Windows 10 Creators Update Problems and Privacy Issues - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wPFbAqICUJo <comment><USER2> Seems like Microsoft are up to their usual tricks.

* Forcing their default apps onto you regardless of your specified defaults; Edge is now the default browser ... again!

* Cortana is back on, even if you turned it off.

* Full telemetry is the default upon a clean install.

An interesting tidbit about the video's YouTube "captions" is that Internet Explorer is captioned as 'Internet Exploder'.</comment>


China Hacks Australian Weather Bureau Computer; Breaches Government Networks - <AUTHOR> http://www.abc.net.au/news/2015-12-02/china-blamed-for-cyber-attack-on-bureau-of-meteorology/6993278 <comment><AUTHOR> Cyber attacks on government agencies are routine and the "adversaries" range from thrill-seeking hackers, through to criminals and foreign states.

But the ABC has been told this is a "massive" breach and one official said there was little doubt where it came from.

"It's China," he said.

The motivation for the attack on the bureau could be commercial, strategic or both.

The bureau is a critical national resource and another state would place a high value on its intellectual property and scientific research.</comment>


Stoicism's Appeal to the Rich and Powerful - <AUTHOR> https://www.exurbe.com/stoicisms-appeal-to-the-rich-and-powerful/ <comment><USER2> I like the slightly provocative title.

To the stoics themselves, wealth and power are indifferent: neither good or bad.

I say that the title is provocative because wealth and power often provoke people, as can be seen in this very discussion (here on Hacker News). Depending on where you come from and where you are in life, a phrase such as "rich and powerful" may call forth the negative stereotype of evil wealthy people, or it may call forth the positive stereotype of Hacker News style entrepreneurs.

It is much easier to be indifferent to wealth and power if you already have it.

My take on the supposed rise in popularity of stoicism is not that it appeals to the "rich and powerful" per se. I do however think it appeals to people who have found themselves in a situation when they no longer have obvious things to live for, which is certainly the case for these people.

If you suddenly find yourself with free time and autonomy, philosophy is a pretty good thing to fill the void with, I think.

<comment><USER3> I have found a stoic attitude a great method by which to weather the ups and downs of life. Whether that means stubbing my toe, dealing with death, or finding myself without an income or a place to live, acceptance of the situation as it is prevents wasting time and energy railing against the inevitabilities of life.

<comment><USER4> Do you have small kids? Just curious, because having a small helpless human dependent on you for their survival and well being has made me change my attitude towards life a bit away from Stoicism.

<comment><USER5> Probaly obvious to you, but why?

<comment><USER6> Not OP. Anecdotally stoicism does nothing for your capability to nurture your children or make actively wise choices. The best example of this is the painfully obvious one of Marcus Aurelius and his son Commodus.

The main failure for the Roman empire was that he failed to name a successor worthy to the task, so Commodus got the gig. I don't know what his failures as a father were or were there any but Commodus came out just wrong either way.

Either this teaches us one of two things or both: 1. even a wise sage is unable to heal his family or 2. Stoicism does not grant you universal wisdom.

Either way, the outcome is that stoicism is obviously not a universal remedy.

If you read Marcus Aurelius' Meditations, the take out message is that the world is shit and people are horrible, but that is no reason not to behave as a gentleman and carry yourself with dignity.

Stoicism can be applied by personal choice to various situations in ones life, but it's hard to make it into a socially pro-active philosophy.

And yes, I generalized whole lot of stuff based on one example only. Call me bayesian.

<comment><USER7> You can be a great preacher but a bad practitioner and vice versa.

Your story reminds of people pointing fingers at misbehaving children of kindergarten teachers.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Stoicism was "originally" a philosophy of (mostly) the rich and powerful of Rome, so it's unsurprisingly compatible.

It's moderate, in that it doesn't prescribe any big external changes to your society or any particular lifestyle. It also reminds me somewhat of deism, which was a popular elite philosophy around the time of the US' founding. Secularism in all but name, with a moderate's concern for the implications of being too extreme. God exists, but let's set that aside.

This is relevant, because the dominant philosophies at the time (and always) were religious. Some of the completing philosophies mentioned, were much more prone to conflict with the religious order.

For example, to this day, the conflict between Jews of the time and "Hellenisers" is a taboo subject in religious circles. These were secular philosophies that became popular in Roman Judea, often among the more internationally minded elite, encroaching on religious monopoly of certain subjects. Epicorus (mentioned here) is a Talmudic villain, and will still get a rise out of many rabbis.

<comment><USER9> > Stoicism was "originally" a philosophy of (mostly) the rich and powerful of > Rome

Stoicism was originally a philosophy of a poor shipwreck survivor from Cyprus. It was made popular in Greece and then imported into Roman culture.

<comment><USER8> Hence the "quotes."

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> For those not wanting to wade through this, the thesis seems to be _"...Stoicism caught on among Roman elites because it was the one form of philosophical guidance that didn't urge them to renounce wealth or power....can be used to justify the idea that the rich and powerful are meant to be rich and powerful, that the poor and downtrodden are meant to be poor and downtrodden, and that even the worst actions are actually good in an ineffable and eternal way. Such claims can be used to justify complacency, social callousness, and even exploitative or destructive behavior."_

I love philosophers, history, and philosophy. I consider myself an existential stoic. (How I reconcile these philosophies I will save for another day) The problem I had with this essay is the same problem I have with a lot of philosophy: it takes itself far, far too seriously for my tastes.

Do the rich adapt stoicism because of the underlying metaphysics in much the same way that powerful Romans did? Did powerful Romans even adapt it in this way, or are we left with various interpretations depending on which sources we use? More to the point, when you pick up a philosophy, decide you like it and want to apply it in your life, is this decision akin to adopting a new religion, becoming part of a cult? Or is it more like entertaining some useful concepts that you play on playing with to see how useful they may be to you?

It's not a facile question. If we adopt philosophies in the same we adopt worldviews, then the history and inner conflicts can be quite important. If, however, we adopt philosophies in the same we might pick up a grape Slurpee at the local seven-eleven, then not so much.

Philosophy tends to take itself far too seriously, and it tends to take a few really good ideas and beat the living heck out of them until they don't work anymore. I doubt the thesis here. Or rather, it's overstated by a significant degree.

<comment><USER11> That is _not_ the thesis of the article, and misrepresenting it that way is doing it a diservice. It would be better to "wade" through it in full than to mis-sumarize it.

<comment><USER10> It would be good for both of us, along with the other HN readers, if you provided what you thought the thesis was.

I'm happy to be corrected, but if all you provide is disagreement, it doesn't do anybody any good.

<comment><USER11> In fact it doesn't have a thesis, as far as the question "why does stoicism appeal to modern rich and powerful". The partial quote you posted is part of a musing around that topic, but it only takes reading that paragraph in full to see what you call its thesis is nothing of the sort.

Here it is for the lazy:

"Thus, turning to the questions that Nellie asked me for her article, when I see a fad for stoicism among today's rising rich, I see a good side and a bad side. The good side is that stoicism, sharing a lot with Buddhism, teaches that the only real treasures are inner treasures–virtue, self-mastery, courage, charity–and that all things in existence are part of one good, divine, and sacred whole, a stance which can combat selfishness and intolerance by encouraging self-discipline and teaching us to love and value every stranger as much as we love our families and ourselves. But on the negative side, stoicism's Providential claim that everything in the universe is already perfect and that things which seem bad or unjust are secretly good underneath (a claim Christianity borrowed from Stoicism) can be used to justify the idea that the rich and powerful are meant to be rich and powerful, that the poor and downtrodden are meant to be poor and downtrodden, and that even the worst actions are actually good in an ineffable and eternal way. Such claims can be used to justify complacency, social callousness, and even exploitative or destructive behavior."

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I always had the impression that stoic virtues mandate that someone who has power to bring change and improve the lives of others also has a duty of doing so. I guess the problem with any philosophy is that humans tend to pick and choose the parts that are convenient. In any case, I still think stoicism teaches invaluable skills in today's society.

</comment><comment><USER13> Stoicism is gaining popularity now because it's a counter reponse to the constant stimulation we are put under.

Non stop food, entertainment, plus the feeling on not being able to have any effect on the global system. Stoicism is way to stay sane.

I believe this trend will end and we will see a regain of existencialism and romantism.

<comment><USER14> How does stoicism counter overstimulation?

<comment><USER15> It invites you to step back from the mundane and consider your life, its infinitesimal place in the universe, its ultimate transience, and the kind of attitude and virtues you want to practice.

It's a form of deep reflection that places your life in a cosmological perspective. In that respect it serves a similar function to prayer and the contemplation of the divine in some religions.

<comment><USER14> I don't think stoicism is related to those things. Those sound like nice meditative things to do, which are compatible with a wide range of different philosophical schools of thought, but none of that sounds like it is actively connected to the defining characteristics of stoicism.

<comment><USER15> I disagree. I have only read parts of Epictetus' Discourses and Aerelius' Meditations, but I think it is borne out by both texts. I don't have them to hand. But quickly looking through an online edition of the Meditations, I am faced with a great many passages matching the stated views. For example:

'Though thou shouldst be going to live three thousand years, and as many times ten thousand years, still remember that no man loses any other life than this which he now lives, nor lives any other than this which he now loses. The longest and shortest are thus brought to the same.'

'How quickly all things disappear, in the universe the bodies themselves, but in time the remembrance of them; what is the nature of all sensible things, and particularly those which attract with the bait of pleasure or terrify by pain, or are noised abroad by vapoury fame; how worthless, and contemptible, and sordid, and perishable, and dead they are- all this it is the part of the intellectual faculty to observe.'

Both quotes are from this online edition: [http://classics.mit.edu/Antoninus/meditations.2.two.html](http://classics.mit.edu/Antoninus/meditations.2.two.html)

<comment><USER16> That's still not what stoicism is. Those quotes are one of many about not holding your success or who you are to materialistic goals, or infinite goals.

while reflecting on yourself via meditation can be useful, it is not the only way, it doesn't need a one week retreat, and if the goal is to meditate on the next idea that will revolutionize everything then that is definitely not stoic.

