Why I'm quitting GMO research - <AUTHOR> https://massivesci.com/articles/gmo-gm-plants-safe/ <comment><USER2> What frustrates me endlessly about the GMO debate is that "GMO" tells you about as much about safety as "chemical." You could certainly GM something into being dangerous or more dangerous, for example transplanting allergens or increasing the production of natural pest control toxins. You could also modify a protein into an equivalent protein, changing nothing.

The only real answer to fears about GMOs is to point people towards longitudinal studies that show that the specific modification in question isn't causing any problems. Sadly, this really isn't possible in our current system, as I have no idea which changes were made to the organisms that get put in the consumer products I buy. In an ideal world, I could read NGK-028181 off the tin of baked beans in my pantry and realize that I needed to throw it out because they discovered something wrong with that one specific genome (or because I know I'm allergic).

As a consumer, if I ever get suspicious about one specific change made to one specific breed, my only option is to buy non-GMO everything. That doesn't make any sense!

<comment><USER3> The GMO debate isn't just about whether the molecules of something you're eating are safe in relation to the modifications. It includes considerations such as what kinds of practices are enabled by GMO: like producing a plant that is resistant to certain herbicides so that you can douse the heck out of the crop to kill everything else. Or how some genetically modified plant is someone's intellectual property, so you're a criminal if you happen to plant its seeds back in the soil. (Just two issues off the top of my head in regard to an area I don't think much about.)

<comment><USER4> > _producing a plant that is resistant to certain herbicides so that you can > douse the heck out of the crop to kill everything else_

I think you're referring to Round-up Ready? Wasn't the point of that program to _reduce_ pesticide use?

<comment><USER5> Monsanto released Roundup-Ready Soybean in 1996 to INCREASE herbicide use, without affecting crop yield [1]

Programs like Bt-corn reduce pesticide use... by making the plant produce the herbicide in the fruit. So, instead of being able to peel or rinse fruit (with varying results), you're eating corn kernels that have pesticide on the inside.

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

<comment><USER4> > _instead of being able to peel or rinse fruit (with varying results), you > 're eating corn kernels that have pesticide on the inside_

We eat lots of pesticides. Capsaicin (in chilis) [1] and piperine (in peppers) [2] are two examples.

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

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

<comment><USER6> Those both being 100% natural, yes they are _used_ as pesticides. However, they are not are engineered chemicals which can be a differentiator in the comparisons and conversation.

<comment><USER4> > _Those both being 100% natural_

The endotoxin used in Bt corn is also 100% natural [1].

I'm not arguing for (or against) Bt corn. I'm trying to show that the language we used to describe GMOs is misleading. Something we think of as natural isn't inherently healthy or unhealthy compared with something we think of as artificial. The same applies to GMO.

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

<comment><AUTHOR> The Bt-toxin from Bt-bacteria is even a certified organic pesticide, because it's produced "naturally" by the bacteria. It's used in organic farming.

[https://www.amazon.com/Bonide- Products-803-Thuricide-16-Ounc...](https://www.amazon.com/Bonide- Products-803-Thuricide-16-Ounce/dp/B001D1H6SE)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I live in a region where very many are vehemently 'anti-GMO'. It's clear within seconds of talking to such people here that they have only the dimmest notion of what GMOs actually are, but they know they are Evil. They also know that all GMOs are created by Monsanto (which is Evil). It is not dissimilar to their opposition to much "allopathic medicine", which comes from Big Pharma (Evil). The dividing line between good and evil is not inherently related to corporations, because these folk don't abjure solar panels, 4WDs or mobile 'phones, the manufacturers of which are presumably Good. Even Big Pharma, which is Evil, is at the same time Good when it flogs them supplements. It is all a little confusing.

<comment><USER8> I definitely sympathize, but I've come to recognize that we can only expect so much of people in mass numbers. I agree with the poster further up that people have a reason to fear the application of expensive technology to the food they eat...they are awash in stories of problems that were identified much later. When the people act on those fears we say they are irrational.

Of course they are, they are human beings, not computers. When have we ever seen such delicate reasoning survive at a mass scale? We call it scientific illiteracy, as if all those people promised to behave in a scientifically literate fashion at some earlier point, and are now behaving defectively.

No such agreements were made.

This tendency to "spread" the Evil label (and the Good one) across categories and into related but distinctly different domains is a biological rather than digital approach to threat. As the elite of a culture that aspires to the digital, we get outraged.

It's not going to make any difference, y'all know that, right?

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> How safe are GMO plants from a systems perspective?

When we breed plants through selection, the changes are slow and the plants do not acquire capabilities from outside their species.

When we change fast growing species like grasses, and give them capabilities they do not have in nature, do we really understand what those species do when they enter a natural ecosystem? Ecosystems have a delicate balance.

I really wonder how comprehensive GMO testing really is.

Having said that, I have no problems eating GMO crops. I don't think the risks are to humans directly. I think the issue is environmental.

<comment><USER10> Like you, I have no problem eating GMO crops but as you say, there are potential knock-on effects from a systems perspective. Similar to the financial system, if the sole pursuit is yield, systemic problems arise.

The main issues I have with GMO is the patenting of crops, specifically those that are introduced to third world countries which are typically sterile, causing the farmers to have an ongoing dependence/obligation to the patent holders. Probably an even greater problem is crop resilience - yes, many crops will give far greater yield when given ideal conditions, but by reducing diversity within the same species makes them more vulnerable to specific diseases. In nature, there is always some % of a crop that's resistant to a disease, that diversity is removed when all the crops are essentially identical.

<comment><USER11> > _The main issues I have with GMO is the patenting of crops, specifically > those that are introduced to third world countries which are typically > sterile, causing the farmers to have an ongoing dependence /obligation to > the patent holders._

Incidentally, this is also the solution to one of the major criticisms of GMO plants: in the event of significant cross-pollination, the GMO plants won't be viable.

> _Probably an even greater problem is crop resilience - yes, many crops will > give far greater yield when given ideal conditions, but by reducing > diversity within the same species makes them more vulnerable to specific > diseases._

We already massively reduce diversity in agricultural crops. This is not a problem specific to, or even exacerbated by, GMO crops.

> _In nature, there is always some % of a crop that 's resistant to a disease, > that diversity is removed when all the crops are essentially identical._

Diversity is doing exactly piss-all for the hundreds of millions of conifers in California that have been killed by bark beetles.

<comment><USER12> Mostly because the natural state is that species outcompete others on long timeframes. The problem is that alleged natural state is currently vastly reduced diversity. If anything, adding GMO will improve on that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> "Personally, the thought that no matter what steps I take there's always going to be people who think my research will harm them is profoundly distressing, and feels really unfair."

Duh. That's the case of almost every very high professional job on this planet. Almost nobody cares. Almost everybody stays in their own little belief. Few try to learn. Even less will admit they were once wrong.

Tell people humanity has been modifying all kinds of life forms for thousands of years and they are flabbergasted. When you tell them it's about selecting plants and breeding dogs or cattle they tell you 'it's not the same', because it was a slower process.

They're scared we are going to mess up evolution and then tell us to stop playing god. Kinda paradoxal.

<comment><USER14> This. Something so fundamental that has been part of our civilization since forever is suddenly out of fashion because of a name.

If you'd try eating real pure non-gmo'd banana you'd break your teeth because of all the seeds, but that thing hasn't existed for millenia. Apples would be disgusting too by today's standards.

<comment><USER8> It's not out of fashion because of a name. It's considered dangerous because of the rate, and there is logic to that.

The slow change in dogs or crops over many decades or generations is tolerable. But rapid change can kill, or at least it excites danger signals in the affected organisms (people).

A car that creeps towards you slowly is fine. One that moves too fast might kill you.

I think rate is the central question in this problem, but it always gets elided in discussion with the word "just," as if rate was a minor concern.

<comment><USER12> This means we should try to recover original many varieties of the tomato. Because in less than 50 years we killed most of them.

Compared to that widespread action, GMO is safe as it is thoroughly tested. Though diversity is not being increased with it either.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> This article is good, and there's literally nothing of value I could say better than the author - which is why I really like Massive's (the site's) commenting system. I've never seen a comment system allows so few people to participate, and I wonder if this model ought to be tried elsewhere. By restricting comments to approved scientists, Massive lets us observe informed discourse without risking the mess that so many other discussion systems devolve into.

</comment><comment><USER16> I find the whole GMO debate to be depressingly asinine.

There's a very good concern, which is seldom raised clearly -- if Monsanto patents the genomes that we need to feed the planet, then that is likely to be very harmful for the development of the poorer half of the world.

But there's simply no credible concern at this point about "genes escaping from one plant to another". There are mechanisms by which gene transfer can occur between bacteria and viruses, but there is no mechanism by which a gene could get from maize to a weed.

I hear complaints mostly about the latter, and seldom about the former -- but note that the former concern could be ameliorated by having governments or other public institutions do the research, and either hold the patents or just make them available for all.

<comment><USER17> > but there is no mechanism by which a gene could get from maize to a weed.

I'm not sure why you say that; this has been unremarkable for a while and is often seen in the wild. Insects play a role too, though this article from Nature specifically discusses cross-pollination.

[https://www.nature.com/news/genetically-modified-crops- pass-...](https://www.nature.com/news/genetically-modified-crops-pass- benefits-to-weeds-1.13517)

<comment><USER16> Thanks, I think my claim was a bit sloppy and underspecified there. The typical anti-GMO concern that I was addressing is that a gene, once introduced, could spread into any plant in the ecosystem and into the weeds that compete with farmed plants, i.e. beyond the species with which the organism can pollinate. The paper you linked shows:

> that a weedy form of the common rice crop, Oryza sativa, gets a significant > fitness boost from glyphosate resistance

which I believe is a much narrower claim. If the anti-GMO claim was that "GMO crops can share their genes with wild/weedy/non-GMO versions of those crops", I don't think anyone would be freaking out in the same way.

