](http://www.aao.org/member/obituaries.cfm)

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah, actually I agree with you and the point of this blog post was there is no reason not to do the operation based on this 6 month experience.

<comment><USER3> There is, the halos!

If you are a software developer, as many of us, you really don't want that. Nor do you want dry eyes, specially when staring at a screen under air conditioning.

If someone really wants to do the operation anyway, then get a LASEK. This won't create the never-healing flap, with all its complications. Recovery time suffers a bit, but that's a minor issue, considering the long-term benefits. Less dry eye.

Halos might still be present though.

<comment><USER4> I had LASIK done and had the halos, but they are now gone 1.5 years later. I also had bad dry eye in the morning for a while - that's also gone.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I live a pretty active lifestyle, I swim, skydive, go running, box, play squash (not all at the same time). I had LASIK about 7 years ago and having wore glasses and contact lenses for 8 years prior to that I still tell anybody who will listen it was the best £2,000 I ever spent.

There was one downside to the operation and that was if I stared at a screen for a long amount of time, or worked too many late nights, I suffered from _really_ dry eyes. It was almost painful. Fortunately some drops that I kept with me for about six months took the edge off of it and now I don't suffer with this anymore.

The Halo thing is definitely a side effect. As other people have pointed out, it's no worse than contact lenses/glasses.

I now no longer have to worry about looking for my glasses first thing in the morning. I can play any sport without fear of losing or breaking my glasses.

Wearing non-prescription sun glasses is something I now take for granted and a complete joy.

I genuinely do believe that my overall quality of life has improved as a result of the operation.

</comment><comment><USER6> Honestly, basically all of the upsides that he lists can be gained from using contact lenses, which are amazing. Also, with plain old American vision insurance (VSP), I get a year's worth of contacts for free, every year. As a longtime glasses wearer I switched to using primarily contacts a while ago and it's amazing. Contacts have their share of (mostly minor in my experience) issues, but as long as LASIK continues to have bugs like the halo thing OP describes, I'll stick with them.

<comment><USER7> Agreed. My quality of life got a lot better once I switched to (monthly) contact lenses. Half a year ago I switched to dailies which was again a drastic improvement to my everyday life. I've been toying with LASIK but to be perfectly honest the surgery just scares me. The idea of cutting open my eyes and shooting lasers at them isn't to appealing to me.

<comment><USER8> What made the daily contact lenses better than the monthly contact lenses?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> What gets me the most about LASIK naysayers is that you also get the same or even much worse artifacts when using glasses or contacts. I had Femto-LASIK 2 years ago, after using glasses for 6 years and contacts for 6 more. I have very slight haloing around bright lights at night (Not as bad as described in the post though). The freedom of not having glasses or using contacts is FANTASTIC!

<comment><USER3> I have both myopia and astigmatism and I see no halos at night.

You are not supposed to see halos if your prescription is correct. You might get some artifacts if you look through your glasses at an angle, but that's it.

Halos are an artifact of LASIK, usually when the pupil is large enough that it expands past the area of the cornea which was "corrected".

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> To anyone who is nearsighted and considering corrective surgery: _do it_. If you look at the stats, the vast majority of patients are glad they got the surgery.

I started wearing glasses when I was 9. I got contacts at 16. It was a great improvement, and I was quite happy with contacts. Two years ago, I got wavefront-guided epi-LASEK. It is without a doubt the best money I've spent.

Glasses have obvious problems, but even contacts come with significant disadvantages. They can dislodge unexpectedly. Doing anything in the water risks losing them. They can trap particles or chemicals against the cornea, causing irritation.

Corrective lenses also tax your mind with more logistics. An overnight trip requires saline solution, extra lenses (and/or backup glasses), a storage case, and some way to clean your hands. This sucks some of the fun out of camping and other activities.

Meanwhile, people who've had corrective surgery wake up and _see_. It's miraculous. Their eyes just work.

<comment><USER11> There are plenty of modern contact lenses that can be worn for longer periods than just a single day without issues. As far as I understand it, this comes from enhanced materials, letting through more oxygen while retaining more moisture.

I use Air Optix ([http://www.airoptix.com/safety- information.shtml](http://www.airoptix.com/safety-information.shtml)), they say up to 6 nights is fine for their baseline version, with up to 30 nights for the Night & Day product. Not affiliated in any way, just a customer.

<comment><USER12> I got a _blister_ on my _eye_ from Night & Day contacts. Then in got LASIK. That was in 2005, best choice of my life.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I wore glasses from age 16 to 25. I've never once worn contacts - couldn't deal with touching my eyeballs every morning.

Got LASIK at 25 (i'm now 36). BEST DECISION EVER. I had it done in Manhattan - cost was about 4500 but I paid it via an FSA which reduced the costs further.

I did have the "Halo" effect for about 6-8 months - especially on traffic lights at night, but it eventually went away.

The only downside is that my eyes can feel dry from time to time - not sure if that is due to LASIK or just from being tired [I have 5 year old twins;)].

I am curious/nervous that the effects will wear off - but even if they do and I need to go back to glasses the last 10 years have been more than worth it.

</comment><comment><USER14> I get similar halos in the dark and I have no vision problems at all, maybe it's exaggerated by LASIK but it's certainly not something that 'normal' vision is immune to.

<comment><AUTHOR> I was wondering about this and asked someone born with 20/20 vision before and they claimed no halos. Would be interesting to hear more opinions on this.

So people born with "perfect" vision. If you stand outside on a dark night and stare at a street light, is the separation between darkness and the light completely crisp, or is there a halo or a starburst of some sort?

<comment><USER15> I have (as far as I know) perfect eyes. Around bright objects there is a slight halo, best compared to the one you see in video games around streetlights at night. It's much smoother than the one in the illustration in the article and slightly less bright. Bright stars show as dots with tiny lines coming from it with different lengths. Really tiny but still visible. Less bright stars show as infinitely small dots.

<comment><AUTHOR> OK, so I guess this is just normal and somehow wearing glasses actually changes your vision by removing those artifacts.

<comment><USER3> Ask a doctor about that. Preferably, not the one who performed the surgery.

As far as I know, there are no halos if you really have perfect vision. Cataracts and minor vision problems (such as a small amount of astimatism) will cause halos, even if the subject claims to see fine otherwise.

If you are doing such a poll, it would be helpful to ask, along with the presence of halos, when it was their last visit to an optometrist. If you believe you have perfect vision, you are not going to see one (even though periodic visits to an eye doctor are indicated, for checkups).

<comment><USER15> Exactly, I can't remember the last time I've seen an optometrist, horrible things could be wrong with my eyes.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> The halo effect took a lot longer to go away for me then a few months, but it eventually did go away. Same with the dry eyes, it took maybe a year for me to get over the dry eyes. I am going on 10 years now and I have no lasting side effects, and I would no doubt do it again.

<comment><AUTHOR> That's great to hear, so there still is a chance it might go away. I had more trouble with eye dryness with contacts actually and never really noticed such a problem after the surgery.

<comment><USER8> That's interesting. I've had problems with dry eyes with contacts, and took that as a reason not to do eye surgery for fear of making the problem permanently present even when not wearing contacts because dry eyes is one of the side effects. So perhaps I should reevaluate.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I had quite bad vision and had wavefront LASIK as well. I was told my large pupils and bad vision wouldn't be a problem "with the newest techniques," but on the morning of the surgery after I'd psyched myself up they dropped a special waiver in my lap.

I'm generally happy with it; it's a bit of a miracle. But my eyes are often fuzzy in the morning, they stream tears when it's windy (and they're correspondingly dry afterward), I see halos, and most distressingly my night vision and contrast are worse. I notice "floaters" a lot more, which can be really annoying. I also wonder what I've forfeited in future correction possibilities. So it's really a mixed bag.

When I go in for tests they claim I have 20/20 vision, but that test is very limited, and due to issues above I simply cannot see as well as a person with 20/20 vision (though I can see better than many people who don't bother to wear glasses).

To be honest, I quickly took for granted the miraculous "waking up and being able to see." The main reason I got the surgery is I couldn't decide what style of glasses to get, and I hated what they were doing to my nose bridge, and finally I wanted to try something transformative for my life, which it hasn't really been, though it has certainly made it a bit simpler.

</comment><comment><USER18> Had mine done in the late 90's and it's the best money I've ever spent. Period. I find in conversations with folks on the fence that it's mostly psychological (fear). To that I say, spend the extra money on the doctor that has such and such credentials using such and such latest laser and get over the hump if that's what it takes. Totally worth it in my book.

<comment><AUTHOR> I also had that fear, which almost stopped me from going through with it. But fear is treatable.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Your haloing looks like keratoconus, which I have. It makes driving at night quite challenging, since oncoming headlights are 'smeared' over quite a wide area instead of appearing as point sources.

<comment><USER20> Keratoconus is one of the reasons I haven't had LASIK myself; the process itself weakens the cornea, and when it's weak already it can lead to serious complications.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> I can't really see any halo in the O picture even how hard I try. Is it supposed to be photo manipulated?

Anyone having a link to the original?

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, it has been manipulated to add in a halo that corresponds to my post- lasik halo.

It is not that strong, but you can check with a color picker app or with a paint program that yes there really is one there.

