Putin's nuclear torpedo and Project Pluto - <AUTHOR> https://scottlocklin.wordpress.com/2015/12/31/putins-nuclear-torpedo-and-project-pluto/ <comment><USER2> > 65,000 lbs, 80 feet long, with the terrifying code name, SLAM (Supersonic, > Low Altitude Missile), or … "project Pluto." This thing was perilously close > to being built. They tested the engines at full scale and full power at > Jackass Flats, and the guidance system was good enough they used essentially > the same thing in the Tomahawk cruise missile.

For those who wish to read more about it:

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

And for those who want to see a very interesting kind of doomsday in which this superweapon is used:

[http://www.infinityplus.co.uk/stories/colderwar.htm](http://www.infinityplus.co.uk/stories/colderwar.htm)

A most enjoyable short story.

<comment><USER3> Nuclear powered cruise missiles also feature in _Missile Gap_ by the same author - ICBMs not being able to work for interesting reasons.

<comment><USER4> * Waves _

<comment><USER3> As someone who was a teenager in the late 70s and early 80s both _A Colder War_ and _Missile Gap_ appeal to my morbid fear of, and powerful fascination with, all things nuclear warish :-)

<comment><USER4> I'm about your age, then. (Born 1964, was 25 when the Berlin Wall came down: where I grew up, lived, went to school, and attended university was never more than 10km from a WarPac strategic nuclear target.)

<comment><USER3> Out of interest, were you writing perl in Edinburgh about '95? Because I have a very vague suspicion we may have met!

<comment><USER4> Yes. (At fma Ltd, who had Demon Internet's web support business until early 1997.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> > Soviet Navy sunk this idea, in part because it only had a range of 25 miles > (meaning it was basically a suicide mission), but also, according to > Sakharov's autobiography, some grizzled old Admiral put it "we are Navy; we > don't make war on civilian populations…"

If it was for coastal destruction why not drop it to the bottom and then swim away and let it denotate in safety.

But in general why even bother, why not launch the 20M warhead as an ICBM and detonate above the target zone. Wouldn't water just dissipate the energy and waste it? This sounds like science fiction more than anything. Kind of like how we trolled Soviet Union with Star Wars.

BTW: Nuclear torpedos existed since at least late 50s and almost started WWIII around the Cuban Missile Crisis times. There was even a hero who saved the world related to it: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vasili_Arkhipov](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vasili_Arkhipov).

<comment><USER6> > Wouldn't water just dissipate the energy and waste it?

Right there in the article:

"The idea is, if you build a big enough bomb and blow it off in coastal waters, it will create a 1000 foot high _nuclear tidal wave_ that will physically wipe out coastal cities and Naval installations, as well as pollute them with radioactive fallout."

"Worse still: blowing up a 1-100 megaton device in coastal mud will make lots of nasty fallout. Sodium-24 ( _from the salt in the water_ ) is deadly."

<comment><USER5> > it will create a 1000 foot high nuclear tidal wave that will physically wipe > out coastal cities and Naval installations, as well as pollute them with > radioactive fallout."

That sounds unrealistic especially if it insunuates a device will wipe all all the East coast cities.

It seems anything they have will be able to wipe out all the stuff they want to wipe out just with ICBMs.

If this ever comes into play it is all over anyway.

<comment><USER6> > That sounds unrealistic especially if it insunuates a device will wipe all > all the East coast cities.

Well, they'd have to use more than one.

> It seems anything they have will be able to wipe out all the stuff they want > to wipe out just with ICBMs.

The idea is that this sort of weapon is a response to US anti-ICBM systems, so Russia can maintain their MAD.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Three issues with the physics behind some statements re project pluto's.

(1) Doing damage with sonic booms. Not happening. Sonic booms do not cause serious damage. Breaking windows, scaring wildlife, keeping people up. They aren't breaking down doors. Much of our assumptions about sonic booms comes from the anti-Concorde movement that in turn is political. Even at mach3+, this thing is tiny compared to concorde and its wake would not be a weapon. The mythbusters covered this well.

(2) Fallout from the exhaust. The russians actually flew a direct cycle nuclear (ramjet-style) engine, the Tu-95LAL. The pilots died painfully, but it didn't contaminate any large area. The americans ran it on theirs on a test stand for five minutes. How is that test area now? To get the equivalent 5-minutes of overflight this thing would have to do tight laps for years and years.

(3) Flying at Mach3 at low level. Yes it can be done, but not for years or even days. At that speed/altitude the craft is well into the "thermal thicket" where friction and compression heating of the air warms the aircraft. With no fuel to burn (to dump heat) and nowhere cool to radiate, this missile would need some magic cooling system. That highspeed dash can only be a dash, which also impacts (1) and (2) above.

<comment><USER8> 1) The sonic booms are from this thing moving at only a few hundred feet overhead. Concorde was also designed with efficiency in mind: sonic booms lower efficiency. I doubt as SLAM was, since it doesn't "burn" fuel. The airframe isn't even area ruled. I doubt it would flatten a modern steel reinforced concrete building without falling on it, but it would certainly break windows and damage some structures.

2) Yes, it was relatively clean with no reactor damage when tested on a stand for 5 minutes. I suspect a few days or weeks of flying at tree level the reactor would physically decay. Breathing uranium/beryllium dust seems unpleasant to me.

3) It was definitely designed to fly at low level at Mach 3 for at least as long as it takes to drop all its bombs. What happens after that is kind of irrelevant, but whatever it is is guaranteed to make a mess. If you stop to think about it; this is inherently a high temperature device. Whatever they were using for electronics and servos would have had to deal with this. It would be interesting to know how some of these subsystems worked for certain.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> The first link in the article is quite interesting (the current project is named Status-6)

[https://foreignpolicy.com/2015/11/12/putins-doomsday- machine...](https://foreignpolicy.com/2015/11/12/putins-doomsday-machine- nuclear-weapon-us-russia/)

also Russian wikipedia has a longer article on this beast

[https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%A1%D1%82%D0%B0%D1%82%D1%83...](https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%A1%D1%82%D0%B0%D1%82%D1%83%D1%81-6)

it says that this contraption is straight out of Dr. Strangelove

* once it is on its way then it can't be recalled

* also they plan to put Cobalt near the fusion core, making it a cobalt bomb, just like in Dr. Strangelove ( [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cobalt_bomb](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cobalt_bomb) )

* Russian wikipedia says that this outrage is supposed to counter US Anti ballistic missiles. (Again Dr. Strangelove - the doomsday device was supposed to counter a massive ballistic missile buildup - for a fraction of the cost).

What worries me is that the worlds elites seem to be a bit less rational than what we had during the cold war ... The Russians seem to be a lot more saber rattling than the Soviet leadership. (I may be wrong here; the defense council is said to have considered the nuking of China during the 1969 border conflict [http://www.scmp.com/article/714064/nixon-intervention- saved-...](http://www.scmp.com/article/714064/nixon-intervention-saved-china- soviet-nuclear-attack) )

<comment><USER10> what the hell is NUKEMAP 3D? it's in the russian wiki, never heard of it. [http://nuclearsecrecy.com/nukemap3d/](http://nuclearsecrecy.com/nukemap3d/)

<comment><USER9> i think it is supposed to calculate the effect of a blast - given such parameters as height of detonation and charge, it estimates the fallout and how it is spread out by prevailing winds. They used to have a paper-wheel calculator for that [https://www.fourmilab.ch/bombcalc/](https://www.fourmilab.ch/bombcalc/) ; this is the online graphical version for the 21st century.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Worth it for this alone:

"Yes, I would have worked on project SLAM: as far as I can tell, it was the most epic redneck project ever funded by the US government. Not that we should have built such a thing, but holy radioactive doomsday smoke, Batman, it would have been a fun job for a few years."