But my specific claim was about gene transfer to unrelated species, which (to my understanding) is not likely. (There's also horizontal gene transfer to worry about, but this is very unlikely in eukaryotes, e.g. see [https://www.ebr- journal.org/articles/ebr/pdf/2008/03/ebr0742...](https://www.ebr- journal.org/articles/ebr/pdf/2008/03/ebr0742.pdf))

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> > _It really showed how futile researchers' attempts at science communication > can be._

There is the Cultural Cognition Project ([http://www.culturalcognition.net/kahan/](http://www.culturalcognition.net/kahan/)), and if I understand the research they did correctly, you really should not expect explanations of science to be effective at changing people's minds like that. In the past, and in psychology experiments, this technique has been shown to be ineffective even though it seems really intuitive that it should work.

</comment><comment><USER19> I view this less on the merits of GMO. I think this is a reflection of the negativity pervasive on the internet. People separate into their own camps on the internet. Then they take a mentality to meat space that they're somehow fighting a fight against "the other side". People are using the internet to collectively ferment their angers to disasterous results.

<comment><USER20> Yes, this is probably the biggest issue, and mainstream media don't help by mostly publishing 'bad GMO' stories where no one hears of the hundreds of success stories (in fact you could apply that to most of the sciences)

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> > Nevertheless, my time in GMO research creating virus-resistant plants has > meant dealing with the overwhelming negative responses the topic evokes in > so many people. These range from daily conversations halting into awkward > silence when the subject of my work crops up, to hateful Twitter trolls, and > even the occasional fear that public protesters might destroy our research.

Do any folks working at social media or adtech firms feel the same way, out of interest? Curious if the recent CA scandals have caused an uptick in confrontational behavior.

<comment><AUTHOR> I collected some mentions of "Monsanto" from this very discussion:

...Monsanto lawsuits...

...created by Monsanto (which is Evil)...

...Monsanto patents...

...those of us who are suspicious of the Monsantos of this world...

I would be funny to be a software engineer if every discussion with friends and family about your work would involve suspicious mentions like "Facebook lawsuits..." , "...created by Facebook (which is Evil)...", "Facebook patents...", "...those of us who are suspicious of the Facebooks of this world..."

Or the same for s/Facebook/Google/g.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> I don't for a moment believe GMOs are in anyway harmful. I do wonder though if they have had the effect of fueling population growth, without necessarily helping the hungry.

It's often stated that GMOs are needed to feed the growing population, but I get the sense that the most of the benefits go to just increasing population and not lowering the raw number of people who are actually undernourished.

In a world without GMOs would there be fewer total people and would that be better than the alternative?

<comment><AUTHOR> They actually had this same discussion in the 1960s when the original "green revolution" used plant breeding and fertilization to increased crop yields dramatically.

If they had done then as you propose, half of the people today in Third World, or having Third World grandparents, would not exist today. How many of your friends and family would not exist?

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green_Revolution#Malthusian_cr...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green_Revolution#Malthusian_criticism)

<comment><USER12> We are paying for this now though. Soil depletion is a thing, as is the increase in pesticide use.

GMO are currently being deployed to fix the pesticide problem without breaking the economics...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> I think part of the problem is that fundamental decisions around IPR collided in time with the decision to explore this space outside of nationally funded research. Had bodies which have charitable status and seek government funds done the majority work rather than monsanto, I suspect GMO would have been understood more widely for its benefits. Having it go rapidly from government funded labs to commercial exploitatio of IPR tied knots into the model: who owns infected wheat next door to a field which was sown with GMO wheat, is a very wierd story. How can you expect farmers to relate well to this? Likewise, the decision of the organic farming movement to de-rate GMO meant the consequential loss to farms around a GMO crop was high. This is pitting farmer against farmer, and farmer against seed merchant. Seed hoarding has been a part of farming practice since Noah. Now, it incurs a long-tail lease payment? Bizarre!

None of this is about the FUD on GMO and health. Its the economics of IPR, and the effect on emotional feelings about GMO. I think the science is fantastic. The commercialization is awful.

</comment><comment><USER24> As a person trained in scientific thought and practice, I am against GMO research for the simple reason that it is one of the main factors enabling runaway population growth. The community involved in GMO research often cite the need to feed growing numbers of people (the author of this article, for one) as one of the motivators of their work, but they never seem to openly acknowledge the fact that they themselves are contributing to the problem they claim to help solve. Based on this alone I wish the entire field could be massively curtailed, if not entirely shut down. The earth needs far less people, not more, and this type of research seems to be making the odds of a future population crisis higher, not lower. Please note that I'm not at all questioning the actual science or the validity of the topic as a research area - merely the impact that said activities have upon the real world, impacts that I don't believe we can ignore.

</comment><comment><USER25> It looks like a lot of commenters here are talking about the public opinion of GMOs and whether or not it's justified. As a graduate student, I'd like to comment on the author of this article instead of GMOs, since I find his story more profoundly disquieting.

The author is leaving his primary research specialization after spending literally years studying it. It's not uncommon for people to change their research focus, but he is moving to a different subfield and specialization altogether. More importantly, his decision is precipitated by unceasing vitriol for something he was passionate enough about to spend the best years of his life working on.

I'm not sure what else to say. I can't imagine what it's like to give something like that up just to avoid having research decisions litigated by other people. It must have been so exhausting and disheartening for him.

<comment><USER26> thanks for empathizing! I am very happy with my future research direction though :)

<comment><USER8> Thanks for writing your article, it was good, and I sympathize with your experience!

I think we are brought up to believe we can pursue whatever we want to pursue, and of course this is true, but there is a cost. If that pursuit falls out of alignment with the community of which you are a part, life can lose it's joy. This isn't fair, it just is. We need to feel in a relationship of give and take with our community.

My own thought here is that the research itself is a good thing, and the act of pursuit deepens your character and experience in a way that makes you more valuable to your community. But people don't like the stories they hear about "patented" crops, about DRM in farmers fields. It's not the research that's a problem, it's the use to which it's put (at least in the eye of the public). GMOs seem to become a lever corporations use to monetize activities that we aren't sure should be monetized.

[I recognize that my "story" above is likely tainted with outrageous misconceptions. I don't disagree! I'm just playing back the image in my head around GMOs, mostly built by passive listening to the conversation in our culture over some years. You can argue with that story, but it's exhausting.]

I think you are caught in the gears of the working out of this vast cultural argument.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> > "is your research going to be patented?"

well, those are good questions. As frustrating as it is, scientists should be well aware that science doesn't happen in a political, juridical or economical vacuum.

This social sensibility should be part of the soft skills of the modern scientist. Same goes for engineers (let's think about the Facebook crisis), or any profession, really.

Ideas have consequences.

Edit: Also that's is quite infuriating: "How am I supposed to explain the consequences of abandoning a technology that can help feed millions to Swiss students who enjoy the world's highest standard of living?" \- if you think that the problem of malnutrition is mainly a technological/agrological problem, that's very disingenuous.

<comment><USER7> > if you think that the problem of malnutrition is mainly a > technological/agrological problem, that's very disingenuous

This is true right now. But a sane world has to plan ahead. Our existing agricultural system can easily feed the world today without GMOs. But if the world population really does grow as anticipated this century (I have my doubts), with a fast-changing climate, high levels of topsoil loss & degradation, there is zero chance without every technological trick we can muster.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> Isn't GMO old hat now that we are using Gene Editing?

"There is another reason gene editing is causing excitement in industry. The U.S. Department of Agriculture has concluded that the new plants are not "regulated articles." The reason is a legal loophole: its regulations apply only to GMOs constructed using plant pathogens like bacteria, or their DNA."

[https://www.technologyreview.com/s/609230/these-are-not- your...](https://www.technologyreview.com/s/609230/these-are-not-your-fathers- gmos/)

<comment><USER26> I cited the same link in my article. But there are uses of GM technology that cannot be achieved using gene editing. The best example is Bt crops for insect resistance. This is a hugely important trait that is only possible through genetic engineering.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> It seems like Taleb et al captured the nebulous fears many people have around GMOs fairly rigorously with the "Precautionary Principle"[1]. I see some people attempt to refute that paper with specific evidence of safety for some GMOs, but have not seen a work that deals fundamentally with section "X"; which or how GMOs can be sufficiently "non-global".

[1][https://arxiv.org/pdf/1410.5787.pdf](https://arxiv.org/pdf/1410.5787.pdf)

<comment><AUTHOR> Taleb is a skilled writer, I give him that. But he doesn't know anything about biology.

From section X.B:

 _" GMOs have the propensity to spread uncontrollably, and thus their risks cannot be localized. The crossbreeding of wild-type plants with genetically modified ones prevents their disentangling, leading to irreversible system- wide effects with unknown downsides."_

Now, the very reason crop plants (GMO or not) cannot spread uncontrollably is tightly coupled to why they are crop plants. They are not poisonous, they are easy to eat, and they produce a good yield. A dream come true for every plant- eating animal. That's why they are crop plants. But they wouldn't stand a snowball's chance in hell in the wild nature, animals and insects would eat them quickly. Wild plants invest a lot of effort to not being eaten (unless they want to, for seed spreading purposes).