<comment><USER21> I tried to add another O into the picture with Photoshop: [http://bbh-001.boitho.com/div/halo.png](http://bbh-001.boitho.com/div/halo.png)

I can't see any different. Maybe I am affected or my ~3 year old lcd monitors are failing to display the colors correctly.

<comment><AUTHOR> They look very different to me. Check your monitor settings if they look the same to you :)

<comment><USER21> The font is different because I was not able to find which one was used here. But except from that; do you see this halo effect?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> I had LASIK done about 6 months ago. My right eye ended up 20/15 but my left eye ended up being +1 and has some astigmatism that it never had. I suspect they screwed up and gave me the wrong correction in my left eye.

Good news is it can be corrected, the bad news is I had to live with an eye that is useless for small text on a monitor. It has been very aggravating but not aggravating enough to go buy a prescription pair of glasses just for the correction in one eye.

Also keep in mind all of the follow-up visits you need to do to keep your "lifetime correction" warranty so get your Lasik done at a place near your house.

<comment><USER22> It sounds like I am being way too negative here. I would do the process again but I would insist on getting full pupil dialation before the procedure. With this correction I will be extremely satisfied but all told it took at least 40 hours for follow up visits including travel time and getting everything set up ahead of time. With my right eye doing all the work and looking at monitors all day it gives up at about 8pm where I can't easily read a 15" laptop without eye strain.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> I had the PRK surgery ([http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photorefractive_keratectomy](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photorefractive_keratectomy)). The first two weeks were the worst of my life. The recovering was painful and I could barely see... And during that time the irritation and the feeling of having sand in my eyes...

Well, after this tough period all the irritation gone, my vision was improving everyday and now, 3 years later I think that it was the best decision ever. Specially if you like to ride motorcycles - and use helmets - it makes a lot more practical.

<comment><USER23> I forgot to mention that now I have this halos at night and a little bit of light sensitivity as well.

In dry weathers I fell a little bit of dryness in the eyes _ I manage to hack myself by forcing some tears. Sounds strange but it works.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> I had LASEK* 2 or 3 years ago and it's been nothing but incredible. I now see 20/15.

With LASEK there is no cutting of the eye, so there is no risk of halos or of the flap coming loose later in life. Something like 80-90% of the complications are from the flap, so LASEK is much safer. It takes a day or so longer to heal, but the results are worth it. One of the coolest things I've ever done, and zero negative side effects. Infact, for the first 6 months of so I walked around NYC like I was on acid - just amazed at how clear everything was and being able to see things like bricks on the top corners of buildings 60 stories tall.

Also, the feeling of waking up in the morning without my eyes all f'd up from sleeping in contacts is priceless. I literally found myself crying tears of joy and gratitude on several occasions for how amazing this was. I was happier simply from being able to see better. And it's helped a ton with my ultimate frisbee game and helped me better deal with sand for beach sports.

If you want a laugh, google Dr. Emil Chynn -- he is a brilliant doctor but also a bit eccentric. He was recently on Howard Stern offering $100k to help him find a wife ;) and then book an appointment to see him.

If you'd like a personal introduction to him, feel free to email me (email@example.com) and I can help you get a free consult and friends & family discount. He also has financing available.

Seriously, if you wear glasses or contacts get this done as soon as you can and look into LASEK (no cut, no flap). If you are in NYC check out Park Avenue Safe Sight (LASEK) and Dr. Emil Chynn.

EDIT: I should mention that with the "HD Upgrade" that I got you get a level of clarity that is impossible to reach with glasses or contacts. It's supposed to be 25x more accurate a prescription because they do a laser scan of the entire surface of the eye, and then create micro prescriptions for every area -- sort of like dimples on a golf ball vs. 1 lens like glasses or contects which basically takes the average prescription for the entire eye. LASEK is superior - more accurate, no halos (since no scar tissue), no flap to fall off, better than 20/20 vision, less risk of infection.. Really an amazing technology (oh and I got a DVd of my eyes being lasered ;) )

<comment><USER3> Aren't the halos created by a large pupil reaching an area which was not touched by the laser? That was my understanding, at least. If so, LASEK would still carry the risk of halos.

But not dry eyes, and no flap dislocation. If that flap DOES dislocate (usually, because of trauma), you are screwed.

<comment><USER24> I thought the halo was from the edge of the flap having scar tissue - I could be off on the cause. But to my understanding there isn't halo risk with the no cut / no flap procedure.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> I've been looking into getting eye correction done using a newer method than LASIK/LASEK. The company that performs it in Sweden calls it "NoCut" but it seems to have a few other trade names in different countries (seems to be performed mainly in Sweden, Australia and the Netherlands).

It works similar to PRK/LASEK in that instead of cutting and reattaching a flap of the cornea (which can heal in place incorrectly, or even come loose if you rub your eyes) they remove a thin layer which then heals back cleanly. It's better than PRK in that instead of removing the layer with alcohol and manually marking an area, all that is dealt with a computer-controlled laser, which supposedly increases the precision, minimizing the affected area and makes healing much quicker and less painful. The biggest downside compared to LASIK is you have to sit in a dark room for 3 days listening t audio books while your eyes slowly and painfully heal, and then wear sunglasses outdoors when there's bright sunlight for a couple months.

After spending a week reading in detail about all the different methods, the possible side-effects or failure modes, etc. I think I'll stick to contacts for now...

<comment><AUTHOR> Contacts aren't totally risk-free either. Not exactly sure what the issue was (this was pre-wikipedia), but my doctor had me stop using contacts since he was concerned my vision was getting worse due to them.

I looked into PRK and was on the fence about it, was unconvinced that there is a big difference besides the psychological benefit of "no cutting". Lasik had no pain either during the surgery, so I think considering the slower recovery PRK would have just been more painful total.

<comment><USER26> My girlfriend can't wear contact lenses any more due to excessive use. She has developed both scarring and corneal neovascularization.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> I have had horrible eye sight my entire life, about 20/2000 to be precise. To give you an idea how bad that is, without my contacts, I could see my hand clearly when it was 1 inch from my nose...basically I was blind without them. I went from massively heavy glasses that put red spots on my nose from the pressure to contact lenses about twenty years ago. That was a huge improvement but you always had to worry about not falling asleep with them in. About 5 years ago I got LASIK surgery where Tiger Woods got his. The halo'ing was unfortunately a price I paid but I expected this because my cornea was so thin in my left eye that the surgeon needed to think about it before even saying if they could do the operation. This is all about risks and rewards. My problem was so significant that I will deal with the halo'ing even though Green Lights at traffic intersections are a t-shaped mess and dry eyes is another byproduct. This current situation is by far more pleasurable than the misery of being dependent glasses or contact lenses.

<comment><USER28> How good is your vision now? I imagine with that severe sight problems, they weren't able to fix it completely?

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> After 17 years of contacts, I had wavefront LASIK. My contact prescription was -9.00, so my choices were very thick and expensive glasses or contact lenses.

Beware the advertised pricing. $2000 LASIK means 'per eye', and you have to add another $1000 for wavefront and another $1000 for laser-cut flaps instead of blade-cut. It ended up being $6,000 which wasn't said until the day of the procedure.

I was told that they didn't expect to give me 20/20 vision, I ended up around 20/40, good enough to legally drive without glasses but I squint a bit. I still have a slight astigmatism in one eye, and that throws me off quite a bit.

The first 6 months during healing were bad - lots of halos, sensitive to light, very poor night vision, especially when driving. But 18 months later Id on't have those problems anymore. I did lose my very close (~6 inches) vision which was very sharp before.

My biggest complaint is dry eyes. I'm not using eyedrops 4-6 times per day, it doesn't help to be in front of a computer screen as much as I am, and it's worst in the mornings and night.

</comment><comment><USER30> I've been very nearsighted since I was about 8-9 years old. I had glasses exclusively for about five years, then contact lenses (monthly disposables) for 15 or so. I enjoyed contacts well enough, but did not enjoy the hassles with them - cleaning them and swimming without them were my biggest annoyances.

I haven't been sold on LASIK because of the risk of permanent side-effects, such as the light haloes, starbursts, night vision issues, and dry eye.

I tried orthokeratology - wearing a special prescription hard lens for eight hours a night to gradually reshape the cornea. I liked the idea that it was completely reversible, and the downside of wearing the lenses at night wasn't a big deal for me (they were never completely comfortable, but they didn't bother me after the first couple nights).

The problems I experienced with the ortho-k lenses were two-fold, which would have affected me _permanently_ had I went with LASIK: 1) my cornea is too thin for the large amount of correction I need, and 2) my pupils are too large.

1) Thin cornea: ortho-k and LASIK require material with which to work. When there's not enough cornea to mold/burn, the procedure results in weak correction. Solution? Wear contacts. Lame. We're back at square one.

2) Large pupils: my pupils are apparently freaky large in low light. The area of the cornea that gets molded was large enough for normal-to-bright light, but in low light the molded area was too small. That resulted in terrible haloes. Solution? Take glaucoma eye drops that shrink one's pupils for 8-12 hours. I didn't like being dependent on a drug in that way. After three attempts over many months to enlarge the molded area, we gave up. My cornea was just too thin to be able to mold a large enough area.