Reminds me of this old bit of Backwoods Fun: [http://www.netfunny.com/rhf/jokes/89q2/origtopfus.366.html](http://www.netfunny.com/rhf/jokes/89q2/origtopfus.366.html)

<comment><USER12> Sounds good, but I think you could probably skip the 8-week timer.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> The article paints a very harsh criticism of the current US "established experts" on Russia. I wonder why such an important designation is being appropriated by these "fools".

</comment><comment><USER14> Nuclear torpedos or Project Pluto is not what I'm most afraid of. This one is:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_Hand_(nuclear_war)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_Hand_\(nuclear_war\)) "An example of fail-deadly deterrence, it can automatically trigger the launch of the Russian intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) if a nuclear strike is detected by seismic, light, radioactivity and overpressure sensors."

<comment><USER5> Interesting, why are you afraid of it? Should you be more afraid if it wasn't there. Idea behind it makes so much sense. Its main reason for existence is to handle crazy twitchy hands of nervous people at the top of the Soviet (Russian) govt.

The idea is if they think there is an attack, say from a failed sensor, without Perimeter they'll be more likely to press the trigger while they still have time, before they are wiped out and never get a chance to retaliate. With Perimeter, they just activate it, and it will increase the chance of retaliation even if initial attack (presumably from US) succeeds. So in result they'll be less twitchy, more calm and as a result everyone lives happier, longer lives longer on earth.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> The upside of this story is once after this kind of weaponry is fired off anywhere on earth there will be one hell of an economic vacuum and a lot of startup opportunities. Considering, of course, you're one of the lucky few million left alive on this planet :-).

<comment><USER16> Indeed I already have sorted enough caps to seed my own radroach farm when the day comes....

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> 1000m waves doesn't really sound believable.

<comment><USER12> He said 1000 feet, which makes it about ten times as tall as that big Tsunami in Alaska in 1958. If you look at the description of the wave created by the Baker shot at Bikini Atoll, it wasn't nearly that high:

"The disturbance created by the underwater burst caused a series of waves to move outward from the center of the explosion across the surface of Bikini lagoon. At 11 seconds after the detonation, the first wave had a maximum height of 94 feet and was about 1,000 feet from surface zero. This moved outward at high speed and was followed by a series of other waves. At 22,000 feet from surface zero, the ninth wave in the series was the highest with a height of 6 feet."

I think the 1000 feet mentioned in this article might come from a misinterpretation of "1000 feet from surface zero" which just means 1000 feet from the center of the explosion.

[http://www.abomb1.org/nukeffct/enw77b2.html](http://www.abomb1.org/nukeffct/enw77b2.html)

[Edited because I can't read and was off by an order of magnitude on my first try.]

<comment><USER18> Doesn't this say that the 1958 Tsunami was 100 ft, not 1,000 ft, in height?

> the sudden displacement of water resulted in a megatsunami that destroyed > vegetation up to 1,722 feet (525 m) above the height of the bay and a wave > that traveled across the bay with a crest reported by witnesses to be on the > order of 98 feet (30 m) in height.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1958_Lituya_Bay_megatsunami](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1958_Lituya_Bay_megatsunami)

<comment><USER12> Ah, you're right: "A tsunami with a record run-up height of 1720 feet..."

I guess I should read harder.

<comment><USER19> Can anyone help me out with how the run-up height is ~17x greater than the wave height? This is because the wave hits the shore and the volume of water in the wave gets squished thin, making it temporarily higher?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Humans are just too "clever" on destroying ourselves! Why can't we build something for improving our world?

</comment><comment><USER21> That torpedo is for military targets in water, such as carrier. It is too small to cause tsunami, or to have much effects on ground targets.

<comment><USER22> The description of the torpedoed from the leaked Russian document, when translated, says: "destroy important economic installations of the enemy in coastal areas and cause guaranteed devastating damage to the country's territory by creating wide areas of radioactive contamination, rendering them unusable for military, economic or other activity for a long time".</comment></comment>


Rails 5.2 (RC1): Active Storage and Beyond - <AUTHOR> https://evilmartians.com/chronicles/rails-5-2-active-storage-and-beyond <comment><USER2> Nice! Active Storage is a welcome addition, as file uploads are used in probably 90% of apps...

Here are the full docs, for anyone interested: [http://edgeguides.rubyonrails.org/active_storage_overview.ht...](http://edgeguides.rubyonrails.org/active_storage_overview.html)

Worth noting is that direct upload to cloud providers is supported already! Really nice, a crucial feature IMO – I had created my own set of libraries of deal with this in the past, so we'll see how this stacks up.</comment>


Deep South Secessionists Working with California Liberals for Peaceful Secession - william-cooper What if I told you common sense Americans everywhere can see behind that veil and are waking up? There are some of us that are tired of paying congress to work half the year and argue, so we have come up with a peaceful solution.
Secession is the legal process of a state leaving the Union. We've been taught for years that this is treason and wrong.
According to Article III of the Constitution, treason is defined as making war against the states, and the constitution does not mention secession ONCE. Neither does it say that we are indivisible or a permanent union.
The idea we are "indivisible" comes from the pledge of allegiance, which was written by a socialist named Francis Bellamy.
Right now, a new movement in SC has launched called Palmetto State Independence, and they are working with CalExit and other grassroots movements in Texas, Vermont, New Hampshire, Alaska and Hawaii to see a peaceful secession in our lifetime.
This could happen. The only legal decision on secession is the case of Texas vs. White, which explicitly says that secession could happen through "consent of the states"...
Our vision is that once California secedes, we can form a coalition of red and blue states that govern themselves in almost every way, but still come together as Americans for issues like defense, humanitarian aid, etc. Check out the link for more info...
http://www.facebook.com/palmetto.independence <comment><AUTHOR> Why do you hate America?

J/k but seriously, this is not the place for this discussion.

</comment><comment><USER2> Ok so we all secede because of small differences that we can't work through right now, and then authoritarian Chinese Communists take over the world. Sounds like a great idea.</comment>


E. Dijkstra: Computer science is paralyzed by accepting this moron as their typical customer. - <AUTHOR> http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/misc/vanVlissingenInterview.html

<comment><AUTHOR> I have always admired Dijkstra and feel sorry for myself for arriving to Austin too late. And this quote is something I wish I could have had a discussion with the man about:

 _"I feel that the effort to use machines to try to mimic human reasoning is both foolish and dangerous. It is foolish because if you look at human reasoning as is, it is pretty lousy; even the most trained mathematicians are amateur thinkers. Instead of trying to imitate what we are good at, I think it is much more fascinating to investigate what we are poor at. It is foolish to use machines to imitate human beings, while machines are very good at being machines, and that is precisely something that human beings are very poor at. Any successful AI project by its very nature would castrate the machine."_

<comment><USER2> Seems that was the original rationale behind computers, as intelligence augmentors.

<comment><USER3> Maybe digital computers, yes, but before that a "computer" was more of a job description.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> My favorite quote:

 _Lisp was great at the time of its inception if only for a radically new way of using machines. It has suffered the fate of having been elevated to a status of de facto standard with all its defects. Despite its conceptual novelty a lot of the design of Lisp is terribly amateurish even by the standards of the time. When I read the first manual, the Lisp 1.5 manual, published in 1961, I could not believe my eyes. It was an extremely poor language. Now it has become the defacto standard of the AI community, which now suffers from Lisp, the way the rest of the world suffered from Fortran._

</comment><comment><USER3> Is Computer science paralyzed by accepting E. Dijkstra's research and comments as valid?

<comment><AUTHOR> Did you bother to read the interview?

<comment><USER3> yes, very much so. Just thought it was funny (it was how I read the headline at first). There was an amusing anecdote about a company not being allowed to start coding until 70% of the project time had elapsed - taken out of context (and there is a LOT of context) that is somewhat contrary to current practices.