There are no cases of crop plants having invaded back to wild nature. Perhaps there is an odd canola plant that escaped a field and grows on a roadside or by an abandoned gas station somewhere, but these are also situations where humans first cleared the wild plants and bared the soil before the canola was able to set roots.

Crop plants don't spread outside of the farmers' fields, and GMO breeding is not trying to change that. (If they wanted to breed competitive wild plants, they'd use wild plants as the starting stock.)

<comment><USER8> Very interesting. I've heard stories of the GMO spreading to another _farmers_ field, causing some problems. But that field is mostly devoid of insects, so it's easy for the GMO to live there.

I still think that a fear of "irreversible system-wide effects with unknown downsides" will persist, despite the good sense of your argument.

Also, as a technologist, I know that we move from solving easier problems to more complex ones. Who is to say that GMO tech isn't just beginning in farmers' fields, and that flush with success in that space, all those engineers, technology and know-how will happily move on to the Next Big Problem. This might be in wild-plant space.

<comment><USER12> The fun part is the current big problem. Boron depletion in soil. Modern farming practices reducing nutritional value of the plants.

Those are the true systemic effects wee should be looking into - there is no way back to 1700s farming now. (Organic farming is not there either.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Plants that are more resistant to herbicides/pesticides (weeds/bugs) due to GMO is my main gripe. Indoor growing and hydroponics is the best solution to this from my point of view. I have no problem with making food more nutrient- rich via GMO. I am well aware that all foods get sprayed, I'd be nice if none needed to be used and plants didn't get modified to make their own herbicides/pesticides.

I'll probably anger both side of the debate because I'm not 100% on one side or the other.

<comment><USER26> I'm probably with you on this but there is an environmental advantage to herbicide tolerant crops (GMO or not). [https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5033196/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5033196/)

Also indoor farming/hydroponics is great for crops that are mainly water (think tomato or lettuce) but much less so for staple calorie crops like corn or wheat.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> I guess the major 'problem' is that (at least the media representation) most of the effort in GMO is not going into products being more healthy, but towards increasing yield.

Put in that light it's immediately obvious the first argument will be 'big industry.' People don't trust big industry, so therefore if they are the largest supporters/drivers of GE it will wholly be placed in the 'bad' basket.

'Big Industry' players time and time again _do_ act poorly, fund outcomes, corrupt policies etc so you concerns can't be dismissed easily and will be conflated either way.

So the question out of this is: how do we increase the integrity of actors involved: science, media, government, business? What would it take to be able to identify and understand which GE is 'honest' vs not?

Until that can be done in any meaningful way, it will continually just be an argument between those saying all GMO/GE can't be trusted and those saying it can. Not to mention the different points being that the distrust is in those engineering/producing GMO vs the actual products/processes themselves...

</comment><comment><USER32> Anyone else got that horrible pop up on the side asking to rate the article?

</comment><comment><USER11> This is the major issue that prevents me from self-identifying as a progressive. The arguments are strikingly similar to arguments over vaccines causing autism; no matter how many times you debunk the myths and fantasies and throw facts at the irrational fears, progressives just keep coming back to the position that "GMOs are scary".

And, like anti-vaxxers, this has a real negative impact on human and ecological health.

I wish there was some kind of "yay, science!" political movement that would advocate for applying science in ways intended to improve human health and happiness in both the short and long term (which would include funding further GMO research).

</comment><comment><USER33> This is sad to hear :(

</comment><comment><USER34> This is a sad result of people's rightful and fully earned suspicion of large corporations and the food industry. How many times have new products been introduced, people assured they're safe, and later we find they cause cancer, or men to grow breasts, or children to lose IQ points? The number of these stories that implicate the chemical industry are nearly countless.

Thus, when new techniques are introduced to agriculture, people become immediately suspicious that they are going to be poisoned so that someone can make a few extra bucks. The difference here is that most of the tweaks GMO scientists are making have well understood results as they produce well studied biological components. However, the protestors are not wrong that the same techniques can be used for good or ill. Science suffers as a result of the incentives of our economic system that prioritize profit over health and safety. Unfortunately, this comes at the expense of the world wide poor over the middle class of the rich world.

If a different system of research and production was instituted that focused on non-profit incentives, I imagine the reaction would be different. The criticism these scientists are facing is not necessarily scientifically grounded, but it is rationally based on a long history of consumers being exploited.

EDIT: A point was made in another comment that malnutrition is not primarily a technological problem these days, it's one of distribution. However, I don't see anything wrong with increasing yields from existing agriculture. Under a non-capitalist system, it would allow us to reclaim part of the environment for nature. Under a capitalist system, it means additional overproduction.

<comment><USER35> Do you want to make a case that health and safety have gone _down_ since we adopted our current "economic system"?

If so, when was this? AFAIK, health and safety have been trending positively in a significant way for well over a century, with nation-state conflict causing the most significant regressions, not profit-motivated corporations.

<comment><USER34> Health and safety typically increase in response to workers advocating for additional health and safety. Those increases were won in spite of the system not because of it.

Noam Chomsky makes the following point: Slave societies also exhibited improvements over time. It wasn't an argument for slavery.

<comment><USER35> Sure, but comparing the virtual slave state of North Korea with the prosperity of South Korea is a pretty good argument for freedom and against slavery.

Do you have some examples of societies that radically increased their overall health and safety without adopting liberal economic policies? Cuba, maybe?

<comment><USER34> This is a very reasonable question, but I think this is too off topic from this article to comply with HN's guidelines as it verges on more general questions. The latest issue of Jacobin does compare the Cuban health system to the US health system and to the Dominican Republic if you're interested, but it's print/subscriber only. SK and NK are too complex to be analyzed under these textual constraints.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> Admits it is vital research but "constantly confronting people who think my research will harm them is profoundly distressing." This is a very personal decision, but I'm glad for those who continue on despite the misguided activism. Imagine if vaccine researchers quit because of the unpleasantness caused by anti-vaccine activists.</comment>


Ask HN: How do companies like Doordash/Postmates get their restaurant info? - <AUTHOR> Is there an open source database of all restaurants in the US that is always updated with new chains' locations? Does the SEC keep this information? <comment><USER2> No and no. Most buy the data from one of a bunch of vendors (like [https://www.factual.com/](https://www.factual.com/), [https://developer.foursquare.com/comparison](https://developer.foursquare.com/comparison), [http://thewebminer.com/geo](http://thewebminer.com/geo), and a bunch of smaller list providers), scrape it from other consumer sites (at least when they're small), or wait for users to submit the location in order to write the first review (Yelp does some of this).

There are some state-specific data sources, like [https://catalog.data.gov/dataset/retail-food- stores](https://catalog.data.gov/dataset/retail-food-stores). Most food licensing is at the county level, though, so there's not a single government- maintained nationwide data source.</comment>


Scaling Yelp from 0 to 139M Unique Visitors - <AUTHOR> http://engineeringblog.yelp.com/2014/10/scaling-traffic-from-0-to-139-million-unique-visitors.html

<comment><USER2> Not quite the in-depth technical breakdown article I was expecting. I am a big scale nerd, so I love reading the finer details of how a company like Yelp managed to scale and build out its product. I guess you had to be at the talk to get the finer details.

I would love to know more about size of data, languages used, size of teams involved and how things like front-end dependencies are managed. Perhaps a follow-up article?</comment>


Aker SSH bastion host - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/aker-gateway/Aker <comment><USER2> I'm the owner of the project, would love to hear any critique or ideas, thanks</comment>


Number Gossip - <AUTHOR> http://www.numbergossip.com/

<comment><USER2> They forgot to mention that 6 is afraid of 7.</comment>


Comparison of Joins: MongoDB vs. PostgreSQL - <AUTHOR> https://www.enterprisedb.com/blog/compare-mongodb-vs-postgresql-join-command <comment><AUTHOR> Co-author here. Thank you all for your comments.

While I understand is tempting to easily conclude that this is apples-to- oranges or that "obviously a relational database is better at data relationships", I recommend to dive deeper into the topic.

First of all, almost all data models you may think of are in some or another way relational (call it "related data", if you prefer). So any database, RDBMS or NoSQL or whatever, will need to deal with data that is related to other bits of data. So this is, from this perspective, very apples-to-apples IMHO.

Second, and regardless of the above statement, the exercise here is to model a data model that is, necessarily, two (or three) pieces of related data. And actually we considered the two models that MongoDB themselves consider for data modelling: embedded and reference. This is explained in the post and references to official MongoDB documentation are provided.

Third: benchmark is open and public. The repository also contains all the query examples used in the post. If anyone considers that there's a better way to represent this data model (problem statement), that would still answer all the "business" questions (queries) considered in the post, please send a Merge Request to the repository. We will be very happy to analyze it.

All in all, this is an exercise of data modeling, for a given dataset. MongoDB requires data modeling, is not "schema-less", and this is pervasive through their official documentation. The reference model, and their $lookup operator, are not a corner case nor a hidden downplayed option. It is a first-class operation, well advertised. But its complexity, performance and rewriting needs to adapt to changes are what are not, apparently, advertised, after our observations.

</comment><comment><USER2> Ok everyone, calm down. I think it is obvious that the author knows that he is comparing apples to oranges here... but that isn't the point. The point of this article was to quantify the difference. His work accomplishes that for these specific tests very well. Yes, we know relational systems are better in these cases, but it is useful for those considering no-sql solutions to see this kind of hard data.

</comment><comment><USER3> While I think it's easy to poke fun at this article - relational database better at handling relational data, more at 10 - it does make me want to understand why one would choose mongo over postgres?