<comment><USER15> I did not say that it was all that stoicism is. I am not even claiming that it is especially central to stoicism. But it is undeniably a part of stoicism, as any fair reading of those two quotes indicates. Yes one of the central beliefs of stoicism is that we should inculcate within ourselves an ability to withstand any change in our external circumstances. But it is a complex philosophical system. It is perfectly possible for stoicism to admit both that belief, and the view that I'm ascribing to it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Interesting article. I'd like to encourage people to read more stuff from her blog, it's absolutely excellent.

I'm currently reading this piece[0] (teaser quote: "then, in the early seventeenth century, Francis Bacon invented progress."). Then there's the series ostensibly about Machiavelli[1], but that is actually a whirlwind tour of Italian renaissance history, philosophy, intrigue and eventually, yes, Machiavelli.

[0] [https://www.exurbe.com/on-progress-and-historical- change/](https://www.exurbe.com/on-progress-and-historical-change/)

[1] [https://www.exurbe.com/machiavelli-s-p- q-f/](https://www.exurbe.com/machiavelli-s-p-q-f/)

</comment><comment><USER17> Being rich and powerful is not enough.

They also want to signal that they are "stoic", nonchalant bad-assess ready to take on everything fate throws at them -- second rate caviar, aging like everybody else, the $10M condo not being just right, some competitor gaining ground, and so on.

They also wake up earlier than common folk, exercise and eat better than common folk, and so on. All of which are easy when you have personal chefs and a big entourage to take care of "details" like washing the dishes, taking the kids to school, preparing your clothes, making breakfast, and so on...

<comment><USER18> Waking up early and getting things done is a matter of self discipline. I had trouble with all of those things until I started going to bed early with my son and wife. Before that I stayed up late and was tremendously tired all the time. Now I wake up at 6 AM without an alarm and just automagically get shit done and have left over time for my side projects, fixing the house etc.

<comment><USER17> > _Waking up early and getting things done is a matter of self discipline._

Anything a person can do is a matter of self-discipline. I could not have slept for 36 days because of working 2-shifts and still "have the discipline" to go for a run. Slim chances, but it happens.

But self-discipline is much easier to muster in "easy mode", when your other duties are taken care of by an army of servants.

Talk of self-discipline without talk of environmental factors making people less tired, less stressed, and less concerned with basic life matters to focus on that discipline is moot.

And talk of self-discipline should take into account aggregates, to discover what's the baseline for most people under certain conditions, not point at some outliers that did it against all odds and say "Here, anyone can do it" (as if difficulty doesn't matter). That's like pointing out Usain Bolt and saying "here, anyone can run sub-10 secs and if you don't you just lack the discipline".

Do you think e.g. a-list actors who trivially lose amazing amounts of weight for roles have "more discipline" that the average folks who statistically fail much worse in their diets?

Or that they have personal chefs, trainers, massagers, cleaners, and so on, plus a 5-10 million dollar incentive (to get the next "action" part), siding with their "self-discipline).

<comment><USER18> > But self-discipline is much easier to muster in "easy mode", when your other > duties are taken care of by an army of servants.

Self discipline is also easier when you actually work on your self discipline, plan your day, have a schedule, stay off your phone and computer when not working and so on. There are countless ways you can make your life easier and stress free.

Losing weight is a matter of eating healthy foods, using the stairs instead of elevators, taking walks during lunchtime, don't eat/drink sugar rich foods and drinks. Losing weight is obviously difficult when one has a medical condition that prevents losing weight, but when you don't it is a matter of self discipline to lose weight. Also taking daily vitamin D supplements makes a huge positive impact on ones mental and physical health.

<comment><USER19> Nothing you are saying is explicitly wrong. Yeah life is easier when you have self discipline. But you're presenting what you're saying as a counter to what the other person is saying, which is that having all of those extra environmental factors (personal chef, housekeeping, etc) make it way easier. What you're saying is self discipline for the common folk is easier when they work on it vs if they don't. That doesn't negate that while them working/focusing on self discipline is easier by, say, a factor of 25% (numbers are just for explanation purposes), having to not worry about doing the dishes, planning your meals, etc makes it easier by 85 or 90%.

Everything is a matter of self discipline, sure, but that's one factor out of a billion. You seem to be arguing that losing weight or getting your life together can be _as easy_ as it is for the rich and powerful if you want it bad enough and take some vitamin D. That makes it easier, but not as easy as it is for, say, Jeff Bezos to exercise every day.

<comment><USER20> In some ways it's easier to exercise self-discipline when someone is super rich, but in others it is harder. For example, look at all of the rich and powerful with drug and alcohol problems. When someone has almost everything it is easy to become lazy and/or abuse substances.

Is it easier for Bezos to get out of bed 20 minutes earlier and do 100 burpees than it is for you or I? IMO, it's not that different.

<comment><USER17> > _In some ways it 's easier to exercise self-discipline when someone is super > rich, but in others it is harder. For example, look at all of the rich and > powerful with drug and alcohol problems. When someone has almost everything > it is easy to become lazy and/or abuse substances._

I look at them, and also see how it's easier for them to get out of their abuse problems, with top notch rehabilitation facilities and everything set up for them.

They also get top notch medical assistance while doing them, and first rate drugs. Many even have their doctors prepare the stuff.

Which they can afford and do at a nice environment, not some crack house.

And when they're caught by the police, they usually get a slap on the wrist and some rehab time, not hard jail like commoners.

And when you stop doing drugs, you get to go back to a nice warm house, and financial independence. Not to your abusing home, or living in the streets.

There are tons of junkies around where I live (not a shabby or poor neighborhood even, just has a shabby square nearby), that don't have these easy ways out.

Now, imagine a rich person, getting out of drugs, while enjoying all those niceties while he was abusing them, and saying "I did it all through my self- discipline" \-- and implying by that that common junkies lack the same level of self-discipline (while they might have 2x his self-discipline but face 10x the problems to overcome).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> There is a certain hipster Stoicism out there yes. But Stoicism is also a valid response to the chaos and overwhelming hedonic treadmill of the 21st century. Look at the book below for how Stoiscim can help [1]:

"Anton shows how today's consumerist lifestyles distort and trivialize the need for self-worth, and he argues that each person faces the genuinely heroic tasks of contributing to the world's beauty, harmony, and resources; of forgiving the cosmos for self-conscious finitude; and of gratefully accepting the ambiguity of life's gifts."

[1] [https://www.amazon.com/Sources-Significance-Rejuvenation- Phi...](https://www.amazon.com/Sources-Significance-Rejuvenation-Philosophy- Communication/dp/1557535612)

<comment><USER22> I presume I am talking to the author right now of the book [1]. Anyway I find fascinating that you used Ernest Becker ideas (his book denial of death) and others overlooked ideas. I would check out the book.

<comment><USER21> Nope, not the author! Just a reader.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> I actually like to see proof that it is now a realy thing on Wall Street and Silicon Valey.

Just because one person mentions it somewhere, doesn't mean a relevant portion is actually doing / living it.

But yes as a software engineere and growing up in a modern socieity, reading about Stoicism comes close to how i perceive my life. But there have probably always been people thinking in that direction anyway.

</comment><comment><USER24> "In a rich man's house, there is no place to spit but his face"

Diogenes

Stoicism is popular in a variety of communities on reddit, so I bet its popularity in SV is related

A Guide to the Good Life: The Ancient Art of Stoic Joy is an easy introduction to Stoicism

[https://www.amazon.com/Guide-Good-Life-Ancient- Stoic/dp/0195...](https://www.amazon.com/Guide-Good-Life-Ancient- Stoic/dp/0195374614/)

</comment><comment><USER25> Here is the failure mode, aptly summarized by someone who knew. You can weaponize any faith or metaphysic this way; some are more obvious than others.

As a personal way of thinking about your own circumstances, it's fine as far as it goes. As a social ethic for how it's OK to organize a society, it can quickly descend into something that, well:

 _For my part, I would say, welcome infidelity! welcome atheism! welcome anything! in preference to the gospel, as preached by those Divines!

They convert the very name of religion into an engine of tyranny, and barbarous cruelty, and serve to confirm more infidels, in this age, than all the infidel writings of Thomas Paine, Voltaire, and Bolingbroke, put together, have done!

These ministers make religion a cold and flinty-hearted thing, having neither principles of right action, nor bowels of compassion. They strip the love of God of its beauty, and leave the throng of religion a huge, horrible, repulsive form.

It is a religion for oppressors, tyrants, man-stealers, and thugs. It is not that "pure and undefiled religion" which is from above, and which is "first pure, then peaceable, easy to be entreated, full of mercy and good fruits, without partiality, and without hypocrisy."

But a religion which favors the rich against the poor; which exalts the proud above the humble; which divides mankind into two classes, tyrants and slaves; which says to the man in chains, stay there; and to the oppressor, oppress on; it is a religion which may be professed and enjoyed by all the robbers and enslavers of mankind; it makes God a respecter of persons, denies his fatherhood of the race, and tramples in the dust the great truth of the brotherhood of man._

Frederick Douglass, 1852

<comment><USER26> Nice. All philosophies (or religions, what have you) must be pursued with kindness for all beings first, last and middle.

<comment><USER22> Just like Russel said not to take any philosophy for granted (at that time Marxism philosophy was mainstream): [https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=fb3k6tB- Or8](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=fb3k6tB-Or8)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Many rich and powerful are extremely ambitious. They aim high and get very upset when they don't get what they aimed for. The higher you get the less if your endeavors will succeed.

Stoicism is a good way of accepting the failure and preserving one's sanity.

</comment><comment><USER28> I've been trying to read Marcus Aureleus for a few years, but it feels like wading through a swamp and I generally give up after 10 pages. Any recommendations for an annotated version for today's readers?