My eye doctor said that because of my thin corneas and large pupils, if I got LASIK surgery I would have suffered the same problems with weak correction and terrible haloes and other vision artifacts in low light.

So I'm very glad I went the non-permanent route first. Luckily with ortho-k, I just had to stop wearing the sleep shaping lenses for a week to revert to my normal nearsighted vision. I'm back to my monthly disposable contact lenses, and am happy I can see the stars clearly and be able to drive at night again.

I would definitely recommend checking out ortho-k, though - I wasn't a good candidate, but I'm sure many people are.

</comment><comment><USER31> I'd call glowing outlines around objects in the dark "glare" and not "halos". From the reading I did before getting LASIK back in April, "halos" can occur in people with very large pupils. So in the dark, your pupils will grow larger than where the flap is cut. So you'd see this phantom circle in the dark all the time.

The glare is annoying, but I purchased a new set of glasses (I know, right?) with no correction and anti-reflective lenses. These help quite a bit when driving at night or working on the computer when my eyes are tired.

Going into my surgery, I told the doc I didn't care if I needed reading glasses (we all probably will), glasses to drive or to work at the computer. Having gone from between a -5 and -6 to 20/15 vision, I am very very happy with the results.

</comment><comment><USER32> I never had eye surgery but (perhaps) as someone with a slight aspherical deviation (astigmatism it is called I see now), I also see those halo's. I didn't even notice anything about the white O on the black background until I zoomed in a lot.

</comment><comment><USER33> I'd love to get my eyes fixed. My vision feels not so great even with glasses/contacts, so I'm kinda hoping that surgery could get me better than glasses vision. I also don't know if it could (positively) affect my night vision, which feels significantly worse than day-time vision.

Of course my expectations for vision are probably too great, and certainly I'm currently in the "normal" range (with glasses).

Also I'm personally quite interested in IOL/ICL/Visian, their advertisements make it look really attractive. But they don't afaik yet correct astigmatism, so that's not an option for me yet.

</comment><comment><USER34> The halos and similar issues would bug and distract me no end, especially considering that I personally can get the same effect (improved site) by wearing glasses.

I just bought a new set of glasses with progressive lenses. I hated them. Oh nos! Oh, wait, I took them back and they replaced the lenses with single prescription. Free. Problem solved.

Not at all to discourage anyone from getting lasik, but this is how I look at the risk from that procedure, for me and my prescription. Possible permanent issues vs just changing my lenses. People with worse prescription than mine might think differently.

</comment><comment><USER35> those artifacts are not uncommon from what i know - especially star like haloes around bright lights. part of it is down to how your retina works and part of it down to the focusing of the light by the cornea, lens and through the humours... its not reasonable to expect all of this to work perfectly, and it has design flaws in terms of bleeds and blooms appearing in the final image.

the halos are because of how the photoreceptors work everyone gets lingering spots of 'colour' when you look at a bright light then look away - note that these bloom out as well, and as they fade they spread for the same reasons. its the surrounds of the 'correct' receptor sucking up the excess energy thats been pumped into that area of the retina coupled with the impossibility of consistently perfect focus

</comment><comment><USER36> I have needed glasses since I was very young and started wearing contact lenses about two years ago. I've always seen the halo around lights at night with/without glasses/contacts. My thoughts have always been that it was happening _because_ of my bad vision.

</comment><comment><USER37> Everyone in this comments thread seems to be comparing LASIK to contact lenses and glasses but what about orthokeratology (overnight lenses)? Does anyone here have experience with it? The idea sounds appealing but there's comparatively little information about it.

</comment><comment><USER38> > _prescription swimming goggles_

And this is how you over-nerd nerds, ladies and gentlemen :)

<comment><AUTHOR> Well, I do swim around coral reefs sometimes, which I wanted to be able to see.

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> I also heard about increased sun sensitivity after LASIK. does anyone else experience this?

I am thinking about this surgery, but I'm afraid of the possible sideffects, unless they're as described in the post.

<comment><USER40> This was my experience (had LASIK in '06): On the day of the surgery, it is enough to make you crawl into a closed room and shun all light. On the couple of days after, it's uncomfortable to look at a computer monitor. On the first few weeks you'll never forget your sunglasses at home. After six months, I'd say it is nearly normal.

It is difficult to say. I used to never ever need to wear sunglasses, even in the Portuguese summer. Now, I find them comfortable on very bright days -- not that I can't do without, it's just comfortable. Might be psychological, might indeed be somewhat increased sensitivity to sunlight.

I was on the fence for four or five years, until I decided to go at it. Best 3000€ I ever spent.

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> Interesting issue with the halo. I started getting that when I developed astigmatism -- I wonder if that is a common experience.

</comment><comment><USER42> the thing this guy fails to mention is whether he had that halo effect BEFORE getting eye surgery...

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks. I'd like to think I was paying pretty close attention, since I already had writing these blog posts in mind even before taking the surgery, so I was taking notes and trying to observe what my vision was before. Of course memory is fallible.</comment></comment>


Send the ISS to Mars - <AUTHOR> http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/07/11/AR2008071102394.html

<comment><USER2> If we're going to start making unrealistic space requests, let's start by cutting the US defense budget by 35% so we can fund real science.

<comment><USER3> Sniper scopes that work even when it's foggy are crucial to our advancement as a human race!

<comment> Asa-Nisse Probably yes. Sea navigation. Mountaineers. Rescue missions. Not that I would much rather see manned mars missions in my lifetime than another desert liberated from its evil nomad dictators... but still!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> What I've never understood is why the ISS wasn't designed in part as a construction platform. Wouldn't it make sense to build the vehicle needed for a Lunar or Martian mission in space and not worry so much about the weight needed to haul everything up in one go?

I mean, I'm not so hot at orbital mechanics, but I thought a really big chunk of the weight was in the rocket and fuel needed to boost the payload into orbit, then a much smaller amount of weight got spent on setting up the flight path to the destination orbit.

If I have the right of it, why spend time and money building the launch vehicles when we can use existing lifters to shove the stuff up and then push off from there. I mean, depending on the departure orbit, we're talking about a third of the velocity needed and most of the mass. You wouldn't even need to tug the return re-entry vehicle along for the ride.

Am I missing something that space experts know all about?

<comment><USER5> It also opens-up design options. If it never has to fly in Earth atmosphere, it doesn't have to be aerodynamic.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> This is an interesting idea and I wouldn't mind seeing it, but it's also a year and a half old. There have been rebuttals published far and wide, including in the WaPo itself three days later:

[http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp- dyn/content/article/2008/07...](http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp- dyn/content/article/2008/07/16/AR2008071602238.html)

Why the repost, if I might ask? A couple of quick searches have turned up no noise from Benson himself on the topic since then.

<comment><USER7> _Human missions to Mars will not be just a bit harder than a trip to the Moon and back, which takes a matter of days. They will be incredible multi-year journeys -- more like the voyages of Magellan than Apollo._

This seems like hyperbole to me. Getting to Mars takes less than a year.

<comment><USER8> There's no civilization on Mars, yet, getting to Mars isn't the end of the journey, it's just the start. The total journey to Mars, on Mars, and back to Earth will be multi-year.

<comment><USER9> I think mars is one of those places where if we ever want to get there we will have to come up with a first mission that doesn't pass current safety standards.

I think it's such a big undertaking that to plan for all circumstances wouldn't allow the mission to happen for a long time. Thing's like no rescue if something went wrong and only accounting for one launch window back to earth,

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> This is why you don't let news reporters write science policy, because they have no effing clue.

Developing the ability to send the ISS to Mars is significantly more difficult than building a purpose built spacecraft to send to Mars. The design of ISS is, to use programmer jargon, tightly coupled to its role in Earth orbit, sending it on a mission to Mars without significant modifications would cause its crew to suffer severe radiation exposure. Not to mention that we'd lose radio contact, the crew would run out of supplies and die, and the station would probably miss its target and fail to enter orbit around Mars (assuming it had the capability to do so, which it doesn't). Adding all those modifications would be more expensive than building a new vehicle that was actually designed for the journey.

Moreover, the most difficult aspect of all of this is propulsion. ISS is vastly heavier than other craft we would send to Mars, making it a more difficult task to move to Mars than any of the reference Mars missions on the table.

<comment><USER10> Wholly agreed. I'm certain the ISS will be of great use in a future manned Mars project (supposing we don't wait until the ISS goes the way of Mir), but repurposing it as a vehicle to Mars is, quite frankly, fucking moronic and as stupid as trying to break the land speed record in a modified backhoe. Simply put: That shit ain't happening.

The ISS would be best used as a permanent base for the crew constructing the manned vehicle to Mars. The ISS would also be capable of acting as a tether for the vehicle, enabling its own habitation modules to be created first. Then once the Mars vehicles habitation module is made, it can be the base for the construction effort.

Using the ISS as a habitation module for the construction effort will significantly speed up the process. Instead of taking years to assemble the structure, like with the ISS, the entire project could be assembled in months with a permanent crew in space. The ISS struggled with getting enough launches, a multinational manned Mars mission would enable launches to be made from _at least_ 3 locations. NASA, ESA and Russia are all capable of launching large components into space, and a ISS based crew would be capable of the assembly process. The ISS will be capable of housing 6 astronauts at one time (I'm unsure if life support can handle 6 astronauts for months at a time, but that's easy to resolve if needed), which means projects could easily continue on the ISS while a Mars project is underway.