<comment><AUTHOR> It is not. Depends on what do you refer to by "current practices". Dumb CRUD projects surely can be coded on the fly using so-called "agile" approach without much thinking. "Steer left or right as required" works very well for them.

The thing is, most of online discussions, _especially_ on YC are revolving around web-based CRUD to-do lists or something similar, whose complexity (something Dijkstra was very much concerned about) is close to zero.

Therefore "current pratices" cannot be used as a good example of software engineering in general, since most "engineers" are too busy dreaming of getting rich by implementing a high school programming project over a weekend and selling it to google.

I am fully aware that I do not represent the common "spirit" of this board by stating these views, but there is no way in hell you can do software for F-22's pilot's helmet can be done using "current practices" you're referring to. In fact, the best "current practice" (as some MBAs believe) is to outsource your typical CURD job to India. Hard to argue with that.

<comment><USER5> Yeah, that's why the "real" government projects are such outstanding successes. Because pour millions for over a decade only to find out at the end that your components don't integrate is a GREAT idea.

True, a lot of the applications developed today are crap. But a lot of the large scale applications can benefit the same way from test driven development, user stories and iterative development. The problem is a lot of folks overreact to agile and think it means doing no design or thinking at all. That's simply not the case.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This one is timeless: "I have said it before in public and I am perfectly willing to repeat it that someone introduced to computers via Basic is in all probability mentally mutilated beyond redemption. That is no joke. A major branch of the Siberian Academy of Arts and sciences is aimed at keeping Basic out of Siberian high schools."

<comment><USER7> I'm sorry but it's bullshit. I taught myself programming with BASIC when I was a kid, my first programs were horrible, unstructured things with GOTOs everywhere and redundant code and yet I was able to teach myself Scheme as well a few years later.

In fact, I find that I understand the point behind useful programming language constructs (and, yes, their beauty) after spending some time suffering due to the lack of them.

<comment><AUTHOR> You have a lot to prove. A giant as big as Dijkstra was, he publicly said that "corentin has mentally mutilated beyond hope of regeneration" and you're out to prove him wrong.

Good luck. :-) Makes me feel more lucky for starting with x86 assembly although I am not sure it's any better than BASIC. God bless us!

<comment><USER8> I don't think Dijkstra's absolutisms have aged particularly well. On some things he turned out completely right, on other things staggeringly wrong. In this article, look at his endorsement of the idea that coding should be left to the final 25% of a project's schedule. It's all very hit and miss, yet he delivers every claim in the same godlike tone of infallibility. The idea that maybe everything hasn't been figured out about software development - that in fact, maybe not very much has been - seems alien to him.

<comment><AUTHOR> Dijkstra could not predict that in 2007 to-do lists and message boards like Facebook will become multi-billion dollar businesses. Sorry to poop on your beliefs, but "agile" BS can be applied only on CRUD projects that have nothing in common with Computer Science.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> "Q You are speaking of the leading edge of research of computer languages..... A Yes, What it is again in danger of being supported to death because one of the hopes of functional programming is that in the execution of programs written in a functional style it will be easier to exploit a lot of concurrency."

Interesting - well I guess that statement is over 20 years old, but probably still holds true. It also explains his other opinions.

</comment><comment><USER9> "You should realize that in any field the time lag, the delay between a significant scientific progress and its acceptance by the scientific community at large not to mention the moment that it finds its way into a product should be measured in generations."

</comment><comment><USER10> "... if the formal definition of a feature gets very messy and complicated, then you should not ignore that warning."

\-- sounds like pg taking about Common Lisp loop.</comment>


Two years of production Go at CloudFlare - <AUTHOR> http://blog.cloudflare.com/what-weve-been-doing-with-go <comment><USER2> Golang is _perfect_ for DNS: its concurrency model matches that of DNS extremely well, its standard library is heavily informed both by Unix and by Internet protocols, and its fast and simple. That's unsurprising, since Golang's charter was to modernize C/C++, and DNS is essentially an expression of 1980's C code style.

<comment><USER3> Go is _perfect_ for almost every kind of server!

Though handling DNS requests over UDP is pretty easy and fast in almost any language. TCP connections are much more pleasant to handle by spawning a goroutine per connection. I do assume using goroutines is slower than multiplexing though, but still plenty fast.

<comment><USER4> _I do assume using goroutines is slower than multiplexing though, but still plenty fast._

Surely, the goroutine model is just an abstraction _built on_ multiplexing? As in, it uses the exact same syscalls that a multiplexing server written in C would use, except instead of storing state explicitly in a connection structure, it's stored implicitly in the goroutine's stack. The main (only?) real difference is code structure and thus the dispatch mechanism to where in the connection handling code processing should resume: In the goroutine, you're literally storing the instruction pointer and jumping straight to it. In the hand-written case, you'll probably go through some buffering code and an explicit state machine.

Basically, Go and its goroutines save you reinventing the connection state capture and resuming code for every single protocol you implement - it comes for free as part of the language. (you can make C do similar things with makecontext/swapcontext plus some extra plumbing code of course) Performance wise it should be a pretty close call: resuming a goroutine will presumably cause a branch prediction miss (due to the change in function return pointer), whereas the multiplexed code will need to wind its way through the state machine logic - almost certainly also a branch prediction miss. CPU cache behaviour should likewise be similar (you're storing the same state either way).

<comment><USER3> This is true, but I'd be very surprised if you could beat the memory usage and performance of a while loop with epoll using goroutines. At least in the role of a DNS server. Now I want to test this...

<comment><USER4> Yeah, stateless datagram protocols are pretty much the optimal problem for unadorned async I/O.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> CloudFlare is awesome. They're living out one of my fantasies of productizing really well done front-end web serving infrastructure, which I love to see. They appear to have gathered solid team. And they're doing it with Go!

I'd love to see those libraries (sans proprietary modules) show up on GitHub!

<comment><USER5> [http://blog.cloudflare.com/open-source-two-way- street](http://blog.cloudflare.com/open-source-two-way-street)

<comment><USER6> Man, there are so many things I love about that blog post (the Go being the least of them). Wish you guys had a presence here in NYC!

<comment><USER7> I'm in NYC this week if you want to grab coffee. Always interested in talking to smart engineers interested in GoLang. Email: matthewatcloudflaredotcom cc: jennatcloudflaredotcom and we'll see if we can set something up.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I wonder how Lua fits into the picture at CloudFlare with this Go infrastructure, since CloudFlare is also a heavy user of Lua [1] as well and key financial sponsor of LuaJIT [2].

[1] [http://blog.cloudflare.com/pushing-nginx-to-its-limit- with-l...](http://blog.cloudflare.com/pushing-nginx-to-its-limit-with-lua)

[2] [http://luajit.org/sponsors.html#sponsorship_perf](http://luajit.org/sponsors.html#sponsorship_perf)

<comment><USER9> Every request that passes through CloudFlare goes through Lua. It has how we look up and apply a customer rules to a recess. We just recently realized a non-blocking logger option for Nginx [2] using Lua and are in the process of developing a new KT library [3] in Lua.

Here are the most recent lua libraries we have open sourced... [1] [https://github.com/agentzh/lua-resty-lock](https://github.com/agentzh/lua- resty-lock) [2] [http://github.com/cloudflare/lua-resty-logger- socket](http://github.com/cloudflare/lua-resty-logger-socket) [3] [http://github.com/cloudflare/lua-resty- kyototycoon](http://github.com/cloudflare/lua-resty-kyototycoon)

<comment><USER10> I love that you brought on agentzh to the team.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Nice writeup. Especially interesting to see that CloudFlare is using Go for its DNS service. I run a DNS hosting service ([https://www.SlickDNS.com](https://www.SlickDNS.com)) and currently use tinydns from the djbdns suite in my name servers, but I'm writing a drop-in replacement in Go. The goal is to make it much higher performance by using multiple goroutines (tinydns is a single process).