<comment><USER29> I read the Meditations in secondary school, high school, but it was the Penguin Classic edition I think. I am reading it for a fourth time, a new translation by Gregory Hays that is wonderful. I grew up poor, but went to a Jesuit high school, took Latin for two years, and I've found Stoicism appealing, because it tied in with my family's spartan lifestyle. We didn't have a phone until I was 12 or 13, and a TV until I was 8 or 10 I think. Minimal furniture, hanging clothes out the window, etc. I can see how it appeals to those say in Silicon Valley, as an alternative or contrast to their materialistic, high-tech world, a refuge. I am not discounting that it appeals to them or anyone for that matter, simply because it has a lot of truth or substance to it. I consider part of my life as stoic, and part of it along the lines of romanticism. I've considered learning Koine Greek to read it, and others, in their original language.

As a side note, my second reading was provoked by the movie "Silence of the Lambs", where Hannibal Lecter coaches Clarice to, ""First principles, Clarice. Simplicity. Read Marcus Aurelius." ;)

<comment><USER22> >As a side note, my second reading was provoked by the movie "Silence of the Lambs", where Hannibal Lecter coaches Clarice to, ""First principles, Clarice. Simplicity. Read Marcus Aurelius

Remembered saying something that a man craves for what he sees.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Any chance it's people who are stoic have a higher chance of moving up to become reach and powerful?

</comment><comment><USER31> "Stoicism was likely influenced by Buddhism through contact with India during the wars of Alexander the Great, and shares a lot with Buddhism: the whole universe is one vast, living, divine whole."

Universe as a "divine whole" is a concept found in Advaita vedanta, not in Buddhism.

"Life is full of suffering, but that suffering is a path to understanding a larger good."

Again wrong. Understanding true nature of reality, any experience happiness,suffering, neutral is considered a path. Not just suffering.

</comment><comment><USER32> The short version of the article is this:

Stoicism is a wonderful tool for improving your inner peace, but be careful, lest its focus on acceptance prevent you from working to improve the outside world.

</comment><comment><USER22> >Stoicism was likely influenced by Buddhism through contact with India during the wars of Alexander the Great, and shares a lot with Buddhism

So is it directly influenced by Buddhism or we presume. I find both Buddhism and stoicism similar in the sense of self (seeing yourself as a bigger just oneness basically mysticism Bertrand Russel talked about(1)).

(1) Mysticism and Logic and Other Essays [https://g.co/kgs/UQD6H4](https://g.co/kgs/UQD6H4)

</comment><comment><USER33> One could easily write and an article titled "Stoicism's Appeal to the Poor and Disenfranchised." Power and wealth is orthogonal to Stoic Philosophy. It counters much of today's culture of blame of jealously of others and offers a more fulfilling and pragmatic outlook on one's circumstances, rich or poor.

<comment><USER34> But the article's point is that its social ethos consists of just justifying the way things are. Two millenia later, we figured out that we can improve many of the way things were, we nearly abolished chattel slavery, we abolished a few diseases, we replaced debt slavery with bankruptcy...

<comment><USER33> There is a difference between justifying and accepting. The article seems to confuse the two.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> Maybe what's useful is that even when you have a ton of money, you still have problems. Not just absolute ones that nobody can help (your friends and relatives dying, illness), but also problems that people who don't have a load of money think you ought to be able to do something about: kids not using the chances you give them, issues with your reputation, status compared to other rich people.

</comment><comment><USER36> What is the story of Seneca running a brothel with his slaves? I can't seem to Google it.

</comment><comment><USER37> Sort of not surprising, Seneca was fabulously wealthy and politically powerful.

</comment><comment><USER38> This article is okay, but contains some misinformation about the origin and principles of Stoicism. The NYT article itself was an absolute disgrace, completely misrepresenting what Stoicism is.

</comment><comment><USER39> TL;DR:

 _Because I think it's important that we mingle some Voltaire in with our Seneca, and remember that stoicism's invaluable advice for taking better care of ourselves inside can–if we fail to mix it with other ideas–come with a big blind spot regarding the world outside ourselves, and whether we should change it._

</comment><comment><USER40> Avoid feeling guilt or empathy towards those who you ripped off on your way up with these easy steps</comment>


Boltzmann Burrito - <AUTHOR> http://boltzmannburrito.com/ <comment><USER2> It reminds the time that somebody left the tap running at Carl Sagan's old house and his widow got a $40,000 water bill.</comment>


H-1B use skyrocketed among Bay Area tech giants - <AUTHOR> https://phys.org/news/2018-08-h-1b-skyrocketed-bay-area-tech.html <comment><USER3> Probably because of the crackdown on other companies with a lot of H-1B applicants like Cognizant, Infosys and Tata. There are a fixed number of H-1B visas available every year, so if it gets harder for some companies, it gets easier for everyone else.

<comment><USER4> That was literally the first thing that came to mind (I was going to make the same comment).

The change isn't that there has been an increase in demand, just that clearly nonsense "skilled workers" in the contracting companies have been blocked. Seriously, I don't see how a contracting firm could ever justify the kinds of "specialized experience", etc requirements of a - by definition - <USER2> software developer.</comment></comment>


OSCON 2010: Rob Pike, "Public Static Void" - <AUTHOR> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5kj5ApnhPAE <comment><USER2> Every time I see news about Go I go and read again the <http://golang.org/doc/go_spec.html> to see if something got better. The first version I've read still needed ";" separators.

Still, D looks to better by the order of magnitude. I think Go solves less problems than D: What I like in D is that it moves in the direction of letting the programmer interact with the "knowledge" the complier has when it processes the code, much more successful than the C++ template clumsiness. Compared to that Go has much more "old" feeling even if Rob claim it's "modern." Even more important, D allows even writing "classic C level" of code if needed -- and for some critical places it's always needed. As far as I understand, the whole D (the compiler and libraries) can be written in D, which is not the case with Go which certainly needs good-old C.</comment>


It was not a DDoS: MtGox got 20k new accounts per day - <AUTHOR> https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=172944.0;topicseen <comment><USER2> If someone did a little bit of analysis on MtGox they might have concluded that setting up new accounts was the most effective way to do a DoS attack. Not that I'm saying that's what happened, just that it seems naive to say "we were down due to new account creation, and therefore we should rule out the possibility of a DoS attack!"

<comment><USER3> The MtGox employees talk about 10 Gbps of traffic hitting their front-end servers. They are desperately working with Black Lotus and Prolexic to help. That is a textbook network DDoS. "Creation of the accounts" is not the source of the slowness and unresponsiveness of the site.

[https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=166578.msg1737375#ms...](https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=166578.msg1737375#msg1737375)

<comment><USER4> They are already using prolexic (check DNS to verify) and it sure looks like DDoS to me.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> There is no way that 20K database inserts in a day should affect them in this way. They likely experienced a DDoS and either didn't want to say it or didn't recognize it and actually believed it was because of their 20K new users. Either way, given the issues they have had and the ~$1.2 billion market cap loss just from this one incident, it begs the question: Should this company be at the center of something as important as Bitcoin?

These types of issues have been faced and solved by myriad other companies, many of them with fewer resources. It seems that every major player in the Bitcoin space has trouble conducting themselves as actual professional businesses and are just fine with causing losses ranging from thousands to billions of dollars in this case. If just a few decent companies came together to provide the services that Mt. Gox and other current "leaders" are failing to provide, Bitcoin could quickly become a much more powerful force than it already is. The limiting factor for Bitcoin is no longer demand; it is the lack of reliable infrastructure for buying and selling them.

<comment><USER6> "The limiting factor for Bitcoin is no longer demand; it is the lack of reliable infrastructure for buying and selling them."

There is a big demand, I don't understand why VCs or YCombinator are not pushing a few startups in this direction.

<comment><USER7> see <https://coinbase.com/>

<comment><USER8> Coinbase is probably in it for the long run, and they are probably doing things to enable them to outlast the competition.

However.

On Monday I was planning to place an order for bitcoin on Coinbase and I was informed that the order would go through on _Friday_ at the market rate at that time. That is somewhat worthless and extremely dangerous in a volatile market. For now, I consider their service unusable.

<comment><USER9> It's been that way for a while. I'm hoping they change the way that works, as right now the only way to guarantee you'll get a buy order in is to use a tool like coinbase-trader(<https://github.com/martindale/coinbase-trader>), literally polling their API until it goes through.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> 1) They should put a captcha on their sign up form. Bitcoin has gotten significant press in the pass week, but not enough to bump registrations by 10x (60k in March alone to 20k per day)

2) "The number of trades executed triple in the last 24hrs." But how much has the volume changed? Is there a way of somehow filtering out what would be "panic" induced trading (perhaps by removing # trades that happen in a large swing) to see if trade frequency has changed?

<comment><USER11> > Bitcoin has gotten significant press in the pass week, but not enough to > bump registrations by 10x

I don't know, well publicised offers of free money might actually result in quite high uptake.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> <http://i.imgur.com/cGjIS9x.png>

<comment><USER13> Dear quandryfoe

My name is Danjuma Sule, one of the sons of major Gen Gumel Danjuma Sule, The late Nigeria's former minister of mines and power in the regime of the late former Nigeria's military Head of state, Gen Sanni Abacha. When my father died he left me an inheritance of 9830422.33333421 bitcoins. Unfortunately bitcoin exchanges are not yet set up in Nigerian currency and I am in need of a young techno wizard with a bank account denominated in US dollars to assist me in gaining access to my inheritance.

It is on this basis I am seeking for assistance. Your percentage is negotiable. Please note; your age and profession doesn't really matter in this transaction. Waiting for your immediate response and bank account specifics.

Regards, Danjuma Sule

<comment><USER14> If you're creating a new account because you KNOW its going to be downvoted, isn't that an indication that you just shouldn't make the comment?

<comment><USER15> Similarly downvoted him.

HN is a serious place for serious topics. We should be talking about bitcoin.

<comment><USER16> I can't tell if you're being sarcastic or not...

<comment><USER17> It's actually a very wonderful comment.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I'm impressed by how many commenters know the cause of someone else's infrastructure problems with such certainty.