<comment><USER4> I can't address MongoDB, but nosql vs relational generally, there are two reasons:

(1) what's faster than a fast join? No join. With nosql you have more flexibility to store the data organized in the same way it is accessed. You don't need to join to another table if the data your app needs is already directly part of the main data the app requests. You _do_ need to understand your access patterns well, and develop migration plans when they change.

(2) scalability. nosql databases generally let you scale horizontally more easily/gracefully than relational databases, though there are trade offs.

Put it together and you get performance at scale, though you generally need to understand your data access patterns and usually need to be more resilient to inconsistencies.

<comment><USER5> > what's faster than a fast join? No join. With nosql you have more > flexibility to store the data organized in the same way it is accessed.

You can definitely do this in PostgreSQL via materialized views. They're directly supported in recent releases, and they don't require you to denormalize the underlying datamodel unlike NoSQL.

<comment><USER4> Well, a materialized view _is_ denormalized data. You distinguish it from the "underlying data model", but you can do that in nosql as well. Also, materialized views still tend to be oriented to rectangular data, which isn't always how you want to access data.

I agree with the general point that Postgres and other relational databases can do nosql things (and nosql databases can do relational things).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Only one person in this comment thread mentioned CAP theorem, which is the (highly informal*) rationale for NoSql's existence and also its deliberate aversion to join dependencies (which more or less violate the core principles of eventual consistency modeled distributed data stores.)

Useful links for erudition:

[https://arxiv.org/pdf/1302.0309.pdf](https://arxiv.org/pdf/1302.0309.pdf)

[https://codahale.com/you-cant-sacrifice-partition- tolerance/](https://codahale.com/you-cant-sacrifice-partition-tolerance/)

[https://martin.kleppmann.com/2015/05/11/please-stop- calling-...](https://martin.kleppmann.com/2015/05/11/please-stop-calling- databases-cp-or-ap.html)

[https://www.somethingsimilar.com/2013/01/14/notes-on- distrib...](https://www.somethingsimilar.com/2013/01/14/notes-on-distributed- systems-for-young-bloods/)

[https://www.microsoft.com/en- us/research/publication/replica...](https://www.microsoft.com/en- us/research/publication/replicated-data-consistency-explained-through- baseball/?from=http%3A%2F%2Fresearch.microsoft.com%2Fpubs%2F157411%2Fconsistencyandbaseballreport.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER7> I would really love to see a direct comparison for scaling MongoDB and PostgreSQL.

When do I usually need to scale up / out in either database? How do I assess that? And how do I actually go about scaling?

Specifically I would love to know how to scale up and scale out (what are the different multi-node options and what are the consistency / replication delay guarantees)?

The last time I used Mongo in production (2013) most startups eventually had to switch databases or hire a consultant to scale. This has always stuck with me.

<comment><USER8> I have spent most of my (limited) career scaling PostgreSQL with (IMO) surprisingly good results.

Most recently I have been using Citus and it has been ridiculously easy to shard data.

To be fair I have only been exposed to workloads of a few Terabytes of data ingest a day so YMMV.

Unfortunately, I can't compare to Mongo as I have had somewhat limited experience with it.

<comment><USER9> > can't compare to Mongo as I have had somewhat limited experience with it

Doesn't seem to stop most people here.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Can someone who is using MongoDB and a RDBMS at the same time tell me the exact use cases where MongoDB is fitter? Structured logs? Caching? Sessions? And why MongoDB does it better?

<comment><USER11> Cluster is very easy in MongoDB and for unstructured data. I've looked into clustering postgresql a few time and it seems like a pain in the butt. TBH, storing data without thinking about relation is just kicking the can down the road.

My previous company store coupon code on it (referrals). I prefer a hash nosql for that though (cassandra) but for a one man shop it's overkill.

\---

edit:

IIRC postgresql have their own document storage like MongoDB. I just never had to use such thing because I guess I'm too OCD about how my data suppose to look like.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> A basis for the apples to oranges argument is that you don't use MongoDB when you need JOINs.

To me, this almost never happens. You almost always need JOINs, otherwise your data is sterile and useless. What point is there to talk about entities devoid of relationships to other entities? Data is always relational; we don't live in a 1-dimensional world.

The only way I see it being useful is for scaling purposes. But there are way better, more stable, more resistant to failure kv stores out there.

</comment><comment><USER13> If you picked mongodb and you are using joins, you've picked a wrong tool for a job.

<comment><USER14> And the corollary: if you store data, you need to use joins.

<comment><USER15> Embrace denormalization! It makes for splendid job security.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> This should really be titled "A comparison of aggregates".

</comment><comment><USER17> This was quite the lopsided comparison - a document store just doesn't get fair competition in a relational setting. Additionally, both the SQL and the MongoDB queries appear unnecessarily complicated (or inefficient) for the examples they illustrate.

<comment><USER18> Is this actually an objective truth? "relational" just refers to the relation within the table, it's less about having a database system with good inter- table relationship handling. It happens to be that a lot of the things we think about as relational are OLTP and have good fkeys, etc.

Is there any real reason why a document store can't have good joins between collections? If you index the lookup keys, I don't understand what about the underlying document model would make joining impossible to optimize as well as a relational model.

<comment><USER19> I don't think most document stores enforce foreign key relationships (and hence consistency) like RDBMS do, so in practice that would make joins difficult.

<comment><USER18> Is joining on an fkey any more performant than without it assuming the same indexing is applied?

When you say difficult do you mean from a developer ergonomics standpoint (knowing there's data integrity), or from a database optimizability standpoint?

<comment><USER19> The former. You have a guarantee of consistency, whereas otherwise you must adjust for this in your application code. Database performance wise I agree they are equivalent.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> We're still talking about MongoDB? Why?

<comment><USER21> Because lots of people are still using it. In Q1 2020 they 89m in revenue, up from 50m in Q1 2019. Just because something is bad technically doesn't mean people will immediately abandon it. See: php.</comment></comment>


Pack half of what you think you need - <AUTHOR> http://www.37signals.com/svn/posts/1268-pack-half-of-what-you-think-you-need <comment><USER3> Couldn't agree more.

You really need less than you might think. The whole point of traveling is that you see something new. You're never going to know exactly what you'll run into or do. Trying to prepare for everything is impossible :). Living with limited resources is interesting in itself, and can even get you into cool experiences meeting new people you have to ask for help.

And as for the software, this is actually an interesting analogy. I don't think I pack my backpack much differently from how I try to decide what goes into a program. Whether it's bloated software or a heavy bag, I use 20% of its contents 80% of the time anyway. I could probably do without the rest and find some interesting alternatives along the way.

I guess it takes traveling frequently to find out you should cut on features :)

<comment><USER4> _> The whole point of traveling is that you see something new._

This is all probably great advice when you're talking about being a tourist.

As someone who does business traveling a lot, though, it's really hard to argue some of these points.

I, personally, would rather carry a little extra junk through an airport because I decided to include a backup shirt and slacks in case I spill some soup.

When we're talking about business travel, you're talking about things that affect your career or your own company. I take what I need to be 99% sure I'll be successful at the destination-- and I don't worry so much about the burden. Of course often you can go out and get what you need, but you don't want to have to do that (especially at the last minute) if you don't have to. That extra bit of confidence of feeling _prepared_ can make all the difference to let your mind focus on getting business done to the best of your ability.

All this aside, I think the analogy about software is a great suggestion. You really don't know what you _should_ be taking with you (i.e. features) until you get there (i.e. release it to users).

I liken that to a civil engineer building a bridge remotely and then delivering all the pieces without having ever visited the site himself. He or she would have a much worse idea of the dimensions, concerns, or obstacles-- and might have to re-engineer a lot of what they built.

Of course software is more flexible than that, but it's still a great idea to take a few, and not _all_ , of your "best guess" features to the customer until you get their usage/feedback to build on.

<comment><USER5> agreed. I have had to pack for trips for overnight, two weeks. a month, six weeks, six months, and same day. Get some durable, cheap luggage. I had great success at Tuesday Morning with a friend on the phone who was cross checking brands and prices on ebay. Got 4 matching pieces of very good luggagefor $400, less than the price of the rolling garmet bag of the set at a luggage store I had visited earlier in the day. Tuesday morning seems to be better than TJ Maxx. I'm sure there's some ecofriendly-no-child-labor-yet-low-cost boutique in San Fran, but I don't live in SF. Also, never buy a standard case bigger than 27". Anything bigger, when full, will be to heavy and the overweight fees outstrip the cost of buying a new bag.

I can travel indefinitely, as a military doc, with a week worth of casual civvies, a suit, a 'service dress' uniform, working uniforms, study materials, and 'doctor stuff' like whit coat, stethoscope, etc, with a folding garmet bag, a 25" rolling suitcase, and a standard messanger bag for carry on. Volume is about the same as a navy 'seabag' duffle. Tested over four- and six-week trips, doing laundry once a week.

My dad recently did 2 weeks in Japan with a folding garmet bag. A rolling folding garmet is definitely my go-to piece of luggage for city-to-city travel, flying or driving. For travel on ships, I recommend the seabag, as it takes very little room and can double as a backpack in a pinch. Obviously, if you're walking inland, your backpack can double as airport luggage. I tend to use an XL timbuk2 for overnighters.

<comment><USER5> I second the suggestions to make a list of necessities, so you don't forget them . . . next time.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> _"... Pack light. Lay out everything you think you need. Then put away half ..."_

Pack one away, bin the other. The thing is you have to carefully think what you really need. Is this item required. Done right this is a work of art - <USER2> matters though. There are things you cannot do with out. Others are a waste of space. Take for example a mate of mine, Alessandro ~ <http://www.flickr.com/photos/agentilini/907130017/>

<comment><USER7> _bootload, the gear in the photo wasn't enough and I needed more stuff for a four day "hut-hopping" hike: it's a long way to the enlightenment._

so, under the 37 signals great advice, this is what this guy needed for National Outdoor Leadership School, and he should have taken half?

when in reality, he needed more gear than presented here.

as usual, the signal is too weak, even if they try to filter out the noise.