<comment><USER12> You can also write it in C and use lthread. It will be faster than what Go has to offer.

[https://github.com/halayli/lthread](https://github.com/halayli/lthread)

<comment><USER2> It will probably _not_ be significantly faster than Golang for this workload.

<comment><USER12> It can be. You have total control of memory layout. You can gain a lot of performance by considering locality of reference, slab allocators, and parsing DNS packets in general will most probably be much faster.

<comment><USER2> Golang also allows control over memory layout.

<comment><USER12> of course it does, but it does it in a way that aims to provide an overall good performance for all apps. But it doesn't mean that's the best performance you can get.

<comment><USER12> C doesn't control memory. brk() does. There are various malloc libraries out there to improve the way malloc manages memory.

But ideally you don't want to allocate memory at all. You want to have memory preallocated and preferably accessing a page that's still in cache. You can control memory pages in C because it doesn't manage that for you.

<comment><USER13> +1

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I want an independent write-up of Red October! Sounds really cool.

<comment><USER15> I'm not an expert, so take this speculation with a grain of salt, but I'd guess this is how it encrypts something in such a way as to require two people:

1\. Generate a key, and use it to encrypt and sign your payload. Nothing fancy here; just plain old symmetric encryption and authentication.

2\. Use Shamir's Secret Sharing to split the key into pieces. You need any two pieces to reconstruct the key. This is where the magic happens:

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shamir's_Secret_Sharing](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shamir's_Secret_Sharing)

3\. Encrypt-and-sign each piece with a secret key derived from its owner's password/passphrase using a secure KDF like scrypt.

4\. Throw away the keys, and put those encrypted pieces on disk.

Now you need passwords from any two people to decrypt the secret payload. Cool, right?

<comment><USER16> For millions of secrets and tens of people holding those secrets, there's a much more space-efficient solution. There's an added benefit that hiding each secret is plain vanilla RSA encryption.

Victor Shoup discovered a relatively straight forward way to take an RSA private key and apply Shamir secret sharing in a way that commutes with RSA public key operations. Just like Shamir secret sharing, each of the N shares of the secret is a point on a random polynomial on a finite ring (in this case, the set of quadratic residues modulo the key's public exponent). Each of the N secret holders, using their secret share, can generate a public share. Any T of the N public shares can be used to invert the RSA public key operation.

Shoup's threshold RSA signature scheme ([http://www.shoup.net/papers/thsig.pdf](http://www.shoup.net/papers/thsig.pdf)) when used for RSA encryption caries all of the caveats that using the raw RSA algorithm entails (use OAEP, etc.)

I'm really surprised Shoup-Cramer encryption is more famous than Shoup's threshold RSA algorithm.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Very good article,though i dont use go(yet) ,that's the kind of writeup i'd like to see more on HN home page.

</comment><comment><USER18> The "seamless binary upgrade" part is intriguing (unless it's just a reference to the fact that binaries are self-contained (which is indeed wonderful)).

<comment><USER19> I have a feeling they just change symlinks between self-contained binaries. Easy to upgrade or revert binaries.

<comment><USER9> We use a supervising process [1] that has bound the sockets and the pass in the file descriptors to Go process. When the new process is ready to take connections it sense a signal to the original process to shut down.

[1] [https://github.com/cloudflare/circus/commits/cloudflare2](https://github.com/cloudflare/circus/commits/cloudflare2)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Pretty cool stuff. How big is the team working on these Go projects?

</comment><comment><USER21> "The guarantees needed to avoid leaving the server in a bad state when handling panics would be impossible without the defer mechanism Go provides."

I'm only passingly familiar with defer, but I understand it to be equivalent to RAII in C++, Python's with statement, Common Lisp's unwind-protect, and others - does is actually provide something more, and if so, what?

<comment><USER22> Go's "defer" is not equivalent to RAII. It is function-scoped rather than block-scoped and has semantics based on mutating hidden per-function mutable state at runtime. For example:

        func Foo() {
            for i := 0; i < 5; i++ {
                if Something() {
                    defer Whatever()
                }
            }

            // ... the compiler can't tell how many
            // Whatever()s run here ...
        }

Compared to RAII as implemented in for example D with its "scope" statement, "defer" has much more complex semantics, inhibits refactoring since moving things to function bodies or inlining function bodies silently changes semantics, and cannot be optimized as easily, because of the dynamic aspects. IMHO, it has essentially no advantages over RAII and many disadvantages.

<comment><USER23> > defer inhibits refactoring since moving things to function bodies or > inlining function bodies silently changes semantics, and cannot be optimized > as easily, because of the dynamic aspects.

As someone who has written and reviewed hundreds of thousands of lines of Go code, I haven't observed this to be the case in practice.

RAII doesn't fit into Go, philosophically, as it lets you trigger hidden functionality on the creation or destruction of data structures, whereas a deferred function can only be run if there's a defer statement there in the code (where you can see it).

In Go, the only way to execute a block of code is to make a function call. There are no constructors, destructors, or any other kind of side effect to allocating or deallocating data structures. This brings a huge benefit in terms of readability and transparency.

Anyway, I'm not sure why we're comparing defer and RAII, because they're generally used for different purposes.

<comment><USER22> > As someone who has written and reviewed hundreds of thousands of lines of Go > code, I haven't observed this to be the case in practice.

Sure, a lot of suboptimal design decisions don't cause problems in practice. That doesn't change the fact that they're suboptimal, and in this case lead to worse performance.

> RAII doesn't fit into Go, philosophically, as it lets you trigger hidden > functionality on the creation or destruction of data structures, whereas a > deferred function can only be run if there's a defer statement there in the > code (where you can see it).

I'm focusing more on RAII as implemented with "scope" in D; whether stuff runs explicitly or implicitly is an orthogonal design choice (although I prefer implicitly running code since you need finalizers anyway in any GC'd language, including Go—so you might as well embrace it). With the "scope" statement you also always have to explicitly call the destructor, but in a lexically scoped way.

The main thing I find suboptimal with "defer" is the choice of dynamic mutable state as compared to lexical scoping.

> In Go, the only way to execute a block of code is to make a function call. > There are no constructors, destructors, or any other kind of side effect to > allocating or deallocating data structures. This brings a huge benefit in > terms of readability and transparency.

[http://golang.org/pkg/runtime/#SetFinalizer](http://golang.org/pkg/runtime/#SetFinalizer)

<comment><USER2> This appears to be a helper function used exclusively by the standard library to handle file descriptor closing (incidentally, the one issue I've had with Golang's concurrency model).

<comment><USER22> > This appears to be a helper function used exclusively by the standard > library to handle file descriptor closing (incidentally, the one issue I've > had with Golang's concurrency model).

But it's part of the public API. You can add a finalizer to any object. The semantics of Go say that finalizers are run automatically when the GC reclaims an object. So this statement is wrong: "In Go, the only way to execute a block of code is to make a function call. There are no constructors, destructors, or any other kind of side effect to allocating or deallocating data structures." It would be more correct to say "idiomatically, in Go people tend to prefer calling functions explicitly, and 'defer' encourages this."

I think the fact that it's used by the standard library to close file descriptors is actually really illustrative: you need finalizers in a GC'd language, otherwise you'll leak resources. Not all resources are stack-scoped. So implicitly running functions on deallocation is a necessary evil. You might as well embrace it in your language design.

<comment><USER2> It may be part of the "public API" solely because it needs to be made available to several different components of the standard library, which is itself at pains to implement itself primarily in Golang.

SetFinalizer feels like a low blow, here.

<comment><USER22> I don't see why it's relevant that the standard library as opposed to user code needs it. The standard library is a library like any other. It needs finalization functionality because you always need that functionality in a GC'd language.