<comment><USER19> Are you new to technology? This is the norm. Everybody is the smartest person in the room, regardless of how little they know about the details of the implementation.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> I find this hard to believe... mtgox, bitcointalk, bitcoincharts were all just experiencing "too much traffic" today?

bitcointalk has a massive donations budget, and we all know mtgox has a lot of money and a huge interest in preventing something like this from happening.

I think it was a DDoS combined with a few opportune sells to create a panic on purpose to be quite honest.

Tinfoil hat replies welcome.

<comment><USER3> Theymos (main bitcointalk admin) is seeing very high traffic to the forums: 250 requests per second. He thinks this is legit traffic, not a DDoS: [https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=172672.msg1799471#ms...](https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=172672.msg1799471#msg1799471)

<comment><USER20> Then what is the reason for the mass panic/selling?

<comment><USER21> It briefly crossed the 200€ mark yesterday. Maybe a lot of people wanted to cash out at that point. As soon as the price was dropping, more people decided it was a good time to sell.

<comment><USER22> While it was dropping, there were two ways you could expect it to go. Either it was dropping and was going to stay low, in which case you should sell, or it would rise back up in which case you should sell and then buy when it got cheap.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> I moved all my bitcoins over to BitStamp (<https://www.bitstamp.net/>) earlier today. MtGox has _always_ felt a little unreliable at multiple levels. They sound earnest in their post mortems, but it's hard to tell if they are sufficiently competent with web technology to be doing what they're doing.

<comment><USER24> Bitstamp is no better. If anything, the (comparatively) low trade volume makes it very dangerous. Yesterday, I put in an _instant_ (market) order at about 5pm. It was fulfilled in about 2 hours, for $50 dollars less than the price was when I put it in. I would expect for market orders to be either fulfilled or canceled immediately, not linger pending for 2 hours.

<comment><USER25> Market orders are relisted every ~10mins at the market price until fulfilled. If you want to sell at _no less_ than some $X, that's what limit orders are for. You used a market order when what you wanted was a limit order; that's not Bitstamp's fault (unless the fault is in making it clear what the difference is, but IIRC they do explain in the FAQ).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Magic The Gathering Online eXchange (MtGOX) refitted to trade a virtual currency which then had to scale massively in a short period of time.

Yeah, I'd say there are serious architectural problems. This is not a software "design" problem though, it's the inevitable real-world result of software "evolution". It happens.

I read they're working on a new platform built from scratch. I bet it's going to kick ass as they've got some real world experience now about what works, what does not and what needs to be hardened.

</comment><comment><USER27> Bitcoin needs a high performance, extremely secure, open source trading engine, with a standardized API that traders can use to arbitrage the exchanges.

The tricky part is transferring other currencies in and out, and between the exchanges. "Ripple" also sounds promising for this purpose.

<comment><USER28> There's nothing like that already? When you say "need" do you know it doesn't exist already? I'm genuinely curious and hoping you know the answer.

<comment><USER27> There was one called Intersago but it looks defunct: [http://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/1447/is-there- an-...](http://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/1447/is-there-an-open- source-bitcoin-exchange)

I came across this project on bitcointalk, which isn't really an exchange but looks interesting: <https://github.com/FellowTraveler/Open-Transactions>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Okay, not a DDoS. Let's go with that for a sec. Absurd load? Even when the data feeds are working, they show huge bursts of transactions going through. (A link downthread shows a screen full of tiny transactions being executed)

MtGox is synonymous with 'bitcoin' at this point. Everyone who knows what a bitcoin is knows what that site is.

Are all those 20k accounts legitimate?

<comment><USER30> To be clear - latency on transactions was at around 600 seconds in the middle of the day - that is, an order to "buy" at the market, or "sell" at the market, took 600+ seconds to execute.

For about 20 minutes, they buy/sell buttons were non-responsive. You could click on them - but nothing happened. I have a suspicion (without evidence other than observation) that at one point today the buy/sell functions were disabled.

<comment><USER8> More like 3600 seconds for over an hour.

The buy/sell buttons always worked, as far as I know, but when the lag is an hour I can see how it would seem broken.

<comment><USER30> I experienced two failure scenarios today - they were very different.

Failure Scenario #1 - Buy/Sell Buttons were not working. You would click them - but absolutely nothing was happening. On #MtGoxLive there were a number of us all experiencing exactly the same thing. A few believed it might have been a javascript issue.

Failure Scenario #2 - Once the buttons were activated/fixed - your order was placed in queue instantly, but remained "pending" - on #mtgoxlive, ;;goxlag showed lag time of about 600 seconds - My order went from pending to "executed" exactly according to ;;goxlag.

<comment><USER8> I consider the first a bug, but the second seems to be the system failing in the way it was designed to.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> The NPR Planet Money podcast just released a podcast Tuesday on Bitcoins: [http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2013/04/09/176688096/episode-...](http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2013/04/09/176688096/episode-450-bitcoin- goes-to-the-moon)

It was the first time I had heard about Bitcoins, and so did many I think!

</comment><comment><USER32> Considering how volatile bitcoins are, any downtime DDoS or not, affect users a great deal. Unlike NASDAQ that can rollback/shutdown the market, MtGox has to maintain 24/7/365. I dare say their market's uptime is more critical than the regular stock market. I wonder how their stack is setup. Anyone from MtGox?

<comment><USER33> > Unlike NASDAQ that can rollback/shutdown the market, MtGox has to maintain > 24/7/365. I dare say their market's uptime is more critical than the regular > stock market.

You are trivializing the real markets. What makes you think this is something that NASDAQ can just "do"? They had a system problem causing delays on Facebook's IPO, and they're still dealing with the shit-storm from that now. Everyone who had poor executions (or missed executions) as a result of the delay is trying to get compensation from the exchange for their technical problem. I haven't checked the exact number recently, but I want to say $21MM is the pool that the exchange has to puke to the "plaintiffs".

Because bitcoin exchanges are not regulated in the same fashion as stock exchanges, I doubt that MtGox will be on the hook for anyone's poor executions.

> I wonder how their stack is setup.

As someone else pointed out, their stack is setup wrong if account management has _any_ impact on their matching engine. Hopefully, it was just the web servers which host both accounts-management and trading UIs. Regardless, there was clearly some resource-sharing which should not have happened.

<comment><USER34> > _but I want to say $21MM is the pool that the exchange has to puke to the > "plaintiffs"._

This is actually back in the news. And the value that the banks are looking to recover is closer to $500MM.

[http://www.swissinfo.ch/eng/business/UBS_unimpressed_with_Fa...](http://www.swissinfo.ch/eng/business/UBS_unimpressed_with_Facebook_IPO_repayment.html?cid=35324786)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> For comparison, Facebook acquired their first 100M users at an average rate of 60k accounts per day.

<comment><USER35> Facebook users generally don't intend to transact though.

<comment><USER8> Especially not in a way where the exact order of each transaction is critical, so there is no opportunity for any parallelism.

<comment><USER36> So while this is an astute observation, a properly run exchange would go through a lot of effort to separate the matching engine (the inherently single-threaded part of the exchange) from the portions of the system that accept orders and spew data. The registration system and web site also don't belong anywhere they could possibly contend with the matching engine. Real exchanges process orders of magnitude more volume on a single symbol than mtgox does, yet have latencies measured in microseconds rather than tens of minutes.

<comment><USER37> The matching engine should be separated completely from the rest of system as this is the one component where you want to align with cpu cache and all other kind of crazy low level optimizations. I do agree that mtgox system is slow but we should keep in mind the resource difference both in time and money the large stock exchanges have had time to build their systems. Most of the stock exchanges also don't build their own system but rely on buying one from a independent organization or another stock exchange.

A small nitpick: Volume is one metric but it does not matter in reality the important part is the amount of transactions on a specific symbol.

<comment><USER36> _A small nitpick: Volume is one metric but it does not matter in reality the important part is the amount of transactions on a specific symbol._

That's quite right, thanks :)

Real venues incentivize participants to post orders in round lots (generally 100 shares) and some of them penalize participants who add liquidity with extraordinarily low fill rates. These rules help reduce load on the matching engine, and afaik mtgox has no analogous rules.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> I never thought it was a DDoS, can't understand why people think this. Lots of exchanges have been down, one even seemed hacked (turned only a related service was hacked), and meanwhile the price only went up.

The price drop is due to panic selling and lag. It was almost inevitable, also constant in the news. Now it happened and we can move on. The price is back to about 75% of what it was already, and I don't think it'll take more than a few months to break the previous price record. Or seeing how fast it's recovering, perhaps not more than a few days.

<comment><USER39> There was a DDoS, as there has been an on going one for quite a while now and you can find so on the mtgox website news section.

However it was not a DDoS in the classical sense that brought mtgox down to its knees but nonetheless a DDoS has occured.

mtgox supports a weird feature whereby you're allowed to enter any buy or sell order even if you don't have funds. This means that whenever the prices matches your order the system needs to check whether you actually can with your balance fill that position.

Via the api, it is possible to put tiny transaction even smaller amounts than what you're allowed via the webgui.

It doesn't take much review of the ask and bid to find out that there were a huge a mount of micro tiny transactions all over the place. Those are in an ever higher volume when system begins lagging furiously and people panic.

These are perhaps HFT, or maybe not, but those are the source of the lag and therefore the source of the panic.

This is DDoSing and it's also mtgox fault for having a a toy exchange and us bitcoiners for using it.

I long ago moved to bitstamp. You can find your local exchange i'm sure.

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> It looks like whoever was behind recent events saw this as message claiming it wasn't a DDoS, chuckled and responded by... making a stronger DDoS. MtGOX is down.

<comment><USER41> The press release did say that they may take the exchange down for a few hours. I'm not sure if that meant unannounced downtime like this though.

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> It's amazing how what is currently the largest Bitcoin exchange service can be so unprofessional. You would think they could have anticipated this.

</comment><comment><USER43> Did anyone notice there was a SEVEN MILLION (USD $) transaction yesterday?