<comment><USER8> True but, like everything in life, nothing is written in stone. I think the general purpose of the post (and also of most things I read in the 37signals "real" book) is to serve as a guideline. And it serves it's purpose even if it just makes you take a second look at the gear (product features) you want to take with you :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> great analogy for software

but how many people really need this advice for traveling?

instead of this over-generalized "half of what you need" and then "lose another half" make a short list of the bare necessities -- and why you need it.

but I guess this is advice for tourists? not sure who has three bags going down cobble stone roads.

</comment><comment><USER9> The maxim of packing the same amount for a 2 week trip as for a 2 month trip is certainly true.

I backpacked around the world for a year and my bag was relatively light (avg. 20 pounds) but even that was quite heavy on long hikes. I've since practiced and am now down to about 15 lbs., and I could go lighter, depending on the weather.

<comment><USER7> what was your avg dist. on the longer hikes? am curious that 15-20 lbs. was heavy on the long hikes. and where'd you store the extra gear (i imagine a lot of it was weather-related)

<comment><USER10> 20lbs (9kg) seems pretty light for a long hike - unless this is just baseline travel gear and you're not counting food, water, tent.

<comment><USER9> Right, it's not counting food, water, tent. When we were hiking / camping in NZ, we carried that additional gear and it was much heavier. I personally have a pretty light build so 20 lbs felt very heavy after awhile, even when I was in good shape.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Is it me or is Matt typically the least interesting 37signals writer?

<comment><USER12> I'm all for speaking your mind, but what exactly is the point of an idle personal attack like this?</comment></comment>


Start-Up Legal Forms Library - <AUTHOR> http://www.orrick.com/practices/corporate/emergingCompanies/startup/forms_index.asp <comment><USER2> If you know an unemployed law grad who's passed the bar, there's a good living to be made merely just customizing these forms for new companies. (I actually begged Yokum to have WSGR do these forms [Wilson has done YC/term sheet docs, but no incorporation docs] for this express purpose.)

<comment><USER3> As a lawyer who has been doing this sort of work in Silicon Valley for quite a while, let me add my thoughts:

1\. The Orrick docs are very helpful templates to assist founders in setting up a corporate startup. Orrick is an excellent firm and the quality of the templates is very good.

2\. Founders should do their utmost to cut early-stage costs and this includes not overpaying for legal services. They should also do their best to educate themselves about the legal points associated with their startups. I believe strongly in this and have done what I call a Startup Law 101 series (<http://www.grellas.com/faq_business_startup.html>) of articles whose very purpose is to help educate founders on such issues.

3\. The key to any legal help you receive in setting up your startup lies in the expertise the lawyer provides. There is no substitute for this and there is no amount of study you will do as a founder that can possibly match it.

4\. I know this from years of experience because, even with founders who have been through the full set-up process under good lawyer guidance, I have routinely seen them try to use the same forms to do subsequent documentation on their own only to have it come back in botched fashion. This often is not critical and can easily be fixed but it is another way of saying that such things do not consist merely of filling in blanks. There is a lot of underlying knowledge and experience involved in doing it right, especially where a founding team is involved with a variety of issues possibly arising among the founders.

5\. For the same reason that founders have trouble managing such documents without expert guidance, so too would an unemployed law grad who really doesn't know this area. Basically, this is a specialty area and is often not well-done by inexperienced attorneys. Again, from experience, I can easily recall young attorneys I hired in my own office for the purpose of assisting me with getting such documents prepared. Skilled ones can do it with proper guidance but others cannot. They come back with work that might appear fine on the service but, scratch it a little and it falls apart (of course, such work would never be seen by the client - it would be redone altogether).

6\. That said, I sympathize with your point about overpaying for lawyers. The larger firms practice a high-caliber form of law but it needs to fit with the needs of your startup for it to make sense for you. If it does not, it is an expensive mismatch. This is true for bootstrap companies in particular. It is important for such startups to minimize legal fees and looking for lawyers who will not cost as much (but who can still do the job well) is important.

7\. Lawyers will not just give out templates, however, because this does leave them exposed in taking responsibility for a project. It is one thing for a founder group to want to "do it themselves" while being prepared to absorb any losses that might result from their not doing it right. It is quite another to do it yourself and then say that a lawyer was responsible because you used his template. Lawyers are paid to customize documents to fit the deal before them. A template is a startup point only. If it is to be used properly, it must be customized. This necessarily takes some effort that will cost money. And, take it from someone who has seen it all over the years, it is worth paying for the right expertise where needed, even as you try to minimize costs along the way. The process is a cooperative teaming and a good lawyer will work with you to so minimize your costs. But being frugal is not the same as being foolish. Where you do need the expertise, you need to be prepared to pay for it.

The startup world is becoming more and more an open field with fewer barriers to entry than ever before. The liberation of the legal side represents one part of this and is a good development. Just be smart about how you as a founder treat your new-found freedom!

<comment><USER4> As per point 5:

this is often the problem that companies who employ software developers run into: they hire a developer who seems to know what he's doing but ends up producing code that, ultimately, is useless.

Are there parallels between the law interview process and the development interview process?

There definitely seem to be parallels between operational but lousy code and legalese that seems legit on the surface but is ultimately useless due to mistakes made in (I'm guessing) semantics, grammar, structure, and expected- by-law requiremens.

In fact, the more I think about it, the more I see that correlates law thinking and software development thinking...

<comment><USER3> The key to good business lawyering is knowing how to think through the issues and to do customized work that attains a client's goals in an expert yet practical manner.

Clients will come in with a sense of what they want to accomplish but may have no idea how to do it. Or they have a pre-conceived approach to an issue that may not be accurate. A good lawyer will listen to the goals, get a good understanding of the key elements involved, and have a good (almost intuitive) sense of what it takes to navigate the legal and practical challenges to get to the goals efficiently. A poor lawyer will throw around legalese, and may pull even good templates out of a drawer, but will have no eye for either strategy or detail - the result will be a mess.

I would thus imagine that good logical thinking ability and a strong level of attention to detail are the main common factors shared between good developers and good lawyers (at least good business lawyers).

So, yes, I would agree with your conclusion about the correlation in thinking between lawyers and developers. Of course, in both cases, experience helps a lot as well but the key skills must there from the start in order to succeed.

<comment><USER5> _I would thus imagine that good logical thinking ability and a strong level of attention to detail are the main common factors shared between good developers and good lawyers (at least good business lawyers)._

Out of curiosity, do you think there are a lot of parallels between the two fields or just those?

To put the same thing another way, do you think that someone who was a good developer could become a good lawyer and vice versa?

<comment><USER3> I have seen many serial entrepreneurs (who originally were developers) become very adept at the legal aspects of dealmaking. From this, I believe that cross-overs would not be too hard, but this assumes that one is drawn to things that lawyers do.

At the advanced level, the most important trait by far is good judgment that assures strategic thinking. If a lawyer lacks this, your deal will be in trouble. I assume your development project would also be in trouble as well without this trait.

<comment><USER5> Thank you.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I wish somebody have published a Canadian version of such documents :)

</comment><comment><USER7> Anyone know of links for user agreements and privacy policies?

<comment><USER8> Automattic has released their TOS and privacy policy under CC-SA.

<http://en.wordpress.com/tos/> <http://automattic.com/privacy/>

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Seems like the forms are IE6+ only as mentioned there. I'm on firefox 3.0 on ubuntu 9.04 and can't view those.

<comment><USER2> Downloaded the Word docs and opened just "fine" in Open Office using Firefox 3.52 on Mac OS X 10.6.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: What use cases are there for Reinforcement Learning? - <AUTHOR> I used to work in RL. While it is an amazing area to research in, I don't see many other use cases for it other than training robots to do a specific thing.<p>What other use cases are out there and which companies are working on it? <comment><USER2> I saw someone from DeepMind mention using RL for Recommender Systems at Google at their ICML 2016 presentation, but they were very tight lipped when I asked for more details.

Bandit algorithms are pretty popular in the ads world, and there is probably some use in extending that to the full RL setup.</comment>


HN request: Nordic startups, we'd love to feature you - <AUTHOR>

My local startup hub, Klak in Iceland, is publishing an online magazine about startups, innovation and the like, but so far, we're a bit too local to Iceland.
We'd really like to have more range in the content, so we'd like to feature those of you who are running startups in the Nordic countries or something like that.
If you're interested please send an email to firstname.lastname@example.com
We've released our first issue and you can check it out on our website: http://nordicinnovation.is/ - It's currently not very web-friendly - we're working on that... <comment><USER2> Other Nordic resources: <http://basementhq.com/> <http://www.arcticstartup.com/>

</comment><comment><USER3> Does Canada count as a nordic country? :)

<comment><USER4> CA is like the nordic Mexico</comment></comment>


Tanium is facing employee unrest and an executive exodus - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-04-13/tanium-s-family-empire-is-in-crisis <comment><USER3> While stealing the employee stock options is beyond pale, the real issue is what the working environment must be like there. I was in a similar situation many years ago with a completely corrupt management team. My boss and I got off on the wrong foot when he asked me to lie about another employee he wanted to fire and I refused (which led to him then trying to find people to dish dirt on me so he could fire me).