File descriptors are just one case of resources that need finalization functionality to not leak: the same applies to GPU textures, X server resources, etc. etc.

<comment><USER24> You don't need finalization functionality in a GC'd language. If you imagine a language that lacks finalization functionality but has automatic memory reclamation, things turn out okay. Finalization functionality isn't something that sane programs depend on -- garbage collection of memory makes sense because if you run out of memory or allocate and remove pointers a lot of stuff, the garbage collector can naturally kick in and find you some more memory to use. If you allocate a bunch of file handles, does the garbage collector kick in when your OS tells you that you've run out of file descriptors?

<comment><USER22> > You don't need finalization functionality in a GC'd language. If you imagine > a language that lacks finalization functionality but has automatic memory > reclamation, things turn out okay.

Not in fault-tolerant message passing systems, to name just one obvious example. Suppose that you put a bunch of file objects into a buffered channel, and then the goroutine that was supposed to receive those objects panics. Your program wants to recover from panics with recover(). Who closes the file descriptors in those channels? Nobody owns them yet: they were in a channel and the goroutine that was supposed to receive them died.

You might be able to solve this by handing out references to the channel to another goroutine that is supposed to clean up the file descriptors, but this gets really complicated. This sort of thing is why Go is GC'd in the first place. It's much easier to just have the GC clean up the file descriptors in channels in which one endpoint has gone dead, and that's the sort of thing finalizers are for and I assume it's the reason that finalizers were built into Go.

<comment><USER24> Have the things in the channel be the equivalent of C#'s IDisposable or something, then the goroutine can clean them up itself.

<comment><USER25> Have you read pcwalton example?

How can the goroutine clean them if it is dead?

<comment><USER24> Sorry, the words coming out of my fingers didn't match the thought in my mind. The channel can dispose of them.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> I do part time IT and I have repeatedly wanted a more programatically friendly DNS and DHCP solution for our small network. dnsmasq doesn't have a great high-availability story, and BIND+ISCDHCP can be quite complicated to configure for high-availability (plus BIND doesn't seem to have convenient options such as expand-hosts from dnsmasq).

Does this mean Go is ready to use to make a 'simple' forwarding/caching DNS server with the ability to have DHCP update local hostnames? How about DNSSEC validation?

<comment><USER2> There's no official support for DNSSEC in Golang, but then, there's very very little support for DNSSEC in the real world. Which is just as well.

<comment><USER27> True, but then again, the de facto dns library ([https://github.com/miekg/dns](https://github.com/miekg/dns)) is simply amazing for all things DNS, including DNSSEC.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> CloudFlare is great stuff just wish they offered SSL on their free tier, should anyone really be running without?</comment>


Ask HN: Are there laws around aggregating and archiving news stories? - <AUTHOR>

I feel like I've heard there are laws in Germany at least that require news agencies to delete news articles published online after a certain period of time. Is this true? Are there laws in the U.S. similar to this? <comment><USER2> I'm not a lawyer.

I've never heard of any such law requiring anyone to delete their own database of content--as long as the content is legally acquired. Look at Lexus Nexus. Their whole business model is an online database of news dating back decades.</comment>


DEFCAD has been blocked in New Jersey - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/Radomysisky/status/1023580044072026112 <comment><USER2> I had a quick look at this site, as I had no idea what it is, apparently it's 3D gun printing.

Interestingly, their robots.txt disallows all indexing bots, so Google etc. show no descriptive info. This seems a rather odd thing to do ?</comment>


Samsung Focus – Unified Inbox; email, calendar, task, memo, and contacts - <AUTHOR> https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.samsung.android.focus <comment><AUTHOR> Hopefully this gets picked up as it is quite an AWESOME app. I posted 21 days ago: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13129002](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13129002)</comment>


When do YC W16 invites go out? - <AUTHOR> Just wondering :) <comment><USER2> \- rejection postmarked 1:59 pm for zejoop.com \- one view of founder video \- zero views of demo video \- I am a single founder \- this was my third YC application, all for Winter sessions

<comment><USER2> \- I don't want to live in a world where someone else is making the world a better place than Zejoop.com is making the world a better place

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Still haven't gotten a yay or nay yet, fingers aching from being crossed so long ;) I haven't seen anyone say they've been accepted yet on either this or this ([https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10467290](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10467290)) thread, only regjections, but a number of others still waiting for an answer one way or another.

</comment><comment><USER4> If you guys got an interview invite from YC and wish to practice beforehand, you can do so here: Pramp.com/YC/faq

</comment><comment><USER5> Got rejected too! I want to encourage everyone, it's not the end of the world. It's normal to be sad, but determination is one of the most valuable traits in an entrepreneur. I plan to reapply in the next session mainly because of the invaluable advice YC can give. Good luck guys!

</comment><comment><USER6> Has anyone already gotten an acceptance letter?

</comment><comment><USER7> Rejected. I hope for a better luck next time) Good luck to all you, guys!

<comment><AUTHOR> I got rejected for one of my startups, didnt receieve a yes or no for my other one. Is that a good thing?

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Tonight by midnight pt

<comment><AUTHOR> am i the only one thats nervous or what?

<comment><USER8> Not nervous but it just started snowing here so hoping for a reason to get the hell out of Wisconsin for a while lmao!

<comment><AUTHOR> We just had a terrible rainstorm and I just got water splashed at me by a car lol.

Lets hope the luck turns around.

<comment><USER9> Fortunately, your entry into YC is completely disconnected from the weather in your area.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> We got rejected too, on to techstars i guess lol.

</comment><comment><USER10> Got Rejected lol</comment>


Ask HN: Examples for great mission statements? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> Don't be evil. A great mission statement, if actually followed......</comment>


Soylent Subterfuge: When a Bad Joke Turns into a Business - <AUTHOR> http://www.priceplow.com/blog/soylent-subterfuge <comment><USER2> Soylent is definitely suspect. The idea that human nutrition can be boiled down to a minimal list of ingredients _that are the only things you should eat_ is nonsense.

That said, there's no reason to think this article is any better. Honestly, I didn't finish it, because as soon as it said that you might crave animal protein heavy products because of a protein deficiency I knew that the author was as full of it as what he or she is criticizing.

The citations look good until you start digging. One of them cites a naturalnews.com article (not a peer-reviewed journal) that in turn cites the Weston A. Price Foundation site, a towering bastion of pseudoscientific nonsense. I wonder how many of actual scientific articles cited even support the points the author cites them for.

In summary, the nutrition science in this article is about as poor as the nutrition science behind Soylent.

<comment><USER3> > The idea that human nutrition can be boiled down to a minimal list of > ingredients that are the only things you should eat is nonsense.

It's perfectly sensible that there is a mathematically minimum sufficient diet, or mathematically optimal diet, with the caveat that:

1\. There's a high probability that this varies for each definition of "you", and for different times of day / month / year / within a lifetime

2\. Soylent is, with almost perfect certainty, not it. But there is a nonzero chance that a purely soylent diet is healthier than the current median human diet.

Will we get there someday? Probably. I"d say there's a better than 50% chance it happens within the next century. Whether we want to get there is another story. FWIW, our bodies aren't really a whole lot more complex than feline or canine bodies, and we've managed to come up with a sufficiently nutritious kitty kibble (or at least, we think we have).

Remember, deciding what to eat is a decidedly modern problem, as is looking at food as a combination of nutrients. For the vast majority of human existence, nutrition consisted of avoiding starvation. When deciding between options, the proper answer was "all of the above".

<comment><USER4> > Whether we want to get there is another story.

NASA could probably have come up with a Soylent-like product by now, but they haven't. I guess that being stuck in a small can in space means that nice food becomes important.

So, on the ground, there are two hurdles. i) Portion control, ii) Choice.