[http://blockchain.info/tx/5d9ef693d41cb3bb4c6d98e70ea8b2cc91...](http://blockchain.info/tx/5d9ef693d41cb3bb4c6d98e70ea8b2cc91be29a804245a06ec8761d9cddc103c)

Actually, $7M based on $100 value. If it was @ $200, well _$14 Million_ USD.

<comment><USER44> Maybe some bitcoins being shuffled around in the exchange?

</comment></comment><comment><USER45> And now, guess what MtGox advises everybody do? Go drink some Champaign! To celebrate their massive success! I'm not kidding-- look at their latest bulletin on why they're suspending trading for the rest of today.

You've got to be KIDDING ME. They don't seem to give two shits about their users or their money.

</comment><comment><USER46> I've been waiting for over a week to get my account verified so I can start using my account (I'm not in the US), but they only seem to verify a few hundred a day and there are still 5000 people ahead of me.. quite frustrating.

<comment><USER47> I'm in Australia, it was 4 working days. IIRC The price went up from $60 to about $170 during that time, very frustrating.

At least I'm verified now - but I have to say their lag time and apparent saling issues still concern me a lot.

</comment></comment><comment><USER48> If you want to run a succesful pyramid scheme, step 1 is find desparate poor people, reddit is a great starting point. Ring up their greed impulse and the rest writes itself.

<comment><USER49> The hundreds of thousands of dollars people funnel at a time to 419 schemes indicate that there are plenty of desperate, greed-clouded middle-classed persons and higher-classed suckers. I suppose Pyramids/MLMs also work well among the lower classes, but they're hardly limited to them, diversify!

</comment></comment><comment><USER50> Someone, please, compete with Mt.Gox more. :( Also, don't store your wallets on Mt.Gox. Oh what a target they must be.

<comment><USER51> In general I agree with the advice to not store large quantities of btc on Mt. Gox, but it's not as dangerous as it used to be a year ago and may be less dangerous than storing them locally in an encrypted wallet... Especially if one uses Windows. If one is using two-factor authentication with Mt. Gox, even if I somehow got infected with a keylogger it wouldn't really matter for Mt. Gox whereas my local wallet would be in trouble. And while we'll see how Mt. Gox responds to user stupidity that leads to their btc being stolen, I'm confident that if it was squarely Mt. Gox's fault (e.g. someone executed a successful social engineering attack on them to get around yubikey), they would make things right.

</comment></comment><comment><USER52> Real Life Mario Brothers?</comment>


Market doesn't justify reusable launchers, expendable rocket makers argue - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/science/2016/07/expendable-rocket-builders-cast-doubt-on-viability-of-reusable-rockets/ <comment><USER2> I thought this reader comment was pretty spot on: _" So let's see, panel to discuss reusable heavy-lift rocket systems that includes no one from companies actively and successfully running such systems. Moderated by someone who could not do it at NASA, thus refused to believe anyone else could do it. Biased much? This panel is ridiculous."_</comment>


Intercom is down - <AUTHOR> http://www.intercom.io/

<comment><USER2> It's back, 2 minutes later. Great post otherwise.

TL;DR: We rolled back a deploy immediately and all is well.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yep, great response time!</comment></comment>


Learn Git Branching - <AUTHOR> http://pcottle.github.com/learnGitBranching/ <comment><USER2> Wow! Author here, did not expect this to get submitted to HN yet (was going to finish out a few more levels this weekend and clean everything up). Forgive the giant "TODO" in the help dialog

The link everyone should see is the demo: <http://pcottle.github.com/learnGitBranching/?demo>

That shows a few example commands, the completion of a level, and finishes with the help dialog.

Some interesting technical highlights

\- I made heavy use of javascript "Promises" to route control through the entire app. The source code has some nice examples, but it would be callback spaghetti without it

\- You can import and export trees to share with your friends ("import tree" and "export tree" commands)

\- You can build levels from within the app with "build level". The intro diaog should step you through the process

\- It even supports interactive rebasing! Try it out with "git rebase -i HEAD~3"

Git is a fairly complex too that can be explained really well graphically. I never understood what I was doing until I saw diagrams in the git manpages and various books around on the internet. I wanted there to be an interactive form of these diagrams but it didn't exist --- so I built it.

9,000 lines of JS later I have this. There's still some polishing to be done, but I'd love for the community to share their knowledge about different git workflows and different ways to explain git concepts.

I tried to make the bar for contributing as low as possible. You can build a level and submit a pull request without even cloning the repo!

<comment><USER3> _Wow! Author here, did not expect this to get submitted to HN yet (was going to finish out a few more levels this weekend and clean everything up). Forgive the giant "TODO" in the help dialog._

Simply enough, <http://pineapple.io/> was disscussed in another thread [0] few hours ago and your link happens to be second on the list at <http://pineapple.io/?reset=true>

Now, hurry up. :)

[0] <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5229185>

<comment><AUTHOR> OP here. I am so sorry! I saw the link in a reddit post and cross-posted it to HN. I use Google Reader for reddit RSS and found the site awesome enough to warrant a HN post.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> This tutorial is great, but it propagates a misconception about git.

"A commit in git is a recorded set of changes that you have made"

Git commits are _not_ deltas. They are entire snapshots of the repository and a single (optional) pointer to an ancestor commit[1]. Git may handle _compression_ in terms of deltas (see 'Packfiles' in [2]), but logically, a commit should be thought of as equivalent to the state of all files that are being tracked. That difference is that if you were only looking at diffs, commits would be the _edges_ of a graph, rather than a node plus a single edge. This is why rebases change the commit SHAs but not merges (and why merges create a new commit). This is why if you are on a merge branch, 'git checkout HEAD~3' may not bring you to where 'git log' would naively suggest.

Version control systems that actually do think of 'commits' as pure 'deltas' are ones such as darcs.

A really good, low level explanation, of git is here

<http://git-scm.com/book/en/Git-Internals-Git-Objects>

(BUG REPORT) The commit created with 'git merge b2' from branch b1 should have HEAD~1 point to the previous head of b1, not b2.

(that said, this is a really cool thing. :) I look forward to the author adding support for conflict resolution. )

[1] [http://git-scm.com/book/en/Git-Internals-Git- Objects#Commit-...](http://git-scm.com/book/en/Git-Internals-Git- Objects#Commit-Objects)

[2] <http://git-scm.com/book/en/Git-Internals-Packfiles>

<comment><USER2> Thanks a ton for catching this. I guess there is a distinction to be made -- the compression might use delta's, but a commit specifies the entire state of the repository.

It's a tricky line to walk though, because commands like "git show" and "git patch" clearly show the delta-like nature of a single commit. I also don't want newcomers to think that commits are heavy and should be used sparingly.

I'm totally down to discuss this on a github issue with you, we could go over the wording. Maybe something like "a commit specifies the entire state of a repository, but is usually stored on disk as a set of changes"?

EDIT: moving discussion to: <https://github.com/pcottle/learnGitBranching/issues/6>

EDIT: fixed in: [https://github.com/pcottle/learnGitBranching/commit/168852b2...](https://github.com/pcottle/learnGitBranching/commit/168852b293697442ea458a96a9c17c15e87a5594)

<comment><USER5> This is still not quite correct. Let me outline the structure, and then I will try and submit a PR addressing it.

The first step to committing is staging what should be included.

The staging process specifies an _index_ of files that are to be added to the next commit. When the commit is recorded, git checks every file/chunk in the index; a hash is calculated per each of these _blobs_ , each blob and hash are stored in a key<->object store, the _object store_ , and the hashes are written into the index of the commit.

If a blob already exists in the store then it is not added again.

When changes are made and committed after this point, the resulting blobs are then hashed and stored again. Any unchanged blob does not need to be stored again; any changed blobs are stored.

When a commit is recreated, it's index is evaluated. Each blob is retrieved from the object store and placed into the tree in the appropriate location.

The most important thing to take out of this? Rebuilding a tree from blobs is _fast_. Second thing to take out? Git only stores each _version_ of a blob (be it a file or a chunk) once, so most 'unpacked' repositories are still quite small.

Now, this is obviously not the smallest representation of the repository, so git has a _packed_ format which calculates deltas between blob files. This will calculate blob-deltas even if they are completely separated in the history; deltas are not between commits, instead they are between objects. Unpacking deltas recreates the blob objects required to build the tree.

The packing process happens every now and then, but it is definitely not done every time a commit is made (by default). The most visible place it is used is when transferring over network protocols (I can't recall if it is done for _every_ network transfer, but I suspect it is). It is done when running garbage collection as well.

\----

The reason why all this is important is as I laid out before: rebuilding trees is fast, which makes fast branching possible, and the object store allows this without exploding the size of the repository.

<comment><USER2> I'll be honest -- that was hard to understand. I don't know the low-level plumbing of git very well, which is why I made a higher level tool like this.

Do you think it's important for beginners to understand all these subtleties? I think I could maybe eventually introduce them, but for the first level on the first screen, I don't think throwing a bunch of concepts at them will help with learning. Feel free to re-open the task if you disagree

<comment><USER5> I'll admit that I don't know what your knowledge is, so my explanation might have been directed at the wrong level. I am drafting a pull request that rewrites this for you, hopefully that will be easier to understand!

I don't think that you need to understand all the plumbing, however it _is_ important to understand how the index works, and that git stores the entire snapshot. The way it currently appears makes it seem like every time you switch branches git has to figure out the end state based on deltas, which is not true. Git has fast branch switching precisely because it stores the snapshot in its entirety.

[EDIT] Here is what I wrote if anyone is interested: <http://gist.io/4969804>

<comment><USER6> Thanks for explaining this. Now I understand what the

        index 1ef56e5..2c756d0

in a diff refers to. I'm now poking around in the object store with `git cat- file -p <hash>` and it's very enlightening.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> It would be great if the help page popped up when I first load the site, so I don't have to guess and type "help" at the prompt to find out the purpose of the site. :)

<comment><USER8> I didn't even realise you could type "help". There definitely needs to be some sort of introduction prompt otherwise people (like me) are just gonna leave feeling like they've learned nothing.