The CEO and president were fully aware this kind of stuff was going on but looked the other way because he was producing the results they wanted to see (they weren't exactly clean either and several years later were both indicted on criminal charges).

I saw multiple people break down in tears due to the pressure he put on them. Everyone was stressed out all the time. People were constantly in poor health due to the stress. Backstabbing was normal operating procedure just to stay off the hit list. People would doing anything to suck up to the boss so they could keep their job another week, or month, or quarter hoping things would get better.

After I left the company I couldn't believe I put up with that. My health was in the toilet. Mentally I was wasted. I remember at my next job constantly worrying that everyone who was being nice to me was setting me up. I parsed every word people said to me looking for a trap. It took me a full year before I could sleep more than four hours a night.

The ones who have left or were let go are the lucky ones. The stock can't be worth the physical and emotional damage.

I've worked in a lot of high pressure jobs before that one and since then but that place will always stand out as the most damaging period in my life.

<comment><USER4> Now, I read these accounts and I wonder, if this is how businesses are run, even a small fraction of them, how are they in business at all? Like, it seems 'business' is _really_ forgiving in terms of staying alive, like turning a profit must be really easy if these morons can do it and stay afloat for any length of time. But you go on /r/entrepreneur or some threads on HN and it is made out to be just a real drag and really really hard to do. What am I missing here, why the disconnect?

<comment><USER3> I think you might be looking at it from the wrong angle. Some of the most morally bankrupt people I've ever met are crazy intelligent. You seem to equate being a sociopath with being a moron and that is more often than not a poor assumption.

The other aspect that I think you're overlooking is that people who are wired like this are often incredibly driven people. Sure, someone on /r/entrepreneur might be willing to give up everything to pursue their dream but a sociopath is willing to lie, cheat, and steal to get what they want.

<comment><USER4> Oh no, I agree, being an asshole and being smart are independent variables, it's a roll of the genetic dice. I meant: how are these folks who are both stupid _and_ an asshole still kicking around?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> There are bad reasons to quit a company and good ones, but there are few better ways to make an exit than _on the spot_ when the CEO of your company personally and publicly berates a low-level employee in front of the team.

<comment><USER6> Correct. If you tolerate, if you blindly allow, if you accept without action - you implicitly endorse.

I remember a time 10 years ago when a flight attendant harassed a person behind me unfairly. I regret not standing up for that person.

Don't be a bystander - do the right thing!

<comment><USER7> Easy to say, and I mostly agree, but it can be tough. I've seen a few of these cases of bully management and what you notice is that the team under the manager (and the teams around the manager) all already realize and communicate (sometimes just glances, sometimes quite openly) that the manager is a problem. So making a dramatic exit to make a point sometimes only makes an obvious point.

There are other factors too. Maybe you have a unique skillset and it takes some time to find similar employment, maybe you stay for family reasons, or for a (probably misguided) sense of loyalty to the team. In my last relevant personal experience, it was obviously a hostile work environment fairly early on but I had made an informal commitment to stay on for X amount of time when I joined.

Abusive managers often actually score big wins in short order and garner favor from higher management, but inevitably we see those managers burn out the systems they build and the systems around them. Employees start bouncing out at an accelerating pace and it's a compounding effect usually because an already overtaxed team is now smaller and has to pick up the slack of the departed.

It usually ends badly.

Which of course factors back into the decision not to make a public display of an exit -- karma usually finds a way to sort these things out.

I think it's probably the case that a lot of these managers are completely oblivious to their actions. I had one manager who proudly claimed (to the team) knowledge of sneaky political tactics and posted articles on fb about Machiavelli and corporate tactics for grabbing and wielding power. It's quite an awkward thing to watch and they're usually not fooling anybody.

<comment><USER8> Walking out instantly is a romantic idea for people who either have fat bank accounts to fall back on or little-to-no responsibility outside of work to worry about. For the rest of us something like that is indeed a reason to immediately seek other employment, but just because you don't walk out instantly doesn't mean you are supporting that behavior.

<comment><USER9> You mean people like extremely well-paid developers with in-demand skills who get contacted by recruiters multiple times a week?

<comment><USER8> I am all of those things and I still can't just stand up and walk out. I have a wife, 2 kids and a house payment to think about. Prudence demands that I line up future employment before giving my current employer the finger.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> _> One of the most unnerving aspects of life at Tanium is what's known internally as _Orion's List _. The CEO allegedly kept a close eye on which employees would soon be eligible to take sizable chunks of stock. For those he could stand to do without, Hindawi ordered the workers to be fired before they were able to acquire the shares, according to current and former employees._

Employees at startups generally take a below-market salary in exchange for equity compensation, so imagine the double humiliation of being fired because your first shred of equity is about to vest.

<comment><USER11> My friend worked for startup, here in India, that was doing work with drones and water level measurements or something like that. It was and still is a pre-VC startup. He had left a huge European MNC where did cutting edge research but was bored and needed the bleeding edge rush and excitement as he put it. He's awesome in his field and then excellent at coding too (not a CSE grad) he was paid really grand in that MNC.

So he was getting less than half of his MNC salary at this drone startup. He was totally immersed in making and breaking things with weekends stopping to exist for him and evenings and nights blurring. For pretty much 10 months.

He was asked to resign a day after demo day where potential investors raved about the product his team (3 people) had finished. Another team mate was also asked to leave within a week. Both of them were given a reason on the lines "excellent engineer but won't be a good fit in the culture and your product was not well appreciated". Only remaining team mate was a confounder who used to pass on requirements. Of course both ex employed didn't get anything. He said he needed at least 2 more months to get some stocks as he would get instalments after every completed year.

He took a break of around two months. Relaxing, slowly getting back to rhythm. Him being good and being from IITB meant he had literally hundreds of recruiter mails every week. But he calmly deleted any mail which had startup mentioned anywhere in it.

Sometimes back his previous manager recruited him back at the same European MNC with a substantial pay raise.

My point of writing isn't sharing a generic burnt by a startup anecdote with you. He tries to remain calm but I, and many other friends, can see that he has been deeply scarred by the deception and (I would call it) betrayal.

<comment><USER12> I've had something similar to this happen early in my career, it took two years out of my life and cost me what I thought was a good personal relationship but which turned out to be just predatory in retrospect.

Those are expensive lessons, your view of humanity will likely never be quite the same afterwards. The fact that the guy crashed and burned gives me no comfort at all.

Even so, I _do_ realize I had a part in that, if I had been a little bit smarter I could have educated myself on this stuff before accepting. And that's where the world today is different than in the past: we now have world- wide networks of people in tech that can warn each other. So every story like the one you told here should help to keep other technical people safe from predatory behavior.

I wrote about my experience here:

[https://jacquesmattheij.com/the-start-up-from- hell](https://jacquesmattheij.com/the-start-up-from-hell)

Apologies for the pictures not working, I still need to fix that after the latest domain shuffle.

<comment><USER13> > I've had something similar to this happen early in my career, it took two > years out of my life and cost me what I thought was a good personal > relationship but which turned out to be just predatory in retrospect.

That is so damn close to me that it was eerie reading it.

I think quite often programmers who are good but early in their careers don't value themselves enough and the relationship ends up been exploitative.

I worked 80hr weeks for just slightly under 2 years for someone I thought was a both a friend and a boss for it all to go sideways.

The lesson was learnt on the spot and while I'm still gregarious these days I operate by the maxim "trust but verify".

<comment><USER12> I used to work for nothing if the work was interesting enough. Bad mistake.

> I worked 80hr weeks for just slightly under 2 years for someone I thought > was a both a friend and a boss for it all to go sideways.

That is really very familiar.

> The lesson was learnt on the spot and while I'm still gregarious these days > I operate by the maxim "trust but verify".

Good for you. And make sure you pass the lesson on to others so they don't have to learn it the hard way.

<comment><USER13> > Good for you. And make sure you pass the lesson on to others so they don't > have to learn it the hard way.

Already did that, I worked at a place where I was the 5th programmer on the team but the most experienced and the lead, the boss was not a nice guy and worked the two youngest programmers like dogs, I soon put a stop to that with the "If you don't turn your computers off, I'm going to go flip the breaker, it's 6pm on a Friday _go home_ ".

The thing I've learnt with bosses like that is most of the time if you stand up to them they either back down, respect you for it or fire you at some point in the future (assuming you haven't already left) but in any case your life improves.

The last job I had for someone I came in at 8:30am, left at 5:30pm and outside of work I didn't answer calls, emails or issues unless I was on call, this was despite the pressure to do so that many of the other programmers succumbed to.

Team pressure is a hard thing to fight against but I've seen enough to know that a team working (actually working, not screwing around on a computer all day) 12 hour days 6 days a week can do that for a month at most and then the damage sets in and each day is less productive till you end up getting less done in 12 hours than your team would normally get done in 6.

Tired people don't do good work.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I went through a long drawn out sales engagement with them. It seemed like a cool product at its core (basically a sort of meshed set of interconnected nodes that you could do live "natural language" queries against predefined collected data (i.e. "what machines are running ntpd?") but the stuff they were trying to sell on top of it at the time like patch management ranged from half finished to promises for future releases to things that ended up simply... not being true.

My perception at the time was that it was a good product for what it did but maybe after the demos were over too many potential customers said "so now what?" and they were putting pressure on engineering to release way too soon. And it turns out they were probably right, even though it was an obviously useful product for live reporting, detection and triage those things aren't appealing to managers so we didn't buy it.

<comment><USER5> So... osquery?