Some people will not eat two scoops of ice cream. They will eat a pint of ice cream. They won't eat 2 cookies, they'll eat the packet of cookies. Some people will smear the cookies with peanut butter, and crumble them over the pint of ice cream.

Will Soylent help these people? What happens if someone eats double the recommended daily amount of Soylent? Or triple? Or quadruple?

Some people will walk into a supermarket, walk past all the fruit and vegetables, and into the doughnut aisle. Then they'll walk past the meat and fish and into the crisp / chip aisle. Then they'll go to the weird salt / sugar / fat / slop instant meal aisle and buy bizarre "food".

I have no idea how Soylent will help them.

<comment><USER3> As far as I can figure out NASA's original solution to space food WAS a Soylent-like product. Astronauts responded by smuggling a corned beef sandwich into space. [1]

The point of Soylent is to separate the pleasure from eating. Rather than being a emotional, sensory activity, treat eating with has all the excitement of popping a pill - insert nutrients into body. What do I eat? Soylent. How much? The amount it tells me to. The questions of "Do I eat the broccoli or the ice cream?" or "Do I have seconds?" are taken off the table.

I wss in the hospital for the better part of a week a year ago. They had me on the "nothing by mouth" diet for a couple days - simply an IV drip for nutrition, then a liquid diet for two more. When my friends came to visit, the first thing I said was something along the lines of "As soon as I get out of here we're getting the best cheeseburger in this city." Could that desire be trained away? I'm not sure.

[1]: [http://history.nasa.gov/Apollo204/zorn/grissom.htm](http://history.nasa.gov/Apollo204/zorn/grissom.htm)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5>
       In short, knocking your body out of its natural
       equilibrium state of ingesting/digesting/synthesizing
       /excreting cholesterol may swing the pendulum too far in
       the opposite direction.

       End of story: while your body might get along with
       cholesterol-free Soylent, the "gut decision" to
       disinclude a vital compound may prove to be short-
       sighted sometime down the road.

The words "End of story" and "may prove to be" do not belong in the same sentence, paragraph, thought, or visible on the same screen.

This is a hyper aggressive article that fails to impress.

</comment><comment><USER6> To be fair to Soylent, a lot of the subterfuge against this is "We don't understand the human body enough to do that yet", wouldn't the best way to find out is to try?

My biggest complaint about Soylent is that they turned their marketing to 11 and failed to mention the fact that long term studies haven't been done so be extra careful, however if people are willing to experiment then power to them.

As a final note while complete meal replacement is possibly out of our reach, partial replacement is already done extensively.

<comment><USER7> No, the best way to find out is not to try. The best way to find out is to study, on a meaningful sample size and with a well documented process and at least a modicum of scientific rigour.

<comment><USER8> This. FFS your body is not a car and you can't (well, not yet) replace parts of it if you fuck it up. You can't stop people from trying but I don't think most of them fully realise the danger they're putting themselves in.

<comment><USER9> Seconded. Playing with nutrition is the same as playing with any other chemical you do not understand very well. You can certainly do it, but chances are you will do the wrong thing and mess up.

The way I see the "we do not understand nutrition" argument is that we can tell some types of very bad nutrition: lack of vitamin C, lack of amino acids, etc. but we cannot design good nutrition. Soylent is bad. We can see that. However, if it was better, if it included all the known macro- and micronutrients int the ideal proportions, from some wholesome looking sources we could not tell whether it was actually good.

I am starting to come to the realization that all good kills us eventually, and all we are really trying to do is to find a diet that kills us the slowest.

<comment><USER10> I think most people are unlikely to exclusively drink Soylent. I tried Soylent, and rather enjoy the taste. I could see myself drinking it for breakfast instead of eating sugary cereal. If you're starting from the point of having perfect nutrition, you don't need Soylent. Most people, however, eat junk food and it's hard to eat well when you're busy. For the average person in a rush, replacing a meal with Soylent may be an improvement.

<comment><USER9> I will take a sugary cereal over Soylent for at least the reason that cereal typically has some fiber and iron in it. Also, just eat oatmeal. Less sugar, whole grain, more nutrition.

Or, if you insist on Soylent-like stuff, go with something that has been around for a bit longer: Ensure.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> It really comes down to this :

\- The guy is not a career nutritionist.

\- He's basically recreating the food they eat in Matrix (the second movie I believe)

\- He's making money off it.

#1 and #3 are pissing people off. I'm actually glad many people are offering to be guinea pigs for this because all-in-one fast food is a good tech to unlock.

<comment><USER12> Doesn't Ensure already exist?

<comment><USER13> Yes it does.

And it's made by Abbott Labs. I don't know how popular Ensure is, but Abbott's baby formulas are _literally_ the only source of nutrition for millions of growing and thriving babies every year.

I would rather buy a product from a real company than from some egotistical young hipsters who (most likely) are nothing more than a recent example of the Dunning-Kruger effect.

And if Soylent goes horribly wrong for them, perhaps the most apropos comment would be: "think of it as evolution in action".

<comment><USER14> If you have something specific to say about their science or tips and suggestions then please say it. Ad hominem is somewhat counter productive to the spirit of HN.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Perhaps I assume too much, but if nutrition and what one should eat were really as simple as what Soylent is trying to do, wouldn't NASA or the Soviet Space Program devised a solution like this for the Astronauts and Cosmonauts? Each program spent tons on researching anything and everything needed to go into space and at some point, I would presume their scientists would have proposed or tested an idea like this.

Edit: I mean that more as a statement of curiosity as to if they did any research and the results of it than as an argument (since there's flaws to it like the argument of variety and morale in long missions). I would guess the Soviets if not NASA would at least be interested in it due to the tight budget of their space program and the ideology of the government (perception of avoiding extravagance).

<comment><USER16> In the Mercury program, food looked like this (mmm Soylent-y) : [http://airandspace.si.edu/exhibitions/apollo-to-the- moon/onl...](http://airandspace.si.edu/exhibitions/apollo-to-the- moon/online/food.1.html)

Problem was that it wasn't particularly enjoyable.

During Gemini/Apollo food looked like this: [http://www.space1.com/Artifacts/Apollo_Artifacts/Apollo_Food...](http://www.space1.com/Artifacts/Apollo_Artifacts/Apollo_Food/apollo_food.html)

Anyone up for Catfood? Probably tasted a lot better than Mercury Tube food but not quite the same as mom's.

Today food looks like this: [http://www.nasa.gov/audience/formedia/presskits/spacefood/ga...](http://www.nasa.gov/audience/formedia/presskits/spacefood/gallery_jsc2003e63872.html)

And well..

[http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/7/70/Ast...](http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/7/70/AstronautsEatingBurgers.jpg/800px- AstronautsEatingBurgers.jpg)

Kinds like it does on Earth.

Some other fun tidbits: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_food#Apollo_program_.2819...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_food#Apollo_program_.281968-1975.29)

I think NASA and other space entities could come up with a super Soylent like substance for sustenance in space, but the trend towards normal food is apparent. I think it's safe to say that Astronauts are well disciplined and dedicated... and if they're not willing to put up with eating goop in a tube... Well I think it goes to show that people by large, even under extreme and alien circumstances, enjoy presentation and variety more than Mr. Rhinehart may believe (or like to suggest to us).

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> The first time I heard of Soylent and this guy I thought "here is a guy who is literally being killed by his own stupidity and does not know it". I can see people buying into this scam and it sucks. The problem is that Rob is a skinny, healthy looking guy. This diet, if it really is his full time source of nutrition, is going to have its effect on him sooner or later, but chances are that one of his clients, perhaps someone twice his age and weight, will suffer the consequences first.

<comment><USER17> When his story was originally shared on HN, I believe it made a point that his diet wasn't entirely Soylent and that he consumed normal meals once a week. I wouldn't be surprised if that combination could carry him for a long time.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> From reading the comments here and on other articles about Soylent, the argument seems to break down into two camps: Harmful until proven safe, or safe until proven harmful. And I really don't understand the mindset of the "safe until proven harmful" people.