Still, nice idea.

<comment><USER9> Agreed. I'm like you and I was just committing, branching, and merging but learning nothing while clicking around. I'm glad I know now though because I can totally use a lesson on branching. I think branching in Git is one of the most misunderstood parts of Git. I can't tell you how many times I've almost screwed up a repo because I made some mistake merging branches and not pulling from the correct branch when working on a different machine. To make matters worse, if you use Git to deploy into production, testing, and staging environments like I do you run the risk of pushing development or untested code into production by accident. I know I've definitely pushed code meant only for one branch (or feature) into production without merging with master... it gets confusing but needless to say it didn't take long before things stopped working and I realized my mistake.

Branching is huge, awesome, powerful, but I know I as well as a lot of developers I know could use a good lesson on it.

<comment><USER10> The implementation of branching in git is so fantastically simple (its literally a commit hash in a file, `cat .git/refs/heads/master` if you don't believe me) that it boggles the mind that so many developers have so much issue with it.

<comment><USER9> The implementation may be simple but I think what gets people is building a mental model of all your different remotes and branches. If you're working on a single machine this is simple. Add in another remote and it's still simple but adds complexity. Add in 3 remotes, 3 development machiness, and oh say 3 branches and the mental model is hard to juggle. I develop on 3 different machines and even after about 6 months of this setup which is very close to the example I gave I still mess things up because I don't think to check what branch I'm on when I switch machines and pull from the wrong one and other little mistakes like that.

Branching really is a very simple thing to understand but what I think gets people in the end is building a mental model of one's own setup and creating good habits like always running `git status` when sitting down at a new machine to be sure you're on the branch you think you are, always pushing to your main remote before switching machines, and making sure to push to the correct branch in that remote, and so on.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> This is really really great. Good visualizations of how git works are really awesome and useful, so thanks!

That said, the intro lesson introduces commits as exclusively deltas. This isn't accurate, and would probably cause confusion with later concepts.

Commits are really snapshots of a tree object (with probably a whole lot of sub trees, and a whole lot of blobs). Since part of the commit meta-data is the parent sha, it's really _easy_ for git to show you the delta, but at it's core git cares about linked snapshots of trees.

I am now done being anal retentive :-) thanks again for the great site, excited to see it more fleshed out

<comment><USER2> Discussion here, I'm updating as we speak:

<https://github.com/pcottle/learnGitBranching/issues/6>

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> My only criticism is that there a million modals you have to go through, and some are even multi page, adding complexity. I would rather have fewer modals/pages that show more text at once.

But overall, this is super handy, great idea :)

</comment><comment><USER13> I would try it out but, fullscreened, I get the message _"That window size is not supported :-/"_

How about letting me worry about that and continue anyway? What is the worst that could happen, I have to use a scrollbar?

<comment><USER2> I support a fairly wide range of zoom levels... from +3 levels zoomed in to almost any level zoomed out. The main reason why I can't do more than 4 is the way canvas pixels interact with screen pixels and some of the text positioning logic.

If you're at a normal zoom level and getting that message, certainly let me know -- the zoom level detection logic is a unfortunately pretty hacky.

<comment><USER14> Please improve the error message to at least tell me what window sizes and zoom levels _are_ supported.

<comment><USER2> I'm removing this for now, my apologies! This is what happens when a WIP gets submitted

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I found it a bit annoying that the "Alert!" dialogs in the beginning looked like a window but didn't work like one whatsoever (couldn't minimize, close, maximize, or move around). Probably shouldn't make something look like a well- known UI if it doesn't behave like that UI, especially to the point where familiar buttons don't work.

</comment><comment><USER16> Awesome visualization, but it seems to deviate from how git works in a few instances. Take "level mixed2" for example. The initial branch checked out was "caption". I did "git rebase -i master" and picked both commits (no re- ordering). That created C2' and C3' which is not correct. C2' wouldn't have been created because it's the same tree as C2 with the same ancestor.

I had other issues with that level as well. It seems to be teaching inefficient habits by forcing strange rebases rather than a single one with an "edit" on C2. I understand this might be a limitation on the (really cool) visualization, but maybe those levels shouldn't be included if you can't show the most intuitive way (at least to me) to accomplish the goal.

Otherwise, awesome work!

</comment><comment><USER17> This is a great tool, thanks so much !

I have trouble understanding the rebase workflow: What is the difference between these two sequences?

        git checkout -b bugFix
        git commit -m "fix"
        git checkout master
        git commit -m "master stuff"
        git rebase bugFix
        git checkout bugFix
        git rebase master

and

        git checkout -b bugFix
        git commit -m "fix"
        git checkout master
        git commit -m "master stuff"
        git checkout bugFix
        git rebase master
        git checkout master
        git rebase bugFix

Is it just the order of the commits in the final tree that will be different? Or I am missing something else?

Instinctively I would tend to do the first one, but that was not what lesson 4 expected...

<comment><USER18> _Rebase works by discarding commits and replacing them with different commits._

If you rebase, then anyone who has the old commits in their repo will have to use git reset --hard to switch to the new branch. In other words, rebase inconveniences all other users of a branch. So you can use it freely on branches that only you work on, but you should be reluctant to use it on branches used by other people -- especially popular branches like "master".

If you use your first workflow, the app clearly shows that you discard the commit C3 ("master stuff") and replace it with a different commit C3'. This requires everyone on master to reset.

If you use your second workflow, the commit that you're discarding is C2 ("fix") instead. This means that only people who checked out C2 on bugFix need to reset.

<comment><USER17> Thanks, that makes sense.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Since the author mentions that it's not ready for submission and use yet, I won't complain that I didn't know what to do with this demo at first.

After reading these comments, it became obvious how great the thing is and going back with that in mind made the app more enjoyable

</comment><comment><USER20> Seems only Chrome exists as a browser. All others need not apply.

<comment><USER2> Should work on Firefox, Chrome, and Safari. Anything specific you are noticing in another browser??

I rely pretty heavily on the box model for layout, but if you look at the CSS I included almost every browser extension (even Opera)

<comment><USER21> It doesn't really layout well in my version of Firefox (18.0.2) - see the output here: <http://imm.io/WxqQ> and here: <http://imm.io/Wxr8>

You can't see what's happening and the box seems to be improperly sized and spaced as well as problems with the terminal-style text editing window. The text flows off the bottom and cursor is misaligned: <http://imm.io/WxrS>

<comment><USER22> Same, here FF 18.0 on Ubuntu. Unusable.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Excellent work! I've wanted an easy way to explain git branching to people and from now on I'll point them to this.

<comment><USER23> Same! Sometimes I would like to introduce my coworkers to the amazing world of git, but it's hard to convince them without showing them a concrete example, this one is a pretty nice overview, and also useful for advanced users! I just got a better, more intuitive understanding of what detached HEAD really means thanks to it!

<comment><USER24> Git is amazing, I just wish if there was a better conflict resolving approach in Git.

<comment><USER10> Do you really? I like the fact that git doesn't try anything clever when it hits a conflict and asks you to fix by hand. Have you found an automatic conflict resolution tool that you liked before?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Absolutely fantastic tutorial, but as most other people here have mentioned there should probably be some indication that you should type help to get started.

<comment><USER2> I just pushed the site live, so it starts off with a help dialog and links to the demo. Future visitors should hopefully get a better experience!

My apologies again -- I only noticed it was on HN when I got an email about it...

<comment><USER25> Your use of live visualizations of the state of the repository is probably the single best part of the app.

Seriously, very very well done.

<comment><USER2> Thanks! Really appreciate the feedback, I worked really hard on the animations and there were a ton of corner cases to solve in order for them to work. But I do think they serve a huge educational value, so I'm glad to hear the work (and code) paid off.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> I'm only getting started with the tutorials but this looks really promising!

I also like the fact that there are no instructions on the page which would make this really useful as a quiz tool to see how students / interview candidates / etc approach the problem space. I fully intend to fork and try to make my own levels when I get some free time.

Great concept. Is this based on something else similar or entirely new?

<comment><USER2> LearnGitBranching is somewhat the intersection between try.github.com (which has the whole fake command line thing) and the diagrams drawn in the git manpages. Try.github was an awesome way to present a tutorial, but it wasn't the full-fledged demo I wanted it to be. A few months later I came out with this!

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> Great work. I recently found a very practical use of Git. I call it the "Poor man's hot code loading". This is a post i just wrote on it [http://blog.mawuli.me/2013/02/poor-mans-hot-code-loading- git...](http://blog.mawuli.me/2013/02/poor-mans-hot-code-loading-git- branch.html)

<comment><USER28> I like this, I use Git in this way on my testing server quite often.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> Nice stuff. This kind of branching visualisation is highly useful. I'd like to work with that kind of interface. I suppose I should use gitk or something similar?

How did you create the branch visualization? Did you use some sort of library for displaying and animating connected nodes, or is it all coded from scratch?

<comment><USER2> I had to code it all from scratch unfortunately :-/ I looked at d3.js, arbor.js, and a ton of other libraries but none of them supported the tree layout I had in mind. Apparently visual tree layouts are PhD dissertation topics so there's a wide variety out there

I think a lot of educational value is in the animations as well, so it made sense to roll my own. The majority of the code involves all the visual and GUI elements -- re-implementing git (ironically) wasn't too bad!

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> What is the difference between doing:

         git checkout -b bugFix
         git commit
         git checkout master
         git commit
         git merge bugFix master

And

         git branch bugFix
         git commit
         git checkout master
         git commit
         git merge bugFix master

<comment><USER31> Creating a branch with

      git branch bugFix

does not automatically check it out, so you'd have to follow it up with

      git checkout bugFix

but if you do

      git checkout -b bugFix

it will create the branch and then check it out all in one step.

<comment><USER2> Yep! Exactly. The status of the current branch your on is designated by the asterisk (like in real git), but in retrospect I guess it could be a bit more clear...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> This is really well done. Nice job!