<comment><USER15> It supposedly has some kind of peer-to-peer topology for executing queries and aggregating the responses, so--I believe, I'm not certain--it avoids having a centralized data store that gets DDOS'd from the agents or a linear machine- by-machine connect-and-query model. That allows it to scale to large networks. The company _definitely_ benefited from the a16z lead-gen (and investment). Tanium was the big shiny endpoint tech of 2016, but I'm not convinced they have a good handle on the use cases/domain.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I'm getting sick of reports like this. Setting up unfair vesting schedules and firing people before their stock vests... somebody should vigorously investigate it and put the CEO in jail. Startups are fucking hard work and a CEO stealing glory is a crime not a culture issue. These guys need fear of God.

<comment><USER17> Its just another form of indenturing workers, by holding these ballooning stock vesting schedules over their heads in the uneven employer/employee relationship. The employer gets stability from the employee, while being able to fire the employee after a few years just before they vest, saving the company $$$ and maintaining control for the current shareholders.

<comment><USER12> > while being able to fire the employee after a few years just before they > vest

Never ever agree to a vesting schedule where it takes longer than a year to get your stock. 1 year cliff maximum.

<comment><USER17> Yeah, a fair vesting schedule should evenly vest as you work, ideally as often as possible (eg: every month or week). Its akin to compounding, as a savings account holder you want the interest on your account to compound as often as possible.

<comment><USER18> to keep it to the point it should come month by month along with the standard compensation, since you take a pay cut in exchange for stock it's only fair to have it delivered month by month, at most with a clause that after x year the stock trickle stops and you get an equivalent increase in your pay

sadly there's plenty sucker willing to gift their work away so any hint of people having a clue about the risks in cliffed vesting become unhirable troublemakers in most startups

<comment><USER12> That will only happen if techies/employees all over a region band together and don't let themselves be pushed into some kind of prisoners dilemma.

<comment><USER19> It's already happening. Anyone who's worked at a startup before and has been burnt is unlikely to accept the vesting and the work conditions. That's in part why it's to hard for companies to recruit experienced tech workers.

At the same time, there is an endless stream of young people willing to break into the industry at any costs.

The age and experience of people in a place tells you a lot about what the company really value.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Whoever thought that calling 'Orions List' 'Schindlers List' was clever has no idea what Schindlers List was all about.

> The situation at Tanium underscores the risk of venture capitalists placing > near-absolute power in the hands of a company's creators.

That sentence does not make sense to me. It is a rule rather than an exception that VCs end up with minority shareholdings but usually favorable terms in case of liquidation. They don't 'place near-absolute power in the ands of a company's creators', they're simply later to the table and have correspondingly fewer shares bought at a significant premium.

The original founders call the shots and only if they dilute to the point that outside capital holds a majority does the equation change and even then there might still be different classes of shares to deal with.

For the most part VCs are along for the ride, they can make noise and they can try to win over the board but as long as the founders have 51% or more they call the shots.

<comment><USER20> The key is board majority, not common shares majority. Because board can change the rules.

<comment><USER12> The board does not change the shareholder agreement nor does the board change anything else to do with the shares. What the board can do - and will do - <USER2> fire the CEO if they are of the opinion the CEO is not functioning well, but if the CEO is also a shareholder and has majority control of the stock (or the confidence of the majority of the shareholders) he/she can call a shareholder meeting, get rid of the board and re-instate himself or herself.

Boards are not active at the level of shareholders, though many boards do have major shareholders as board members.

<comment><USER20> The board can change the bylaws, issue new shares to get a majority of each class, wash out founders with a forward and reverse split. Preferred shares have all kinds of rights not given to founders. 50.1% of shares outstanding means nothing by itself.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> This sums up nicely why working for someone else's dream (the dipshit Orion's in this case) is a bad idea.

</comment><comment><USER22> After raising a Series B of $90 million, new employees would be getting probably, at most, 0.05% over four years, or vesting around 0.01% on their one-year cliff.

I can't imagine how the founders thought that firing tens of key employees in order to retain an extra fraction of a percentage point made financial sense.

</comment><comment><USER23> _> One of the most unnerving aspects of life at Tanium is what's known internally as Orion's List. The CEO allegedly kept a close eye on which employees would soon be eligible to take sizable chunks of stock. For those he could stand to do without, Hindawi ordered the workers to be fired... which would help Hindawi defend his ownership by limiting the number of stakeholders..._

The suggests one of two things: Either Tanium has a _really strange_ vesting schedule or Bloomberg blew the reporting here.

The typical vesting schedule is distributed over four years with a one year cliff. That means, with typical vesting, only <1 year old employees could possibly be on this list. Furthermore, only 25% of their grant would be at stake. With Tanium being a relatively mature $3.7B startup, we can infer that the typical grant size at this stage would not constitute more than a small fraction of a percent, even for fairly senior positions -- and we're talking 25% of that.

It thus is highly unlikely that firing right before the cliff would retain "sizable chunks of stock" big enough to materially affect the CEO's ownership. It's entirely possible that a List exists, but the stated motivation doesn't add up. Bloomberg should really follow up here with details on the vesting schedule.

</comment><comment><USER24> Isn't a father-mother-son leadership team a massive red flag when choosing what company to work for? I mean, whether it's a car dealership or a tech startup, when you have family pride all mixed up in company culture it really tends to be a shitty place to work.

If anyone has any examples of where this type of setup has actually worked out well, would love to know of one.

<comment><USER25> There's a funny thing about that. Quite a few companies have been financially successful with that model, but a disproportionate number of them seem to be morally challenged. One of the first lists I was able to find included Wal- Mart, Cargill, and Koch as three of the top four. Price fixing, influence peddling, and several examples of private profit at public expense. I kind of don't care how much money they make, or how much I might make by going there. I still wouldn't touch them with a ten-foot pole.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> The father goes around apologizing for his son's behavior? I'm pretty sure that's not helping anyone.

</comment><comment><USER27> yet another sorry story of a man being driven to the brink of madness by the greed monster.

</comment><comment><USER28> Where is the evidence? Where are the quotes by previous employees making this claim? These employees were fired because they were failing to do their job. If you are running a company will sit aside and do nothing and continue to let anyone stay in the company that proved to miss their target repetitively? These claims are 100% false. This story is not only poorly written but it is full of false information crafted only for click bait. It's sad that I can no longer feel as though Bloomberg is a creditable source of news.

<comment><USER29> If you've got contradictory information you're willing to share, it would be interesting to hear about it.

<comment><USER28> [https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/working-tanium-stacey- ruesch-...](https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/working-tanium-stacey-ruesch-sphr- ryt)</comment></comment></comment>


Could One Man Single-Handedly Ruin the Planet? (2018) - <AUTHOR> http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2018/10/bolsanaros-amazon-deforestation-accelerates-climate-change.html <comment><USER2> It's not as if Xi Jinping would make the same decisions ifhe suspected he was the last human language speaker on our planet.</comment>


Service Deployment As an API Startup - <AUTHOR> Right now we have multiples cloud providers who lead us with the issue to choose one, so we have our scripts to setting up in that particular provider we choosed.
What if a service let you choose whatever provider, services or infrastructure you want?
Every cloud provider have something similar, AWS marketplace, DigitalOcean one apps, etc. But those does only give us only simpler apps (wordpress, ghost, etc).
I don't know if there are something similar, but I'm building a service to do something I've named (Automation as an API / Setup as a API) with no particular objective to force that names.
The service will let users to choose the software and the infrastructure that adapt to their needs (multiples vps, load balancing, vpn, etc). Then the service will generate and API endpoint with the payload information to use, so their can use it in their software, pipelines, or share it to let others try that setup. <comment><USER2> It sounds like you are talking about things similar to CloudFormation and Terraform.

Have you used those?</comment>


HN now requiring Google recaptcha to login - <AUTHOR> Can we get rid of this? I'm pretty sure it's been universally discussed here how insecure it is and how it allows google to track our movements. <comment><USER2> It's on because HN is under attack by a botnet. Sorry; we know people hate it and we don't like it either. The plan is to replace it with a different approach, but this is not likely to happen during the current attack. However, if you (i.e. anyone) email firstname.lastname@example.com we can put your username on a whitelist to exempt you.

<comment><USER3> I would like to have my username added to the whitelist. Thanks.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20783482](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20783482)

</comment><comment><USER5> Are you sure? I just logged out and back in and it worked without any Google mess loading.

<comment><USER6> Yes, I'm getting the recaptcha every time I re-login.

<comment><USER5> Ugh. Apparently this happens when HN is under attack. Not sure if the cause justifies the means in this case. For many HN'ers having their HN account associated with their other Google database entries or employment records would be a line they surely do not want to cross.</comment></comment></comment>


A Developer's Month as an Illustrator - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/learning-lab/a-developers-month-as-an-illustrator-718aaea90233 <comment><USER2> Nice illustrations !</comment>


Awesome new SQL syntax - for developers - <AUTHOR> http://forr.st/~4LY

<comment><USER2> The author seems to be mistaking "simpler" with "terse." There are a lot of people that actually _like_ a certain level of verbosity as it can help with comprehension.

<comment><AUTHOR> There's no mention of it being "simpler"...

<comment><USER3> _\-- Even complex operations could be expressed more simply_

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Please, drop the "awesome" from the title.

<comment><AUTHOR> The awesome stays

<comment><USER4> But this is not awesome.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I can't see the comments on that site (maybe adblock is killing them?), so this may be a duplicate, but I would suggest reading Date's "SQL and Relational Theory" and looking at Tutorial D (an alternative to SQL) before implementing this. At the very least it would clarify how you might use sets and where you need to worry about things like ordering if you are going to reproduce SQL faithfully.