I believe everyone wants the manned Mars mission to last longer than the construction effort, or it's going to be a serious anti-climax. Also I hope NASA plans ahead and that the Mars craft is highly reusable and highly adaptable for later missions.

<comment><USER11> I'm sorry, but I just had to:

<http://dragvideo.co.cc/?tag=dragster-backhoe>

<comment><USER10> I almost said as stupid as trying to drag race a backhoe, I decided to change it when I realized it would probably be cool. I'm glad I changed it, and dragster backhoe is as cool as I thought.

<comment><USER11> Interesting though, how you can think of the most unlikely things and a google search will turn up several examples.

This is probably closely related to how difficult it is to find some original niche to exploit. If you can think of it, so can others.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> non-modified humans in space is a waste of time and money. space science should all be poured into transhumanism.

</comment><comment><USER13> Haven't people learned anything from Doom?</comment>


What MongoDB got right (2015) - <AUTHOR> https://blog.nelhage.com/2015/11/what-mongodb-got-right/ <comment><USER2> Marketing. Marketing is what MongoDB got right, along with a small helping of being early to market. It's not even the best or most convenient document store, doesn't have the most features, isn't the most secure, doesn't handle high availability the best, they basically got everything just "good enough" (and sometimes not), along with stellar marketing.

They marketed their asses off while they iterated to build a document store that was worth the praise they got people to heap on to it.

IIRC the acquisition of the wired tiger engine was basically a rewrite, because the previous implementation was just bad. So if the database engine wasn't good, and distribution wasn't good (until later), and schema management wasn't good, and the query language wasn't all that great, what did mongo really get right? Marketing and being early to market/new and shiny at the right time (when everyone was deciding that writing the frontend and the backend in the same language, javascript, was an awesome thing -- which I don't necessarily disagree with).

If someone needs a database these days, I always just suggest postgres. if it's good enoguh for reddit ([https://github.com/reddit/reddit/wiki/Architecture- Overview#...](https://github.com/reddit/reddit/wiki/Architecture- Overview#reddit-the-software)), it's good enough for the next facebook for dogs (unless your problem is completely different then of course you should explore whatever database paradigm fits your problem the best).

<comment><USER3> > suggest postgres.

and if you have projects in maintenance using mongo, mysql. etc. try fdw[0].

It will allow you to query old systems using pgsql/plpython to integrate more easily into your new design or developments.

[0]: [https://wiki.postgresql.org/wiki/Foreign_data_wrappers](https://wiki.postgresql.org/wiki/Foreign_data_wrappers)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> The biggest thing MongoDB got right was putting developer first, optimize for initial experience and development speed.

Most database systems came from relation theory background and optimize for performance, operations, data safety, but often developer convenience was sacrificed.

Did anybody liked writing data migration? Try explaining value of table migration to some Product Manager of early startup :-).

You can argue if that's were the right tradeoffs, but that's how MongoDB get a lot of steam.

<comment><USER5> "Did anybody liked writing data migration? Try explaining value of table migration to some Product Manager of early startup :-)."

People are so spoiled this days. What is so hard in writing table migration, it is like a few minutes of your time. And why would some non techy product manager even know that you wrote some migration sql file. It is a minuscule technical detail related to the chosen technology and he will not see any repercussion in the production. But try to explain to him why after some reckless sprints you got many inconsistencies in the user facing app which you will have if you abuse "schemaless" NoSQL but use implicit schemas which change over time without proper checks. And if my product manager will push just for initial speed all the time without 0 time for some basic architecture (and I mean really basic), engineering practices and such, you know really useful stuff, I would leave that place without second thought. It is digging it`s own hole from the beginning.

And what is the problem of data migrations? Implicit schemas in MongoDB are much worse of a problem when your data requirements change. With relational databases you at least have integrity checks on the DB level that guard you from much of the possible problems when doing such migrations.

<comment><USER6> > What is so hard in writing table migration, it is like a few minutes of your > time

Wow, I wrote migration script for a couple of table rationalisation and it took me a week, to make it error-prone and to provide a revert option. Not to mention that you usually need to work with production data on your local to test if the migration will work without any errors.

And If you happen to have a migration error on your production database. It is a terrible experience, which usually includes downtime.

Maybe my lack of experience on writing SQL migrations increased that time, but isn't this the whole point of the OP in terms of dev first.

<comment><USER7> Writing SQL migrations is not easy, I agree with that. But I don't think the issue is with SQL: in my opinion migrations _in general_ are difficult to do properly , regardless of the technology, expecially

Even when you use a schemaless db like MongoDB, you still have to manage your data (let's say the schema is implicit).

If for example you decide that the "phone number" field is no longer a string but a list of objects (containing each the phone number and the kind of number), you will have to update the old data to adapt it to the new model, incurring in the risk of messing up production data.

Of course you can (and it is what many people do) avoid the problem at the data level and "fix it" at the application level (for example, checking every time if you have a single string or the new list), but if you really want you can do the same with a SQL database (keep the "phone" field on the table, but add the new table for the list of numbers).

A disadvantage of the SQL approach is that many are less versed in it than in the application language, but there are many tools available to handle SQL migrations in your framework's language.

<comment><USER8> > Even when you use a schemaless db like MongoDB, you still have to manage > your data (let's say the schema is implicit).

Yes, the "secret" to MongoDB not having to write data migrations is simple: you get to simply have them as technical debt for later.

What could go wrong ?

Well, that's easy too: an accounting system where each method has a switch with 10+ cases, each case having 30+ lines of code inside of it, depending on something like "record version" or worse, on implicit tests.

And what could be worse ? Well, having a switch with only 9 cases in one of those methods ...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> > SQL is a great language for ad-hoc exploration of data or for building > aggregates over data sets. It's an absolutely miserable language for > programmatically accessing data.

Disagreed. SQL is great for programmatically accessing data, especially with a good client library like SQLAlchemy. I have a much easier time understanding and, most importantly, debugging SQL than MongoDB's query language.

It did not solve the injection issue either, MongoDB injections are a thing[1] and they're much harder to reason about than SQL injections.

[1]: [https://www.owasp.org/index.php/Testing_for_NoSQL_injection](https://www.owasp.org/index.php/Testing_for_NoSQL_injection)

<comment><USER10> I believe the authors point is that you have to use SQLAlchemy for that experience. Natively, the experience is much harder and that's why ORMs (like SQLALchemy) have been built. In MongoDB, the driver matches the command line interface 1-1, there is no need for a higher level wrapper so that you can use your database.

<comment><USER11> That's actually a myth. One thing is Object Mapping, which is repetitive, but whenever there is a layer of indirection to "hide SQL from the developer", then there will be developer pain and waste of developer time.

SQL is just a language and needs to be learned. It's not hard and being declarative it also teaches to think differently than imperative programming.

Want to query in Javascript? Sure go ahead, but don't say SQL is harder.

<comment><USER12> > SQL is just a language and needs to be learned

Assembler is just a language and needs to be learned.

Oh wait. Nothing needs to be learned and there are always cases for higher up abstractions. Especially SQL which can get extremely complex if it needs to.

<comment><USER13> Do you compare assembler with SQL?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> A couple of notes:

MongoDB is excellent for design-first rapid agile development when domains are still maturing. This is common in large system redesigns and start-ups.

Comparing MongoDB to SQL or relational is pointless. They are tools. Given the right circumstances, both serve a purpose.

Relational databases are still necessary for analytics and reporting. (Try using any reporting tool on a schemaless database or a schema that's a moving target)

I would argue that MongoDB is best used for R&D, but once your domains have matured, quickly moving to a relational data store will provide more sustainability.

I've also started incorporating graph databases into my architecture thinking. You should too.

<comment><USER15> Would you please give a practical example for your last point (graph databases)?

<comment><USER14> Security.

Instead of using tables "Roles, Users, UserRoles, Actions, RoleActions" or whatever model you've come up with in the past, think in terms of graphs:

Person P [IS IN] Role R

Action A [IS IN] Role R

Now you can match a person to actions and using a query language like Cypher (Neo4J), it's very easy.

I've found this to be vastly more efficient than using a relational or document database.

I have an implementation of Identity Server 3 with the back end store in Neo4J and it's so much easier than managing a SQL back end.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> SQL is most sophisticated language ever built by mankind. It is centuries ahead of the second most productive language. Mix Window Functions, Common Table Expressions, Qube/RollUp, Materialized Views, ... and holy smoke...

You should try really hard to be unproductive with SQL and any relational system.

</comment><comment><USER17> > Querying SQL data involves constructing strings, and then – if you want to > avoid SQL injection – successfully lining up placeholders between your pile > of strings and your programming language. If you want to insert data, you'll > probably end up constructing the string (?,?,?,?,?,?,?,?) and counting > arguments very carefully.

Uhm what?

At least in .NET+SQL Server land you can give your SQL queries named parameters. If there's a mismatch you'll get an exception saying so...