Another direction you can go with this is to make a series of Git puzzles. Basically, starting with this diagram A, convert to diagram B in the least number of moves. To be extra useful, these could revolve around common Git pitfalls.

<comment><USER33> This is a _fantastic_ idea! Just like chess puzzles, only for git. Would be a _great_ deliberate practice tool.

<comment><USER32> Exactly, the chess puzzles are a perfect comparison.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> I thought I knew enough git, but the other day I was still able to lose my changes...

Suppose I'm in master and already modified a file, and now I notice that it would be better to work on a devel branch with those changes, so I could pull upstream changes from master and merge locally. I think I did something like this:

      git stash
      git checkout -b devel
      git stash apply
      git add file.txt
      git commit -m "XYZ new changes"

      git checkout master
      git fetch
      git rebase origin/master (to avoid an empty merge, changes
                                upstream were in independent files)
      git merge devel (to get commit "XYZ")

In the end of this, I had lost my changes in file.txt.

</comment><comment><USER35> I would seriously consider packaging this as an enterprise teaching tool for developers. Companies buy this sort of tools for training. Very good commercial potential here.

<comment><USER2> I also spoke to the Github guys about integrating this into their set of training tools (try.github and a few docs), but I think they got caught up with their full time responsibilities because I haven't heard back in a while.

I could commercialize it but it deserves to be free!

<comment><USER35> You do know that with the license you currently have in there anyone can just sell it, right? You don't have an issue with that?

<comment><USER2> I'd be really disappointed if someone added one level and started selling a zip file of the application to enterprises for $400 a pop.

That being said, I've heard the GNU license is sometimes too prohibitive (albeit no definitive examples). If you know licenses at all, I'd love some advice

<comment><USER35> $400? This would sell for _thousands_ in the right market. Add in training, and you have a long time gig here. This would even be a great online training business. So many possibilities.

Right now, you cant be disappointed if the license allows it. If you have doubts, change it _now_. In terms of licenses, I'm not really an expert. But you could just roll your own. Just take the one you have right now, and remove what allows people to sell it. Still won't stop some people from doing it, though.

For example, I forked your repo. Why? Because its such a nice platform, that I want to learn how it works. I saw that about other 20 people had forked it too. What is stopping them from putting up a website and selling it? Nothing. Nothing at all.

Open source is awesome and all. But you have to also be aware that there are a lot of ruthless people out there waiting for programmers like you to put out software like this one under such licensing terms. Its like buying a car, and listing everyone you know as an owner in the title. Can't get mad when they sell it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> Awesome. Using some lovely client side tech: backbone, browserify. Going to have to really spend some time looking through the code. Cheers!

</comment><comment><USER37> This is great. Adding this to my list of resources for beginners. The ability to build levels, export trees, etc. makes it even better.

</comment><comment><USER38> Would be nice to see the solution of a level, to compare it with what we have done (and to find the solution if we are stuck).

<comment><USER2> You can type in "show solution" to see the solution for a level (after a prompt). I'll have to add this to some help dialog somewhere...

(again I apologize about the discoverability for different commands -- was going to document all this before submitting)

<comment><USER38> Thanks!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> This looks awesome! Thanks for putting this together. It's hard to keep something cool under wraps :)

</comment><comment><USER14> C1' has two meanings, one is the result of a rebase, and one is the result of a revert. I stared at level 2 of "master the rebase, Luke" for a while before I realised this. I think these two things should be have different notations (maybe C1' and C1^-1, or C1' and C1r).

<comment><USER14> In fact, I solved that level using only 'git revert' commands, which I don't think was the intended solution. And the displayed solution isn't complete: it asks the user to perform an interactive rebase. (I'm not complaining, just feedback.)

<comment><USER2> That's a good point. I should just disable revert in all levels except for those related to it. I rarely revert in practice so it's not a huge issue.

Showing the concept of a "modified" commit is hard though. That's why I did all the C1' sillyness (like the man pages do). The apostrophes also scale nicely (up to C1'^99) where reverting a reverted rebased commit might make the text too big.

EDIT: Fixed, see: <https://github.com/pcottle/learnGitBranching/issues/7>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> shameless plug: www.srctree.net - Ace editor + git + canvas for viewing commits/branches.

I built it about a year ago, mostly for learning and fun. I haven't advertised it a lot but it seems relevant in here. I hope it's not off topic!

<comment><USER41> Interesting but how to get other code in there is not so clear. Could be useful as an educational tool, with nicer defaults.

<comment><USER40> I'm not sure I get it. You can start coding and just keeping on commiting and it will handle branching automatically. No doubts that I should make that clear somewhere.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> I don't get how it works.

<comment><USER43> You can:

\- 'git checkout -b branch_name' to create a branch

\- 'git checkout branch_name' to switch branches

\- 'git commit' to add dummy commits (no need to git add stuff)

Edit: formatting

<comment><USER44> You can also:

-'git rebase branch_name'

-'git merge branch_name'

-'git checkout C6' to enter a detached head state

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER45> I worked my way up to branch spaghetti, where I went into the deep end, the solution for it uses commands and concepts not well introduced in the proceeding 'puzzles' (rebase -i)

</comment><comment><USER46> very nice idea. when/if this supports git push i'll come back and play some more. i'm a total git noob, git makes me crazy and maybe this will help clarify things for me.

<comment><USER47> I suggest you take the time to learn the "core" before memorizing all the commands.. everything will be so much easier : )

</comment></comment><comment><USER48> Awesome work, obviously author has spent a lot of time on this and thought it through. Even with advanced GIT skills, it made me think about few things.

</comment><comment><USER49> Buggy in Firefox. Stoplight window buttons not correctly placed, and the popups aren't centered-- they just align to the upper left

</comment><comment><USER50> you need to replay the solutions slower...

</comment><comment> js-coder Dude, this is epic! Really great work.

</comment><comment><USER51> Please support git fast-forward!

</comment><comment><USER52> Beautiful. Great job.

</comment><comment><USER53> Have tried merging and rebasing, absolutely wonderful!

</comment><comment><USER54> The back array does not function well.

</comment><comment><USER55> I don't see how this could be helpful. Does the author imply that there exists only one branching and merging strategy for any CVS?

<comment><USER56> No? Else the link / project would be called "Learn CVS Branching"

</comment></comment><comment><USER57> Great work. Thanks for releasing .

</comment><comment><USER58> type 'level' to start.

<comment><USER59> Wow! How did you find that?

<comment><USER60> I typed help first.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER61> Great job. Would be cool if you told people about git flow once you notice the pattern further in.</comment>


3 Ways to Make Your Programmer Resume Stand Out to Hiring Managers - happy-go-lucky https://stackoverflow.blog/2017/07/05/3-ways-make-programmer-resume-stand-hiring-managers/ <comment><AUTHOR> Not to be negative but aren't these things that any decent programmer resume would usually include? I don't feel like these really make someone stand out.</comment>


Ask HN: Trademark approach for global startup? - <AUTHOR> For those who run global businesses, how did you go about doing trademarks?
Submit in home country then madrid protocol or other? And did you do it yourself or hire a trademark attorney? In my case it's for a website and an app.
Thanks! <comment><USER2> You are aiming big. Maybe too big?

Focus on * Good name * Good Domain * US Trademark

<comment><AUTHOR> The name + domain is already there, the question now is how and where the trademarks should be registered.</comment></comment>


Potentially Habitable Planet Discovered - <AUTHOR> http://arbesman.net/blog/2010/09/29/potentially-habitable-planet-discovered/

<comment><USER2> Discussion: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1741330>

<comment><USER3> And indepth analysis and reality checks by Phil Plait [http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/2010/09/29/po...](http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/2010/09/29/possible- earthlike-planet-found-in-the-goldilocks-zone-of-a-nearby-star/)

<comment><USER4> And on the other end of the journalistic quality spectrum, News.com.au has this article

[http://www.news.com.au/technology/perpetual-twilight-of- red-...](http://www.news.com.au/technology/perpetual-twilight-of-red-dwarf- planet-gliese-581g-may-host-band-of-life/story-e6frfro0-1225932102533)

The link from the main page reads: _Odds of life on new planet '100 per cent'_

<comment><USER3> Odds of tabloid misquoting a scientist to sell more copy "100 per cent.

<comment><USER5> It seems to be an accurate quote from Vogt:

 _During a press briefing, Prof Steven Vogt told The Daily Telegraph, "Personally, given the ubiquity and propensity of life to flourish wherever it can, I would say, my own personal feeling is that the chances of life on this planet are 100 percent."_

which sounds rather excessive to me.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> It's still a bit of a stretch to describe this as habitable in our sense of habitable here on earth. I prefer the phase most earthlike planet. Which in this case is still a fair way off being very similar, as usually there is always the conflict between the scientists that advise caution because of the unknowns in there findings compared to the media which at times skim the first few pages and sensationalize it all.

Will be very interesting to see the results from Kepler in a few years in relation to finding a planet in a similar period at a similar distance to our position in the solar system.

</comment><comment><USER7> Bear in mind that this planet is supposed to be in the habitable zone. There are three known planets within the solar system's habitable zone - Venus, Earth and Mars. Only one of them has any confirmed life.

<comment><USER8> And coincidentally the only planet in our solar system's habitable zone that supports life is the one with a largish moon.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Our Moon is also in the Goldilocks zone, and rocky. But it lacks an atmosphere.

Is this because the Moon is small, and some threshold of gravity is required? Or somehow related to the Moon's cold and inert interior, thus no gaseous volcanoes? Or just a happenstance of composition?

The Moon is a concrete anchor for imagining exosolar worlds.

<comment><USER10> I talk out of my ass, by if I recall the numerous pseudo-scientific tv-show I've seen correct, the moon is pretty much similar to the Earth, but due to its smaller size, it has cooled down much faster. Additionally, it's not heavy enough to sustain an atmosphere, which can bind water to the planet.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Feel free to correct my math

</comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment>=====

Voyager 2 (man's fastest space craft) is traveling 35,000 miles per hour / 60 = 583 miles per second.