</comment><comment><USER19> The immaturity and uselessness of this article(written by somebody in a competing market) doesn't support any fear, uncertainty, or doubt for me.

I vouch that if there continues to be market interest, and a lack of forceful interference(from say, a government); Soylent will become what it needs to be in order to succeed(safe, complete, and vetted).

</comment><comment><USER20> Why is everybody so negative about this? He's doing something weird, but he is still leaving himself open to scientific evidence, which is better than the average mystical / religious diet recommendation (chinese medicine, hinduism, vegetarianism) which mostly do not accept scientific evidence, and instead do their diets for unassailable moral/mystical reasons (balancing "qi", balancing hot/cold foods, purity obsessions, etc.)

People survive on life rafts eating flying fish and drinking rain water, for months at a time. Most people using soylent will not eat it for all their meals, and they will almost always be surrounded by other food they can eat if they start feeling bad. So I don't think it's a big deal, let him do what he wants!

<comment><USER21> So, a vegetarian diet is without science on its side despite plenty of evidence to the contrary (not listing any sources, there's plenty of information available on the subject), yet someone marketing a nutrient goo with obvious nutritional deficiencies as a complete food replacement is totally okay. That's some odd logic, pal.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> To me, the appeal of soylent is that it's such a compact food delivery system. I eat healthy food, but my portion control is all out of whack.

My hope is that a month of Soylent will help my stomach shrink and learn the proper signals telling me that I've had enough to eat.

<comment><USER9> Have you tried drinking lots of water with your meals? Especially carbonated water/Seltzer water? That tends to curb appetite very effectively for some people.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Interesting the assertion that 80g of protein is paltry. I happen to agree, as do many people I respect.

But many, many people (esp vegans) argue the opposite. The FDA, after years of avoiding an opinion, finally settled on 34-56g/day RDA for protein.

<comment><USER24> As a powerlifter I consume 200g of protein per day.

One thing you won't see is any IFBB pros or ANYONE with muscles drinking soylent...

Here's a good URL to read with lots of science. [http://examine.com/faq/how- much-protein-do-i-need-every-day....](http://examine.com/faq/how-much-protein- do-i-need-every-day.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> I am all for this since I rarely have time to enjoy food. However, I also understand that some of the nutrients probably can't be absorbed by the human body in that form, so for me, it'll be treated as a supplement. If they can do one thing that'll make me buy this. It'll be to change it into a cookie.

I mean c'mon, that gruel looks disgusting and the thing already tasts disgusting.

</comment><comment><USER26> The appeal of Soylent is cost and convenience. This advice to do bulk cooking instead is not helping in that regard.

<comment><USER27> Buying food in bulk = cheap Cooking food in bulk = convenient

<comment><USER28> Cooking food in bulk is anything but convenient. Where the hell do I put all of it? How do I track if it's still good to eat, etc.

<comment><USER29> In the fridge?

<comment><USER28> My fridge isn't that big.

<comment><USER30> Get a bigger fridge. It'll be less than a year on soylent and you get to eat actual real healthy food.

<comment><USER28> My fridge is exactly as large as the hole in my kitchen allows for it to be, and I have no place to put a second one.

Small condo is small :(

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> I agree with the article on the "If food is too hard… you're doing it wrong" section. I don't think that this means Soylent is worthless though, on the contrary, I think it's what makes it viable.

While I would never choose to live on just (or mostly) Soylent, as I enjoy food too much, I think it would be very useful to keep around.

Instead of something to replace food entirely, it could be reserved for when you're in a rush. I'm sure that Soylent for breakfast Mon-Fri is much better than nothing. If you're out of the house and need to grab lunch, I'm sure Soylent is healthier than McDonalds.

All the criticism of soylent I've seen is the completely reasonable (and almost certainly correct) assertion that it's not sustainable as the exclusive food source in the very long term. Like everything it should be done in moderation.

</comment><comment><USER27> I wouldn't eat the tasteless crap and this guy is spot on. However, some of these comments stating eating only this stuff vs eating all processed food isn't too far off.

At the very least, I would not use a fast carb like dextrose/glucose, I would say use a longer burning carb to reduce energy spikes and dips.

</comment><comment><USER32> While I am highly dubious of Soylent as a product, Rinehart's approach seem solid enough. The problem with Soylent, as I see it, is that no one formula is applicable to very many people. RR himself had regular blood work done and tweaked the formula heavily based on his body's response. Given that it's been several months and he is alive and seemingly healthy, I see no reason why this approach couldn't work for anyone else. As long as you throw in a couple meals of varied real food in every week for good measure, this really seems pretty safe.

</comment><comment><USER33> What do people think about soylent just replacing like 1-2 meals a day? And then you have your full course chicken breast and brown rice meal for dinner or something.

It seems like that might be a good compromise for people who are scared of their bones deteriorating, their kidneys waning, or their tissues slowly inflaming.

No one says you _must_ eat only soylent day-in and day-out. But it sure seems like a nice way to save time and money on, say, a dozen meals per week.

</comment><comment><USER34> when I was younger and lived in the USA, I had a diet of virtually only mcdonalds (and burritos). I survived.

this has got to be, at least slightly more nutritious. LOL, what's the big deal? I'm also like 100% sure this is better than what the starving africans are eating.

why doesn't he just provide some constructive improvements instead of a graphically enhanced rant, with the assumption that the entire world eats a balanced nutritional diet?

oh yea, the various arguments against the man (and other fallacies), are nice touches too... seriously, who cares dude? if he's such a super experienced nutritionist, why doesn't he make his own soylent v2.0?

disclaimer: never tried soylent, nor care to try it, but soylent did inspire me to make my own version of easily reproduced "food". it's still in experimentation, but ironically this article was informative. it's given me a few new ideas to improve my own blend (which uses almond butter instead of soy as a base). thanks!

<comment><USER35> McDonald's food contains a larger variety of foods and nutrients than Soylent. For example, a Big Mac has all of the following:

Beef, Salt, Black Pepper, Bleached Wheat Flour, Malted Barley Flour, Canola Oil, Soybean Oil, Pickles, Egg Yolks, Onion Powder, Mustard Seed, Vegetable Protein, Turmeric, Lettuce, Onions

It's also loaded with HFCS and a laundry list of preservatives and additives. I'm not saying it's the healthiest food, but given a choice between the two, I'd choose the one that at least has a few real food components.

And before you mention Supersize Me and the effects it had on his health, remember that it was an n=1 study and The Fathead Movie did the same experiment and his health improved.

<comment><USER34> I would never mention that awful film. I only mentioned mcdonalds, because I grew up on "fast-food" and not healthy balanced diet food... actually I didn't know anything about nutrition until the soylent thing came out, and I decided I wanted to make my own version, so I started researching.

I have my own criticisms of soylent but that's not my point. (I don't think soy to be the best form of protein. I'm experimenting with a combination of almonds and chicken breast right now) so if, and when I become as well knowledgeable as that guy, and perfect my recipe I may post it for others to see -- but I don't know enough yet. I think he could have been more constructive though. I think maybe that actually soylent (or any other one- size-fits-all solution) is not universally good for everyone. maybe we should all be experimenting and trying to create a variety of different recipes.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> I think the most minimalistic, food, product execution that has proven to sustain life, pass on immunities and provide superior nutrition is breast milk.

Of course we can't attach "vacuum suckers" to lactating women but the "old" 'soylent green' "....is made [by] people" and cow milk is probably a close second.

</comment><comment><USER37> I appreciate the vocal skepticism as I feel it's important, especially when it comes to this topic. Proper studies should be done, but if people want to take on the risk themselves to consume soylent then more power too them, so long as they know the risks.