Perhaps this is a problem in some other stack (PHP?)

<comment><USER18> BTW we can use stored procedures in SQL which provides many benefits. It is often forgotten.

<comment><USER19> How do you version control that?

EDIT: To those mentioning migrations, note that reviewing migrations are like reviewing patches. Sometimes you want to not review a specific patch but rather look at the whole method, and `blame` a specific line or three to get an idea of what the previous developer's intention was. You can't get that type of overview from reviewing each patch or migration.

<comment> mike-cardwell Not the OP, but db migrations in git would be one obvious and simple method.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I'm not convinced about the point of structured operation format.

I agree that manually building SQL strings can be cumbersome. But in practice you can use libraries that allow you to easily create them programmatically.

The JSON queries of MongoDB on the other hand, while they are simple to use programmatically, they are a pain to use outside of your program, for example for running ad-hoc queries, or generating a report from your data. And there is no library to fix this.

</comment><comment><USER21> The appeal and the pitfall of JSON is just that it's less broken down than tables.

Suppose you built a "contact database," but all it was was the scanned images of people's business cards. You could flip through pages of them, but you can't do searches. But the input is so easy, just scan and save. And the output is likewise easy, just embed the images in a web page.

1\. Running optical character recognition would be the first step in breaking down these cards into parsable information.

2\. Converting the text into JSON and storing it in MongoDB would be taking it to the next level.

3\. Breaking down the JSON into a set of tables would turn it into the most flexible and useful form --- but it's also the most work.

You don't have to take all your data all the way to tables. For example, I leave my website log files as text. Grep and awk are usually all I need. I don't usually import them into tables --- although I have a few times for easier analysis!

Although you don't have to turn everything into tables, I would say there are several applications out there where the developer should have gone all the way and not stopped at JSON.

</comment><comment><USER22> Slightly off-topic, but once ActiveRecord(Rails) - always ActiveRecord. After years of developers complaining about SQL DBs being "difficult" and MongoDB allowing to "easily prototype", I still don't get what's hard about working with PostgreSQL if you use something like Rails.

</comment><comment><USER23> Mongo is one of the few NoSqls to offer "unique" keys. While common in SQL, this is a big differentiator from other NoSqls and allows many use cases that would have otherwise ended up in the SQL world

<comment><USER24> What? Are you talking about like primary key?

Cassandra have this, any hash database should have some sort of unique concept or key, and IIRC graph database all node should be unique.

I didn't realize this was a rare thing in NoSQL world.

<comment><USER12> No. They are talking about enforcing uniqueness on a particular column.

Nothing to do with the primary key and yes it is definitely rare in the NoSQL world.

<comment><USER5> To me, it really is kind of funny that such a basic thing is rarity in NoSQL world.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> > The situation is sufficiently untenable that it's rare to write apps without > making use of an ORM or some similar library, creating additional cognitive > overhead to using a SQL database, and creating painful impedance mismatches.

That's only true if you're using PHP,Python,Javascript or dynamically typed language. Mongo documents don't automatically map to classes in C++ or Java, the impedance mismatch still exists and a data mapper library is still required, just like with RDBMS.

</comment><comment><USER26> Talking about an easy experience for failover, and horizontally scaling, I recommend taking a look at MemSQL or NuoDB. I think MemSQL did a really nice job in creating a fast bare-bone SQL solution, with an easy to use management interface. [https://docs.memsql.com/operational-manual/v6.0/managing- hig...](https://docs.memsql.com/operational-manual/v6.0/managing-high- availability/)

</comment><comment><USER27> Prior discussion: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10554391](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10554391)

</comment><comment><USER28> Our community began being filled with relatively inexperienced types who treated engineering problems and solutions like a popularity contest. It was suddenly 'smart' to mock it, so they did, barely understanding the basics. In essence a desperate attempt to fill the gaps in their CV. Meh. If you find yourself mocking, you're probably doing something wrong _somewhere_

</comment><comment><USER29> Doesn't Postgres do everything that MongoDB does? I still see MongoDB's popularity coming primarily from ignorance about what PG can do.

</comment><comment><USER30> I highly recommend ArangoDB as an alternative to Mongo - similar noSQL setup backed by RocksDB (as of 3.2) and includes graph database abilities.

</comment><comment><USER31> Sorry for the obvious plug, but if one wants solid replication, ACID compliance and a few other 'enterprisey' features, you should try MarkLogic: [https://developer.marklogic.com/products](https://developer.marklogic.com/products) I feel like we got a lot more things right ;) Other than price it would be good to hear, if people agree and what's missing still.

</comment><comment><USER32> (2015)

</comment><comment><USER33> Most widely mocked, most successful, first open source IPO in a long time.

<comment><USER34> Not sure why you were downvoted. It is at least a little exciting to see a successful IPO of a business built on an open-source database, even if it's not the best one. It proves the model is viable, and is a healthy thing for open source in enterprise.</comment></comment>


Obscure C++ Features - <AUTHOR> http://madebyevan.com/obscure-cpp-features/?viksra <comment><USER3> Are these really that obscure? Well, the 3[array] thing is unexpected and also not something you would use in real code, so it reasonably counts as obscure (although it's such a hoary example of "obscure C" that it's almost familiar). But pointers-to-members, template-template parameters, and the overloads of ++ and -- are, I would have thought, just standard features you would learn in the normal course of learning the language.

<comment><USER4> Yeah, out of all these only the "most vexing parse" struck me as somewhat obscure simply because it's so insidious. The rest... not really that obscure. I mean, come on. a[3] equivalent of *(a+3)? That's just pointer arithmetic. Most of the other stuff is probably intermediate level.

<comment><USER5> Most people understand that a[3] and *(a + 3) yield the same result, not that they are actually identical in terms of language syntax.

<comment><USER6> they really aren't identical in the general case - this is a mistake on the part of the author. trivially consider the case where i overload operator[]...

<comment><USER7> Yes, this is more of an obscure C feature (they are exactly the same in all cases in C, the standard defines a[b] as *(a+b)), which is inherited by C++.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Every time I read about obscure C++ features, the more I'm convinced that the language needs to be torn down and rebuilt from scratch.

<comment><USER9> Whenever I read something like this, I'm reminded of that Winston Churchill quote "It has been said that democracy is the worst form of government except all the others that have been tried".

I think C++ usage is one of those things that you don't truly understand until you've decided to start a new project in C++ even in 2013. For a reasonably common feature set in real project (i.e. not a side project for fun), C++ is the only option.

Specifically most alternatives exhibit one or more of the following:

* automatically managed memory (enough said)

* not expressive enough (I would throw C in this category even though C is a fine choice and often times the best choice for many projects)

* not nearly mature enough in terms of compiler/toolset/language in general (often, it's unclear whether the language will ever achieve that necessary maturity)

* not fast enough, usually for one of the above reasons, but sometimes for other reasons

<comment><USER10> Automatically managed memory is almost always a _good_ thing. Aside from preventing a huge class of bugs, it also is often more performant. Why disparage it?

And I'd hardly label C++ as the epitome of expressiveness. A broad, haphazard feature set doesn't necessarily imply it's expressive.

<comment><USER4> I think he's talking about garbage collection, which is often perceived as slow.

But you can certainly have automatic memory management in C++ as well. Stack- allocated objects manage themselves, for dynamically allocated objects one can use scoped/shared pointers. One added perk is that you can extend this approach to deterministically manage not only memory, but any other resource that can be acquired and released (e.g. locks). I actually like this approach very much. The only problem I see there is that since you're still using raw pointers, the runtime can't really move things around for efficiency since that would invalidate the pointers. But in a garbage-collected language that doesn't expose pointers, the heap can be defragmented during runtime, which is nice.

<comment><USER11> > The only problem I see there is that since you're still using raw pointers, > the runtime can't really move things around for efficiency since that would > invalidate the pointers.

The biggest downside is not really efficiency but that you lose the memory safety of a managed language doing this.

<comment><USER4> True, but most of these issues can be mitigated by using best practices - <USER2> vectors instead of raw arrays, avoid shared ownership (and use shared pointers when you can't), etc. Of course, these don't make the language safe, but they do help alleviate the problem a great deal.

I wonder if it's possible to design a language that would be able to prevent these problems at compile time without incurring the runtime cost of managed languages. I mean, we already can detect some problems using static code checking tools (i.e. PVS-studio), so it must be feasible.

<comment><USER11> > I wonder if it's possible to design a language that would be able to prevent > these problems at compile time without incurring the runtime cost of managed > languages.

Rust does this. :) It is not easy to get right—the borrow checker required a lot of design work to achieve the right balance between expressiveness and practicality—but I think we've shown that it is possible.

(Disclaimer: I work on Rust.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> C++11 is actually really, /really/ nice. If you haven't already you should read up on it.

I was hating c++ for vague reasons I couldn't place. I was wrong.

<comment><USER13> I would agree. Although my work involves writing some code under VS2010 on Windows so I can't use C++11 features, I still read Stroustrup's book. The tour of C++ is particularly helpful as it covers many of the new features, and offers tips like making the compiler work for you.