187,000 miles per second equals the speed of light.

Light can travel 57,395,520,000,000 miles in one year (roughly 5.7 trillion miles).

So, in 21 years that would equal 57,395,520,000,000 miles x 21 years, or roughly 120 trillion miles.

Thus, if Voyager 2 was our space craft we'd have 583 miles per second x 60 seconds x 60 minutes x 24 hours x 365 days x 21 years to get 386,095,248,000 billion miles towards our new planet.

There is a huge gap between 386 billion and 120 trillion miles, like 311 times.

That means it would take us roughly 310 x 21 years = 6528 years to get there using current technology.

I just don't see us going there as being very practical.

<comment><USER12> At 35,000mph would take 402,000 years. Inter-stellar travel is not for the feint-hearted. It's probably possible to accelerate a space-craft to around 10x this speed using current motor technology. Even so, that's still 40,000 years - and 21 light years is like a nano-meter away on a galactic or cosmological scale.

Really, if you want to cross inter-stellar space in any kind of reasonable time - O(human lifetime) - you need to go faster. Possible solutions are: solar sail or new kinds of ion thruster. Both of these impart a very small force (and hence acceleration) for an exceedingly long time, resulting in very high velocities. Your target speed is about 10% of c. In the case of the solar sail it receives momentum from sun for ~ 50% of distance (assuming similar- sized star to our sun), and then is braked by the momentum from the target star for the rest of the journey.

Problem with solar sail is it needs to be GIGANTIC, and composed of materials stronger and lighter than those available today. Additionally force from sunlight is proportional to 1/r^2 so your acceleration decreases with distance.

So, nuclear powered ion thruster is probably the answer. But, obviously, this kind of project is expensive. And either way, you need living quarters for an entire society to live and reproduce.

<comment><USER13> Why do you limit a reasonable amount of time to a human lifetime? If we're going to colonize interstellar space with anything like our current technology we're probably going to have to ditch that requirement.

There's no reason you can't have a multi-generational ship that takes a thousand years to arrive. You don't have to send thousands of people either, it's enough to send a hundred or so, have them populate on the way, and maybe send some frozen sperm & eggs with them to increase genetic diversity.

Another possibility that'll probably become viable within 50-200 years is to not send any humans at all, but to only send a fast & small ship with human sperm & eggs that can start hatching humans once it gets there. Raising the infants could be done with robots and other infrastructure manufactured once we get there.

<comment><USER14> Read 'Orphans of the Sky' by Robert Heinlein to get an idea of the many problems with this approach. Human society is not culturally stable enough to utilize a generation-ship method of space exploration.

<comment><USER15> Most human societies aren't stable enough for that. But visit most presently isolated communities, and you'll find that they're quite stable.

<comment><USER16> If you can visit them, they're not isolated.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> This all seems dependent on the planet being tidally locked. How do they know that? Does a certain distance from the sun absolutely guarantee it?

<comment><USER5> Check out the equation towards the bottom of

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

which gives a timescale for how long it takes for a body to become tidally locked to the body it orbits. I haven't plugged in the numbers for this planet, but I'm gonna assume it winds up being much shorter than the age of the star.

<comment><USER17> Well, the link you're giving says (at the bottom)

"Gliese 581 g may be tidally locked to its parent star Gliese 581"

So it's not known for certain.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Let's suppose there is a lot of water. Can you imagine weather at terminator with incredible winds blowing from hot side to cold side and back closer to surface and evaporating oceans on hot side that constantly rain down on the cold side of the planet?

First order of business for any life that might arise there is to NOT catch the wind and NOT get in the flow.

<comment><USER5> On the upside, there's a tremendous amount of available energy for lifeforms to harvest.

Here on Earth, life gets its energy from soaking up solar energy, or from eating things that have been soaking up solar energy, or from eating things which have eaten things which.... you get the idea. The sole exception is at deep-sea geothermal vents, where you can pick up energy from the thermal gradient. On Gliese 581g, there's huge amounts of energy to be picked up just from the constant flow of energy from hot side to cold side, so I'd expect lifeforms to somehow be tapping into that.

<comment><USER18> Piezoelectric tendrils gathering energy from ever flowing water. I like that.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> This might be nth time I am hearing a news "Potentially Habitable Planet Discovered". Nothing happens after that.

<comment><USER20> Really? This is the first time I'm hearing that. I've seen "planet discovered" a bunch of times, with a crescendo of excitement. I was always disappointed that they were almost exclusively super-giants and the "so what" line always said something like "and if this super-giant has moons, they could be habitable!"

This is the first time I've seen a story about an actual earth-like (with fairly loose parameters) planet that is roughly in the life-zone! Usually headlines that say "earth-like planet discovered!" involve either a frozen rock orbiting way outside of its sun, or a burning pebble right next to it.

However important this particular planet is, I think it's a first as far as fairly plausible life candidates go. Here's to more!

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Given the options, I would still prefer earth.

</comment><comment><USER22> Now we have somewhere to go when that asteroid hits in 2098

[http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/2010/09/28/th...](http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/2010/09/28/the- newest-tiny-threat-to-earth-2010-st3/)

</comment><comment><USER23> "we've almost totally depleted this planet, we can just go to this one that is 21 light-years away."

<comment><USER23> thanks.

<comment><USER23> all things must pass. ever heard of biocapacity?</comment></comment></comment>


Cats Do Control Humans, Study Finds - <AUTHOR> http://news.yahoo.com/s/livescience/20090713/sc_livescience/catsdocontrolhumansstudyfinds

<comment><AUTHOR> This is gonna sound strange an probably not a discussion for HN, but I found the study interesting...

I'm a cat person, but I also like dogs - I just don't have the time or space to give them a good home. So, meanwhile I'll suffice with cats. I always make it a point to train my dogs with the utmost respect and obedience, had them most of growing up just like cats, so I usually put in a lot of time training dogs, but we haven't had one in about 4-5 years.

Maybe this study does 'suggest' or show something (I haven't seen the data), but I know my cat doesn't control me. At least anyways, when it comes to food. There are some that I can see where they are trying to manipulate, but heck, what would you do if you were starving? I usually leave food down (dry) all day and night for my present felines, unless it's wet food it doesn't smell, and I only give them wet food when I feel they deserve it (maybe once or twice a week), based on the type of day I've had. And reiterating, I'm a bastard when it comes to discipline, so it makes sense when they give my wife more attention...

They'll cry when they want to get out of a room that I've locked them in for their safety on some occasions, but that's about it - and when that happens, there's no doubt I'm firm and stubborn, so based on the study, my cats don't yet have the cry down for us, lol.. are they stupid? Maybe. The article says that they've only figured out the call for food - nothing else. Funny? definitely. But evil? Some are, the current ones I own are not, but I have had owned troubled cats before, I've also owned troubled dogs before. My local radio show host insinuated from this and other studies that cats are evil; there's another article floating around about whether they're "Little Satans" and if they get the "concept of nukes" to watch out.

[http://atheologian.blogspot.com/2009/07/study-suggests- cats-...](http://atheologian.blogspot.com/2009/07/study-suggests-cats-are- antichrist.html)

LOL

Ultimately, I love animals, and like any good hacker, a cat while typically nocturnal can certainly be a worthwhile companion while hacking away in the wee hours. My advisor when I'm busy at work: <http://img194.imageshack.us/i/myadvisor.jpg/>

So maybe the topic of hackers owning animals has come up before -- care to share any thoughts on your pets with respect to this article?

Cheers

<comment><USER3> Since food is always available to your cats, you probably wouldn't have gotten the same cry the study suggests. That cry is just for food and supposedly hits the same frequency as a human babys. So, cats aren't exactly controlling their owners, rather just using that specific purr/cry to make it more likely they'll get food. Now, if we can get some study done on the puppy dog eyes and how we (I) can become immune to that.

<comment><AUTHOR> Indeed. There's an okay discussion going on at New Scientist, where they talk about how we can liken a human baby to doing the exact same thing - <USER2> what they can (food). So I think we can use a better word than "exploiting" which has negative connotations - it's more based on _survival_. I must say though that when I put down the wet food, I certainly get a different cry, likely because they like it and I give it to them only when I think it's appropriate (rare) - not when they want it. They do run out of dry food daily or every other day, but they don't call for it, or cry for it... they'll come running when the bag or box is opening, but it's like "aww.. dry food again!? I guess we'll live".

Baby pups at malls or breeding grounds are simply too difficult to ignore. ;)

With both of these species, going back to the Egyptians for cats, and not sure when for dogs, over time they've evolved to be alongside us - and sheesh, we have kennels, animal daycare, grooming, the Wag Hotel in San Fran, and a new airline that is in talks to be only used for our pets?? Isn't it our fault as humans for the "exploitation"? I don't think it should come as a surprise, but the media putting a negative spin on it isn't necessary I think...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Sorry I couldn't resist:

[https://store.theonion.com/kitten-thinks-of-nothing-but- murd...](https://store.theonion.com/kitten-thinks-of-nothing-but-murder-all- day-magnet-p-200.html)

<comment><USER5> Obligatory XKCD:

<http://xkcd.com/231/>

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Reddit had this with a less linkbaity headline: [http://www.reddit.com/r/science/comments/90s4u/so_you_know_h...](http://www.reddit.com/r/science/comments/90s4u/so_you_know_how_sometimes_a_cat_will_sound_like_a/)

And linked to the new scientist not yahoo.

</comment><comment><USER7> Certainly Spot had Data well-trained.

(I know I'll probably be down-mud for that, but it'll be worth it.)

</comment><comment><USER8> After reading this, I heard the most baby-like cat meow coming from outside, but it turned out to actually be a baby.</comment>


Why Did the FBI Arrest the Hacker Who Stopped the WannaCry Attack? - <AUTHOR> https://nymag.com/selectall/2018/03/marcus-hutchins-hacker.html <comment><USER2> Very movie-esque.</comment>