</comment><comment><USER6> The author forgot that in order to be successful in business environment SQL must be readable by advanced business users (with help of developers). "Awesome new SQL syntax" is clearly for developers only and is not not suitable for business users.

<comment><USER7> I'm aware that sql was originally intended to be used by non technical business users but I've never known a single one that did. Have you had experience with people that do?

<comment><USER6> Yes I worked with some business people who understand SQL (at least somewhat).

Any business analyst worth its salt understand and can write at least simple SQL (to pull the data from database).

But even if business folks on your current project do not care about understanding SQL,your next project would have such people. So it would be very helpful if SQL version you have experience with is business-friendly.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Not clear if this is a domain specific language that would generate SQL, but when I was working for the big enterprise players they always had a way to abstract SQL running against several DB engines... (one of 'em called it meta- sql).

There was a significant effort to push this, and it was only successful because it was embedded into the dev environment of the enterprise software.

Great idea, but the many different versions of SQL syntax will be a pain to properly implement. I'd suggest staying with a single DB engine, then branching to others.

</comment><comment><USER9> I sympathize with the effort, but I think this is the wrong approach. SQL is often difficult/annoying to write because you don't do it very often- maybe once a week, maybe once a month, maybe less. The syntax is acceptable, but it's very different from the various languages I work with on a regular basis, and occasionally you forget things.

With this, you have even less muscle memory, since maybe one hobby project you work on will use it, making recall, comprehension, and debugging that much more difficult.

<comment><AUTHOR> I agree with this except I use SQL day in-day out... so shorter syntax would actually save me time

<comment><USER9> what do you do, out of curiosity? I often forget that not everyone lives in my little corner of the development universe.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Here's the awesome new SQL syntax that I use: <http://sequel.rubyforge.org/>

Examples: [http://sequel.rubyforge.org/rdoc/files/doc/querying_rdoc.htm...](http://sequel.rubyforge.org/rdoc/files/doc/querying_rdoc.html)

<comment><AUTHOR> That's ORM and whole load of other sweetness... This is just SQL syntax... only shorter

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> It's been done, and pretty well: <http://htsql.org/>

<comment><AUTHOR> Awesome!

<comment><USER12> You really like that word, don't you?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Surprisingly close to something I've been thinking about, and working on a bit in my spare time, for me:

         :table(id=1) => SELECT * FROM table WHERE id = 1

Hadn't thought about mutation, only selecting though.

</comment><comment><USER14> I like that someone is trying to come up with a better SQL syntax, and agree that many existing OO wrappers (and NoSql query syntaxes) end up making it more difficult to write queries. But this proposal seems to make things a little too brief for my taste (what's the difference between < and > again?).

I wonder if there's more to be gained by developing shorthand for more complex bits of SQL. For example, I've always been annoyed by the group by syntax, which seems redundant since the SQL interpreter should be able to determine which SELECT columns to group by (all columns that aren't aggregate functions).

</comment><comment><USER15> His version is just too much more harder to read...

</comment><comment><USER16> Has the author never seen an ORM before?</comment>


How to Make a Beautiful LED Lamp and Control It with Mobile - <AUTHOR> https://thestempedia.com/project/diy-dabble-controlled-led-lamp/ <comment><USER2> Quite expensive for the target group, not clear how it's better than, say, RPi?

(Also, the LEDs will likely overheat and degrade when mounted on the cardboard. And I'd muchly prefer lamp with physical knob on it. But that's probably not the point.)</comment>


Founders should be CEOs - <AUTHOR> http://yoda.posterous.com/founders-should-be-ceos <comment><USER2> Unfortunately, I've been close to a couple of companies where the founders, while they did have the original drive to create the company, have no idea how to manage a business. These are companies founded by 23 year old kids with no management experience or really anything other than some college - like many tech startups. The company cultures have needed up poisonous, the companies have no structure. Customer service and general organization is abysmal and it's visible from the outside. So, not all founders should be CEOs.</comment>


This Is How an Aerospace Engineer Designs Hardware Products - <AUTHOR> https://www.fictiv.com/resources/spotlight/hardware-lessons-from-roost

<comment><USER2> James, Roost designer, here. Happy to chat modulus, moments of inertia, design/analysis tools, best 3D printed materials, MIL-Specs, slip fits, molding shrinkage/theory, etc.

3D printing is an absolute game changer, but I've found to make it work to your best advantage in validating and removing uncertainty from your design, it takes a thought-thru approach. The good thing is prints are relatively cheap, and you do always learn by breaking things :)

</comment><comment><USER3> "In aerospace if you launch a vehicle, you can't go fix it," James says. "It's 10,000 miles in the air by the time you realize something's wrong!" \- And I think that I get nervous during deployments...

<comment><USER2> Most of aerospace lives in a 6mo-1year time between deployements/launches. And then Elon and SpaceX "deploy" every week or two it seems, absolutely blows the mind how they are going about it.</comment></comment>


Announcing Newspack - <AUTHOR> https://newspack.blog/ <comment><USER2> When I first read that Google is funding WordPress development, I was honestly expecting that Automattic would use that money to update their code base. It's horrible 15 year old code that has no namespaces, autoloading, or any of the features introduced in PHP 5.3 or later.

It unfortunately looks like they are trying to shove AMP down the throats of small scale news publishers and yet charge them $1-2K to host a same old WordPress site, quite possibly with Gutenberg, and now with AMP on top.

Thanks I hate it.</comment>


It only takes India a month to set up a better election than the US - <AUTHOR> https://qz.com/1570687/how-indias-massive-2019-election-will-work/ <comment><USER2> "Voter ID cards are delivered in person too"

In the US, there are groups of people that want to get rid of voter ID laws, so you don't actually need an ID to vote. If it truly isn't about voter fraud, why not keep the laws and get IDs out to the people that don't have them.

It seems to be working in India.</comment>


We Really Are Born with a Natural Fear of Spiders and Snakes, New Study Shows - <AUTHOR> https://www.sciencealert.com/deep-unshakeable-fear-spiders-no-random-quirk-fate-born-arachnophobia <comment><USER2> I believe it. My three-year-old was in my lap when I was mousing around and did something that didn't work. But my older son had been messing with the settings and instead of a Bing! got a dog growling.

He was out the door in like 2 seconds. And he'd never met a dog in his life at that point. Yet he knew.</comment>


Systems Programming in Distributed, Multicore World with Go, Rust, and Parasail - <AUTHOR> https://docs.google.com/viewer?a=v&pid=forums&srcid=MTM1Nzg0MDEwNzUyNTU3MjA2MDkBMTA5MjQ4NzMyOTM0MzU0MTc0OTEBRmM0Unk2OHZlODhKATAuMQEBdjI

<comment><USER2> This article pops up every so often, so again I should emphasize that the concurrency story in Rust has changed greatly in the interim (and will continue to change as new approaches to concurrency are fleshed out in the stdlib).

<comment><AUTHOR> Can someone experienced in both Rust and Go comment on how the two languages compare regarding concurrency? Is it more flexible having it in stdlib vs being baked into the language? I regard myself as fairly experienced in Go and find its concurrent primitives really straightforward to use. The whole goroutines-channels-select package feels like a very powerful and easy to use tool for concurrent code (though you can still shoot yourself in the foot).

<comment><USER3> It is a great deal more flexible having concurrency constructs built as library features as opposed to baked into the language. If the constructs provided don't make the same performance tradeoffs that your use case demands, you can build your own. These can provide safe, statically verified APIs by leveraging Rust's ownership and lifetime semantics.

Unfortunately channel selection and futures are still pretty raw at the moment (it remains to be seen if it will be ready for 1.0), but other constructs such as threads, channels and mutexes are looking pretty strong for 1.0.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Here is a video of a talk the author, Tucker Taft, gave about the ParaSail language at Mozilla last year:

[https://air.mozilla.org/region-based-storage-management- para...](https://air.mozilla.org/region-based-storage-management-parasailing- without-a-garbage-chute/)

</comment><comment><USER5> Seems like this is a better source of the article: [http://parasail- programming-language.blogspot.com/2013/04/sy...](http://parasail-programming- language.blogspot.com/2013/04/systems-programming-with-go-rust-and.html)

</comment><comment><USER6> Unfortunately, it's a "why X is great, by the vendors of X" article. It's an ad for ParaSail, which is too new (and possibly too weird) to have much traction yet.

</comment><comment><USER7> Note that the document seems to be from the spring of last year.

I think it is interesting that Parasail has no explicit pointers and only uses value semantics. This means that no garbage collection is needed: the storage associated with a variable is freed when the variable goes out of scope, or when the variables value is set to _null_ (and yes, you must have a value of type Optional T in order to set it to null). I thought that having pure value- semantics would be too costly in a language, but apparently that kind of solution has its place after all.

<comment><USER8> can you clarify how value semantics are costly compared to garbage collection/explicit pointers?

<comment><USER7> As far as I understand, and if no extra care is taken on the part of the programmer: the extra copying, since you would have to copy over the data from one variable to another instead of just using and moving around pointers. In Parasail's case, you can choose to use "move" (move value from left side to over to the right side) and "swap" (swap the values of the left and right side), which will avoid the copying.</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: What to do when deep interest/specialty isn't a big nascent opportunity? - <AUTHOR> (Yet.)<p>Especially in the context of being a student and carving an academic path, it's unclear whether I'll regret pursuing such a deep interest (that may or may not result in $$$ value in the future), or if pursuing the big, nascent fields of tomorrow will be futile if I don't possess deep interest in them. <comment><USER2> Questions like this only get useful answers if you come clean with the details.</comment>