Stroustrup wrote an interesting paper (wish I could find it) in IEEE/Computer magazine that strongly advocated static code and not overuse of dynamic_casts etc. for speedy programs - this is making the compiler do all of the optimization instead of doing everything/making many decisions at run time.

The Wikipedia article on C++11 covers many of the new features quite well, but Stroustrup's recent revision of the C++ book is a joy to read - the fonts help, as the previous one had some pretty horrible fonts in my opinion.

<comment><USER14> VS2010 actually does implement quite a few of C++11's features, you have to be careful though and better read the MSDN documentation for each of them.

A weird case I found recently was that the VS2010 implementation of std::to_string(...) only supports long long, unsigned long long and long double. [http://msdn.microsoft.com/en- us/library/ee404875(v=vs.100).a...](http://msdn.microsoft.com/en- us/library/ee404875\(v=vs.100\).aspx) Not very useful for most cases. Luckily VS2012+ supports the rest of the number types.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> This one [1] surprised me.

 _Q1: Is the following code legal C++?_

        string f() { return "abc"; }

        void g() {
            const string& s = f();
            cout << s << endl;    // can we still use the "temporary" object?
        }

[1] [http://herbsutter.com/2008/01/01/gotw-88-a-candidate-for- the...](http://herbsutter.com/2008/01/01/gotw-88-a-candidate-for-the-most- important-const/)

<comment><USER16> I do not think they had this kind of usage in mind when they allowed it and i think the use case for it is in using a const reference to a function argument.Most people use this all the time without thinking about it or wondering what is the origin of the variable they are accessing through the const reference.

eg is when you have a function like below:

      void foo( const string& str )
      {
             cout << str ;
      }

The above function takes a const reference to string and uses it without caring if the passed in variable is a temporary variable or not.

Now declare a function as:

         string bar() { return "abc" ; }

and the above two function can be used with:

         foo( bar() ) ;

I think this use case is the one that allowed the use of temporary variable from a const reference and people do this all the time.

<comment><USER17> > I do not think they had this kind of usage in mind when they allowed it

I think they did based on 8.5.3 which has this example:

      struct A { };
      struct B : public A { } b;
      extern B f();
      const A& rca = f(); // Either bound to the A sub-object of the B rvalue,
      // or the entire B object is copied and the reference
      // is bound to the A sub-object of the copy

As well as 12.2 para 5:

      class C {
        // ...
      public:
        C();
        C(int);
        friend C operator+(const C&, const C&);
        ˜C();
      };
      C obj1;
      const C& cr = C(16)+C(23);
      C obj2;

In the C++ standard which talks about the temporary bound to cr existing for the duration of the entire program? Moreover, why would a rule for const references be specifically needed to handle foo( bar() );, but no equivalent rule for bar().foo(); which handles an implicit _non-const pointer_?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> See also FQA: [http://www.yosefk.com/c++fqa/index.html](http://www.yosefk.com/c++fqa/index.html)

</comment><comment><USER19> The function try blocks is new to me. It's actually kind of elegant (for C++). Granted, the reason I've probably never encountered it in the wild is that there are probably very few scenarios where you have a member in the initializer list where you want to handle an exception on initialization. If you were trying to handle an exception of an instance variable initializing, most people would just move that member to the constructor body (e.g., if you have a pointer). The only time this would be useful then is for members that don't have default initializers (e.g., a reference).

<comment><USER20> It's nice to avoid the default initialization and construct a member directly with the argument you want. Then you can construct a second member which might depend on that previous one, etc. This can even include lambdas right in the initialization list, and all of this may throw and log an error with the catch block. Personally, I rarely like to see code in the actual constructor body anymore.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> " _The tokens and, and_eq, bitand, bitor, compl, not, not_eq, or, or_eq, xor, xor_eq..._ "

Hey, I remember when those were introduced!

I was the sysadmin responsible for supporting the default gcc on all of a computer science department's non-research machines and upgraded gcc between semesters. I then got to spend a couple of days rewriting some grad students' code because the had used "and" and "or" as variable names.[1]

Fun times!

[1] Many of whom were upset because the upgrade had changed the preprocessor/compiler interface and broke their research compiler.

</comment><comment><USER22> "The tokens and, and_eq, bitand, bitor, compl, not, not_eq, or, or_eq, xor, xor_eq, <%, %>, <:, and :> can be used instead of the symbols &&, &=, &, |, ~, !, !=, ||, |=, ^, ^=, {, }, [, and ]."

In C, the first few are only if you include the C99 header <iso646.h> (the later ones are just digraphs). Are they included by default in C++?

</comment><comment><USER23> I knew about the first sentence, but the second really obscure.

        Accessing an element of an array via ptr[3] is actually just short for *(ptr + 3).
        This can be equivalently written as *(3 + ptr) and therefore as 3[ptr], which turns out to be completely valid code.

<comment><USER24> This was actually written in the book I used to learn C (I think, at least I knew this early on). It seems completely irrational when someone tells you that ptr[3] == 3[ptr], but with the above explination it makes perfect sence.

<comment><USER25> Yes and it also explains why array indexing starts at 0.

<comment><USER26> Not really. It would be just as easy to say a[x]=*(a+x-1) and let array indices start at 1.

<comment><USER27> actually yes, [] derives from BCPL, see evincarofautumn comment just above. ( link to comment, [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6886488](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6886488) derived from this submission : [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6879478](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6879478) )

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> I couldn't even imagine something like ref-qualifier and function as template parameter.

</comment><comment><USER13> Most people have come across member function pointers - event handling! They are (in some libraries) wrapped in macros for easier readability but most beginners use function pointers without realising.

</comment><comment><USER29> This article misses _WHY_ certain things are the case, and has several incomplete or incorrectly-explained points.

<comment><USER30> Yeah, the one that got me is "branch on variable declaration", which I believe is actually a special case of the fact that assignment is actually an expression which returns the assigned value; `a = b = c = 42;` works for the same reason.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> I've always thought that this ranked among the most obscure:

      typedef int F(int);
      class C { F f; };
      int C::f(int i) { return i; }

I've never seen it used in practice...

</comment><comment><USER6> surprised that most of this is considered obscure... and also teh square bracket thing is only for built-in types (e.g. pointer types) because it can be overloaded...

the constructor vs. function choice is a classic gotcha for instance. i've had to explain it to juniors many times.</comment>


Browserling Reaches 100 Customers - <AUTHOR> http://www.catonmat.net/blog/browserling-reaches-100-paying-customers/

<comment><AUTHOR> Hey just wanted to give some context - I'm from the Teespring team, we signed on a couple months ago. Browserling has been incredible for us in terms of diagnosing fringe bugs and testing new features across multiple browsers quickly (especially javascript/dynamic elements).

Looking forward to seeing what's next

</comment><comment><USER2> Why are you defining yourselves by YC? "YC Rejected" doesn't give me any extra info...

<comment><AUTHOR> I should clarify that I posted this, not Browserling. I'm just a happy customer.

I put YC Reject in the title because I thought it would be interesting to explore the companies who didn't make it into YC, but have still grown into successes.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Are you guys really using alien technology?</comment>


I didn't want to fly – so I took a cargo ship from Germany to Canada - <AUTHOR> https://www.theguardian.com/travel/2020/jan/07/cargo-ship-train-rail-to-vancouver-canada-low-carbon-travel-europe <comment><USER2> I mean....yes. Yes, your carbon footprint is smaller by travelling slower. But you need to be in an extremely priviledged position to be able to afford travelling this way, both financially and time-wise. Cross-atlantic is obviously quite extreme, but even within Europe a train is not really a viable alternative for a lot of people, when I go to visit my family the choice is either a ~£100 Ryanair ticket for a 2 hour flight, or around 40 hour long train journey that will cost at least £500 one way. I just don't have the money or the time to travel this way. I don't know what's the right answer here - I suspect it is "just don't travel then".

<comment><USER3> I agree with your main point! I want to state that upfront so that you don't think I'm arguing about the current situation, apart from addressing specifics.

You will have to add some time to flying scenario. You have to arrive early to the airport to go through security (2 hours?), you have to wait for your luggage after landing (30 minutes?), and since airports are usually located outside of the city center you have to add travel time to and from the airport (45 minutes in each direction?). In my example that's an extra 4 hours added to the 2 hours time flying.

It's still a lot less than going by train, but with train you get the convenience of being able to run onto the platform 2 minutes before departure, you end up in the city center, you pick up your luggage and leave, and you usually have more space which makes it easier to work on the train if needed.

Also, flying is extremely subsidized and tax-exempt. I just read articles (in Swedish, so I don't know if anyone wants links) claiming that air tickets should be between 50% and 95% more expensive if they had to carry their own costs, if there was a tax on airplane fuel, and so on. So the price for air tickets probably doesn't reflect their real costs, and obviously doesn't take the environmental effect into account.

But even adding the extra time and extra cost, it would still be faster and cheaper to fly than to take the train, which is unfortunate from an environmental perspective. I wish we had faster trains, and a lot more overnight trains so that you could start your travel in the evening and wake up in a new city. It wouldn't help with a 40 hour trip, because it would still be two nights with one full day on the train.

This might work for people who can work remotely on the train, but not for everyone. Start you journey on Thursday night, work Friday on the train, and arrive Saturday morning at the destination. Someone I know did this recently while traveling to a conference, and the company obviously paid for the tickets. This doesn't help when visiting family, but for work travel, train could be an option.