<comment><USER38> I hope they don't start asking for the Healthcare insurance to pay for all the long term effects they may get from this. Wanna live off Soylent? Good. You're on your own.

<comment><USER32> You could say that about almost anything though. A Soylent diet is significantly better for you than what many people currently eat. Should we deny people healthcare because they eat too much fast food as well? The chance of soylent incurring any meaningful healthcare cost is basically nil.

<comment><USER38> > A Soylent diet is significantly better for you than what many people > currently eat.

Zero evidence. Good job on the comment.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> I am still waiting to learn that they are just trolling with the name Soylent and have another name picked out for it.

</comment><comment><USER40> Regardless of the health aspects, do that many people WANt to drink liquefied meals? I _like_ eating food.

</comment><comment><USER41> Excellent write-up! I'd love to see a similar write up for the popular medi- fast diet!</comment>


France, Germany in standoff with Silicon Valley on contact tracing - <AUTHOR> https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-europe-tech-idUSKCN2262LM <comment><USER2> Isn't it pretty easy to just ignore them and not offer the service there?</comment>


SXSW: Privacy isn't dead, despite what Eric Schmidt or Mark Zuckerberg might say - <AUTHOR> http://www.itworld.com/tech-amp-society/100685/privileged-straight-while-male-technology-executives-are-dead-wrong-again <comment><USER2> Headline: "Privileged straight white male technology executives are dead wrong (again)"

Oh yes. Only working-class, black lesbians ever get anything right regarding technological social policy.

Seriously, what's with the prejudiced headline? Privacy is good. You don't have to diss entire categories of people to argue for that.

<comment><USER2> ...and, I'd like to add, doing so makes you sound stupid. So I didn't read very far.

People like Bruce Schneier argue eloquently about why privacy is a good thing without this sort of childish name-calling. [http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2006/05/the_value_of_p...](http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2006/05/the_value_of_pr.html)

<comment><USER3> Bruce and danah are arguing from completely different perspectives. I think danah's talk needs to be read in its entirety - it fits in also with some of her other work around the demographic and ethnographic issues around social networks <http://www.danah.org/papers/talks/2010/SXSW2010.html>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Direct Link: <http://www.danah.org/papers/talks/2010/SXSW2010.html>

</comment><comment><USER5> not having privacy is synonymous to denial of freedom

</comment><comment><USER6> Don't click! It's ad bait!!!</comment>


How to Invest in Tesla While Avoiding the Elon Musk Drama - <AUTHOR> https://www.barrons.com/articles/tesla-bonds-51556231073 <comment><USER2> Don't invest? Tesla seems like an extreme dangerous investment after all the big name companies are fleeing it and Goldman gave a scathing report</comment>


Washing Hands in Hot Water Wastes Energy, Study Says - <AUTHOR> http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/energy/2013/12/131213-washing-hands-hot-water-wastes-energy-health/ <comment><USER2> I always thought the purpose of hot water was to improve the reaction between the soap and the oils on your hands.

Use cold water, and the oil thickens, which makes it harder to emulsify, and less likely to get washed away in the water. Use hot water, and the oils are easier to wash away. Oils can trap dirt and bacteria, so washing them away makes your hands cleaner.

There's a telling quote from the article that makes me think they're not really studying what they should: " Even water as cold as 40°F (4.4°C) appeared to reduce bacteria as well as hotter water, if hands were scrubbed, rinsed, and dried properly."

But how do they fare when hands _aren 't_ scrubbed rinsed and dried properly, and does the average person scrub, rinse, and dry their hands properly? More importantly, are they more likely to do so if the water is pleasantly warm? If hot water helps in the actual common case, then it's still important.

<comment><USER3> You're right. They also think that the purpose of washing one's hands is killing germs instead of removing them from the skin.

<comment><USER4> I'm in my 40s, but I only learned in the last ~10 years that soap didn't kill bacteria, but only helped remove bacteria that was stuck in the oil in your hands. My sister, who is in the medical field, told me this and at first I refused to believe her because the idea had been with me basically my entire life.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Interesting from a biology/chemistry perspective, but also perhaps a really good example of missing secondary effects.

"The agencies do recommend using soap and water and scrubbing vigorously, for at least 20 seconds."

I spend a whole lot more time scrubbing when the water is nice and warm.

""You don't need hot water, you need soap, water, and friction," said Sack. He added that the Escambia County Health Department in Pensacola, Florida, decided to turn off the hot water heaters in its five clinics two years ago, after a review of the literature provided no evidence that hot water was better."

... and did turning off the hot water have impact on compliance with hand washing policy? That would be an interesting follow-up study.

</comment><comment><USER6> The researcher interviewed in this article, Amanda Carrico, has three degrees in psychology.[1] I'm not sure why I should trust her to do a review of the microbiology literature.

[1] [http://www.vanderbilt.edu/viee/profiles/amanda- carrico.php](http://www.vanderbilt.edu/viee/profiles/amanda-carrico.php)

</comment><comment><USER7> "if hands were scrubbed, rinsed, and dried properly."

... which never happens. Seems like the same faulty logic used to justify blow-driers over paper towels.

It doesn't look like the study that would actually answer this question (randomly assigning bathrooms heated and unheated water, doing hand swabs on leaving patrons) has actually been done, but if I were in a position to gamble on the outcome, I'd bet the cold water bathroom gets substantially less effective cleaning for human-factors reasons.

</comment><comment><USER8> Maybe. But my hands feel better with hot water.

</comment><comment><USER9> This whole time I've been taking hot showers for nothing.

</comment><comment><USER10> IF you use cold water, your body has to make up the lost heat. This requires energy which comes from burning calories, meaning you will have to eat sooner. Food is not free energy, and in many cases is probably a lot _less_ efficient energy-wise than hot water when you think about the energy it takes to grow, prepare, package, and ship it.

This is why I started the Lukewarm Water Hand Washing Awareness Coalition (LWHWAC). We've been fighting for years to raise awareness of the dangers of washing hands in both hot and cold water by lobbying to get our messages in schools, holding bake sales, running TV and radio advertisements, streaking through hot water heater sections of department stores, and holding flyering campaigns.

<comment><USER11> But so many people nowadays eat too many calories.

That's why I started the Cold Water Weight Loss System.

With a regimen of cold showers and washing your hands with cold water, you'll shiver those pounds away in no time.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> In other news: The sky is blue.

Well, it's actually grey right now. _Sigh._

</comment><comment><USER13> So the surgeon should use cold water before gloving?

It seems more sensible to heat the water at the tap like they do in Germany and Barbados.

<comment><USER14> Huh? Did you read the article?

<comment><USER13> I confess to being facetious with my comment which is probably not cool because though I believe this whole preoccupation with carbon emissions to be a scam, the idea of wasting energy bothers me on a natural level, so that long before global warming I washed my hands with cold water.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Shouldn't the use of good antibacterial soap remove most [99%, as advertised] of the bacteria anyway?

<comment><USER16> No: those antibacterial soaps are advertising a number that is the same as regular soap. They're no better in getting rid of bacteria, and may contribute to antibacterial resistance. [http://health.howstuffworks.com/skin- care/cleansing/myths/qu...](http://health.howstuffworks.com/skin- care/cleansing/myths/question692.htm) (but a quick search will net you plenty of other refs)

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> I knew it!</comment>


The Times 03/Jan/2009 Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks - <AUTHOR> https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Genesis_block <comment><USER2> The last 10 years bailouts have been raining like crazy and few people noticed. Let's hope this is going to change.</comment>


Jonathan Stark is for Suckers - <AUTHOR> http://interfacelab.com/jonathan-stark-is-for-suckers/ <comment><USER2> Not a particularly well written piece; it claims that subscription-based monetization is difficult for web apps but somehow perfectly acceptable when it's for a mobile app, yet gives no evidence or reasoning for this.</comment>