I have an airplane interested colleague and I asked him about environmental fuels. He said that aviation biofuel already exists, and it's just a question of adoption and scale. A carbon dioxide tax might push air companies towards biofuel, or you could have the option of green biofuel departures and let the customers decide if they think it's worth the extra cost. I'm sure my train- traveling conference goer would consider that option if it was available.

As I said, I agree with your main point that if you just look at price and travel time today, the less environmentally friendly option makes more sense. It would make more sense if the slower option was also much, much cheaper than flying, because that would encourage more people to use that option.

<comment><USER4> Only as a reference:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19562152](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19562152)

The whole thread may be of interest to you, it is about Sweden wanting to re- surrect night trains:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19557848](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19557848)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> > ships rarely have room for more than a dozen passengers

Reason is that you need a ship's doctor if there are more than 12 passengers.

</comment><comment><USER6> There is no mention of the type of fuel the cargo ship burned while outside of port (bunker fuel, anyone?). The three citations at the end of the article simply reference generic sites, not specific information.

<comment><USER7> Possibly something awful, but irrelevant for the passenger on the scale of moving a 100,000 tonne ship, so we should consider that issue separately.

<comment><USER8> Couldn't we make the same argument for an airliner:

X cubic meters of CO2 divided by 200 odd passagers in an airliner.

Vs.

Y cubic meters of NOx/SO2/CO2 divided by that person and however purchased the freight goods in the container.

We could argue that the cargo ship would sail irrespective of that passenger, but we could equally make the same reasoning for people buying last minute seats that would otherwise fly empty.

Without doing the maths this risks making very fortunate people feel good about themselves and distracts from corporation practices that are orders of magnitude more harmful.

Again I do not have the numbers but what is the carbon impact of halting all german flights versus decomissioning all german coal plants?

<comment><USER9> > We could argue that the cargo ship would sail irrespective of that > passenger, but we could equally make the same reasoning for people buying > last minute seats that would otherwise fly empty.

Sure but the cargo ship business isn't moving passenger. If they always fill all the passengers rooms, they won't decide to bring more ships into the equation. Whether there's 0 passenger or 15, the ship will still go through that same amount of fuel.

Someone else did gave some good example of energy usage that a passenger will cause, like the water he will consume will need to be desalinated, or if he get sick and that require diverting a ship.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> The carbon calculations seems questionable. The author should include all energy used on board the ship, which is entirely from fossil fuels. The energy required to desalinate seawater for drinking/washing was probably greater than a flight.

Also, an additional, unnecessary person on the ship is slightly increasing the risk of diverting the ship because of a medical emergency. Imagine how much carbon would be burned if this massive ship had to turn around to drop off a sick passenger.

</comment><comment><USER11> Cargo ships are unregulated and burn the lowest grade oil called bunker fuel. These ships can emit the equivalent sulfur emissions of 19 million ICE vehicles.[1]

[1][https://www.cadmatic.com/resource/articles/does-one-ship- pol...](https://www.cadmatic.com/resource/articles/does-one-ship-pollute-as- much-as-50-million-cars-)

<comment><USER12> Not as of January 01 - there's a new regulation this year that imposes a sulfur cap on fuel burned by cargo ships [1]. Most ships must now burn more expensive and cleaner fuels. Some ships - mostly larger ones - still burn HSFO but they can only do so because they've installed "scrubbers" which clean the emissions to reduce the amount of sulfur emitted into the atmosphere.

It's an open question whether scrubbers are really helping or just a diversion from purchasing higher quality fuel, but it's only economical to install scrubbers on the very big ships and so the large majority of the ~50,000 strong merchant marine fleet don't have them installed.

[1] [https://ihsmarkit.com/topic/imo-2020-regulation.html](https://ihsmarkit.com/topic/imo-2020-regulation.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Seems like offsetting would be easier?

That's one of those economically sensible things that normal people dont seem to like though.</comment>


What can we do as men to stop sexual harassment? - <AUTHOR> https://sworddance.com/blog/2017/02/20/what-can-we-do-as-men-to-stop-sexual-harassment/ <comment><USER2> Focusing on quarterly goals or the like just glosses over this as an issue. It is important that men be willing to say "that isn't how we talk around here" or "man, that is a pretty crude thing to say to someone in a professional environment." If you have the power, comments like that should be met with "you're fired" because honestly, if someone in my workplace can't maintain some sense of decorum around women, how should I expect him (in this case, always a him) to behave around clients, investors, etc.

This is not something around which to dance lightly. It is far too common, and it only takes a few people willing to stand up and say that this isn't acceptable to break the norms of a bunch of guys just laughing along while a few say crude things.</comment>


Universities 'dumbing down on maths' to fill places - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-13751233 <comment><USER2> British education is tearing apart along class lines.

Oxbridge, the Russell group and a handful of other institutions are setting ever higher entry requirements and looking to break away from the existing system by promoting the IB or new qualifications like the Cambridge Pre-U. They have no qualms about stating that A-Level syllabuses are being dumbed down. Oxford and Cambridge maintain lists of A-level subjects that they do not recognise. Most of their prospective intake comes from independent, grammar and wealthier comprehensive schools with the resources and confidence to guide students towards the right qualifications (increasingly something other than A-levels) and coach them through application and interview.

Most other universities are engaged in a mad rush to the bottom, competing to fill the maximum number of places at the maximum fee at minimum cost. Their main appeal is to working and lower-middle class students who may not be confident in their ability to get a place at university, who are unlikely to have received any useful guidance in their application and who are foolish enough to believe that "a degree is a degree". Standards at secondary level are falling, as are contact hours at most universities. With a strong financial incentive to maximise intake, the results are obvious and inevitable.

The reputation of these universities is plummeting amongst employers, who are seeing increasing numbers of graduates and even postgraduates without basic skills in reading and writing. This is not hyperbole - I regularly deal with correspondence from recent graduates and often have to make follow-up phone calls because their written English incomprehensible.

Crisis is too mild a word for the current state of HE.

<comment><USER3> I am Australian and didn't go through the UK education system but I lived in the UK from 2001 to 2004 and I was somewhat shocked at the state of the education system when I was there.

At the time there was a show on Channel 4 called "That'll Teach 'Em". The idea was to put (then) current GCSE students through the old O-levels in a 1950s boarding school environment. It was of course (like any "reality" show) done up for TV but there were some interesting tidbits, which were news to me (as an expat):

\- Grade inflation is rampant, so much so that they had to invent a grade above an A (the A<asterisk>) because too many people were getting As.

In the US I _believe_ this to also be a problem but it's hidden behind scaling of results. At least I see so many people who have 3.8+ college GPAs (which, as I understand it, basically means 80% As and 20% Bs) that I have to wonder where all the C students are.

In Australia--at least when I went through the education system some 15+ years ago--it was nothing like that.

\- Students who were getting 11 GCSE As couldn't pass 4 O-levels. Granted the curriculum structure is different (eg it once relied on more memorization) but still...

\- Current education philosophy in the UK seems to emphasize creative expression, which to me sounds like the educational equivalent of moral relativism in that there is no wrong or right. The idea is to simply make students express themselves. Nevermind actually knowing anything or being able to critically formulate or deconstruct an argument.

\- Students who were getting As in GCSE French couldn't even conjugate the verb "avoir" (to have). If you've never studied a language this means coming up with the French equivalent of I have / we have / you have / he/she/it has / they have (j'ai / nous avons / tu as / vous avez / il/elle a / ils/elles ont). This is as basic as it gets.

In case you were wondering why there was 6 for French and 5 for English, the second person singular in English (thou hast) has fallen into disuse.

From what I remember the exams were largely take-home translations, which in the Internet age typically meant getting someone French to do them.

\- Maths was incredibly weak.

But the UK seems to have a similar problem to what Australia does now: a government who has treated the number of students in university as some kind of target. The uncomfortable truth is that not everybody belongs in university or will get anything out of it.

<comment><USER4> > what Australia does now: a government who has treated the number of students > in university as some kind of target

I am beginning to see the first real results of these policies amongst that group of my friends who _did not_ do technical degrees or have some other skill. The people who did "International Studies" or "International Politics" or any of a whole range of cool-sounding but, when it comes down to it, basically useless qualifications. None of them can get any sort of job commensurate with the headed-straight-for-the-UN promise of the degree title; at best they can hope for a public service bureaucrat job. More than one are teaching themselves programming after observing myself and others rocketing up on trajectories unthinkable in the arts degree world.

Disillusionment doesn't really begin to cover it. The realisation that a great number of degrees are, if not useless, then at least impractical has not yet seemed to make it back to the year 12 students doing the choosing - but the secret certainly seems to be getting out, in some demographics at least.

<comment><USER5> Holder of a useless non-technical degree here. Tens of thousands of dollars spent on education, and now I work an entry-level retail job. But I do count myself fortunate that I have no debt from my (perhaps mostly pointless) university experience.

Using my spare time to teach myself programming and some math. :-)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I'm not sure this should be posted here where most won't understand the context.

In the UK (bar Scotland), if you plan to go to University, you do A Levels in 3-4 subjects between the ages of 16 and 18. This means you need to make key choices that go towards which subject you study at University at the age of 16. Many students either haven't decided on their degree subject or make uninformed choices.

To reflect that reality, Universities are loosening their subject admission requirements and putting the prerequisite material in the University course instead.

Personally, I believe that A Levels should be reformed to reduce early specialisation.

<comment><USER7> "prerequisite material in the University course instead"

Isn't that pretty much what Scottish Universities have always done with a 4 year degree? Entrance used to be based on Highers taken in 5th year at secondary school - with some people going straight to University after the 5th year or others staying around to get more highers or to do additional higher levels qualifications.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Suprised? Not I.

While studying at the University of Wollongong, they were dumbing down the computer science courses to improve pass rates and keep more students (who probably shouldn't be doing Comp Sc anyway).

Two of my first year courses with C++ were split into three after I completed them with the _harder_ content removed (such as abstract classes, inheritance, etc).

A lot of Universities are run like businesses now, rather than academic centers of excellence (at least in my humble opinion).

<comment><USER9> Inheritance is considered "hard" content in a C++ course? What do you talk about for a semester without it?

<comment><USER10> \- Turing-completeness of templates (or does one need inheritance to get Turing-completeness?)

\- Exception-safety

\- Writing portable code (no, 'int' does not wrap around; chars are not ASCII, signed int is neither equal to in int nor to unsigned int, etc)

<comment><USER9> If inheritance is too hard I doubt template metaprogramming is on the syllabus.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I'm surprised that this is considered news, because it's been an observable issue for 15 years or more. As I understand it, when O-Levels were replaced by GCSEs the maths syllabus dropped some of the more challenging areas like calculus, leaving all the study of these areas to the A-Levels. As a result the standard of maths understanding for the university intake generally dropped. Universities made a number of changes to deal with this: they introduced more maths-light degrees (for example, combining some computing content with business management, finance and languages content), some courses increased the amount of maths tuition in the first year, and I believe that some even extended the course to four years to give students time to 'get up to speed'.

That said, I wouldn't class this as 'dumbing down'. They're reacting to a change in the tuition that happens prior to university entry that they have little control over. No one is saying that they're dropping the standard of the teaching that the universities are actually delivering, so the ability of a physics or computer science graduate today should be broadly similar to that from 10 or 20 years ago. What seems to be changing is the amount of work that the universities need to do to get students from a lower ability at entrance to the same level at graduation. That, and a migration by the students towards courses which are lighter in maths.

Caveat: it's 15 years since I worked at a university, so I have no inside knowledge of what's going on these days.

</comment><comment><USER12> I don't like the phrase "dumbing down". Based on the article, they are loosening their admission requirements, and seem to be allocating extra coursework to help students catch up.

I think that what matters is if the students manage to acquire the necessary skills after they do the mathematics coursework (which many should have done at school). There are probably a significant number of students who thrive after they catch up - implying that they are "dumb" is quite offensive.

<comment><USER13> If the shoe fits...

In the US, "extra coursework to help students catch up" typically means these people aren't graduating in four years. (My university just recently released data that the average student was graduating in five to six years). That means more gov't support, more student loans, and yet more time separated from the workforce.

However, many incoming freshmen still seem to either 1) not be making an informed decision about whether or not they will succeed in college, or 2) not have enough character to resist the social forces that say they should go to college no matter what and damn the consequences.

If that's not dumb, I don't know what is.

<comment><USER12> As someone pointed out elsewhere in this thread, people choose their A Levels at age 16.

I had a vague idea that I wanted to study medicine at age 16. I ended up doing CS. 16 year olds tend to have very fuzzy ideas about what they want to do with their lives.

Excluding them from entire fields of study based on poor A Level choices seems a bit harsh to me.

<comment><USER14> That's no excuse tho'. For most of history 13-year-olds were considered adults.

<comment><USER15> For most of history 30-year-old women and off-color men were considered property.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> The submitted article is about the situation in Britain, and the situation in the United States is similar.

[http://www.usatoday.com/news/education/2010-05-11-remedial-c...](http://www.usatoday.com/news/education/2010-05-11-remedial- college_N.htm)

[http://www.all4ed.org/about_the_crisis/students/college_acce...](http://www.all4ed.org/about_the_crisis/students/college_access)

Providing remedial (secondary-school level) mathematics courses for college and university students is a big business in United States higher education.

<http://www.aleks.com/>

<http://bluehawk.monmouth.edu/~bgold/DvMthIn.html>

It's commendable that higher education teachers give their students a second chance to learn mathematics that young people could learn in primary or secondary education, but even better would be for young people to have opportunity to learn mathematics at a younger age.

<http://math.berkeley.edu/~wu/NoticesAMS2011.pdf>

<http://math.berkeley.edu/~wu/Lisbon2010_3.pdf>

<http://math.berkeley.edu/~wu/CommonCoreIV.pdf>

<http://www.ams.org/notices/200502/fea-kenschaft.pdf>

Grade inflation after entry into higher education

<http://gradeinflation.com/>

has been going on in the United States for quite a while.

</comment><comment><USER17> Warwick university actually increased their requirements between 08 and 09. (I'm not sure if there's been any changes since.) To get a place in 08, you needed A's in maths and further maths at A-level, and either two other A grades (NB. most people only take three A-levels) or a B together with a grade 2 in a STEP paper (a more difficult math paper used by Warwick and Cambridge for entrance requirements). The 08 year was unexpectedly crowded, so in 09 the AAAA option was dropped.

They're also making the course itself harder in at least some respects. There's a second year business module which is popular with third year mathematicians because it's easy marks; as of next year, it won't be an option to them.

On the other hand, I've had a lecturer say that when he taught a module to biologists, several of them didn't understand how to work with the relation "V = IR", and he got negative feedback for making the module too math-heavy.

</comment><comment><USER18> In Ireland, our situation is very much reflected in this, only that students must study some level of maths up to the Leaving certificate (A-Level).

The problem is that there is no real initiative to do higher level maths unless your course requires it. This means that there is a tiny proportion of students who take the higher paper. While most others sit an ordinary level paper, the difference in difficulty between the two is massive, and leads to a lot of people with a below useful level of maths, and universities must really be struggling.

Some initiatives have been started to make Maths a worthwhile option, by changing its worth to the overall mark, but the reality is that it is a subject that is largely rejected by the student body due to the fact that there is a "I hate Maths" mentality and the fact that the workload to do well is significantly more than other areas.

</comment><comment><USER19> I used to be pretty involved with student government when I was an undergrad. a few of our first year courses had a 70-80% failure rate, which the profs and higher year students supported (of course) and which the administration despised (of course).

the course was introduction to discrete math. it wasn't a very hard class, but most people who enter computer science in first year have no idea what computer science is, so this was a big shock.

<comment><USER20> I swear, discrete math must have one of the highest failure rates of any course in the CS curriculum. I knew _tons_ of otherwise bright students who had to re-take that course, regardless of which professor they had.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> England has multiple exam boards which offer the same qualifications, and compete with each other for business. Total WTF.

[http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/2009/aug/25/teachers- cho...](http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/2009/aug/25/teachers-choosing- exam-boards-gcse) [http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/2011/may/26/exam- boards-...](http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/2011/may/26/exam-boards-fined- substandard-qualifications)

</comment><comment><USER22> When I was in highschool, I actually couldn't _imagine_ how anyone could enjoy maths as a subject. Even though I was quite good at it, relatively (managed to get A's).

<comment><USER23> I enjoyed maths in high school because when I finally overcame that initial comprehension in solving it, it felt like I was solving problems based on present formulas.

<comment><USER24> Isn't that the problem though? To get good at maths at that level, you just apply a bunch of memorised formulas or methods. It's not about discovery and finding your own approaches to solving a problem, it's about applying formulas and tricks.

<comment><USER25> Sounds like you had poor teachers. Mathematics should always be about problem formulation and understanding which methods are appropriate and how they fit together. Memorizing formulas is not mathematics at any level.

Here is a very good, albeit rather long, piece on the subject.

ftp://math.stanford.edu/pub/papers/milgram/milgram-msri.pdf

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> I finished high school in England a few years back, but education here is pretty bad. The whole lowering the boundaries thing is very true, the school I went to had a 20% pass rate the year before me, last year it was at almost 90%. They're just adding new "easier" qualifications and "easier" subjects to improve the pass rates but the quality of education remains the same.

Luckily failing high school doesn't have any real bearing on life.

</comment><comment><USER27> The average human brain has shrunk by 20% in size since the last 10 000 years. Thats the size of a tennis ball, or the size of an australopithecus afarensis brain.

<comment><USER28> Cite that it has happened, and cite that it matters, please: Brain size is only very loosely correlated with intelligence, and that doesn't sound like it's something that actually occurred anyway. As per the Flynn Effect, in fact, IQ has been trending upwards for quite a while.

<comment><USER7> flowerpower is possibly thinking about Neanderthals - who have been reported as having larger cranial capacity than "modern" humans:

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

However, this isn't particularly relevant as we aren't descended from them and AFAIK the link between cranial capacity and intelligence isn't clear.</comment></comment></comment>