A web-based mission control framework by NASA - ____Sash---701_ https://github.com/nasa/openmct <comment><USER2> I've worked for the European Space Agency and EUMETSAT and it's crazy how much effort is wasted because everybody is writing separate mission control, monitoring and data analysis applications that do 95% of the same things, each with its own horrendous UX/UI, idiosyncrasies and bugs.

I'm not in that industry anymore but I just wish everybody would just grow up, use this (and related) software and contribute. No reason not to do that (of course except for pride).

<comment><USER3> This is actually a generic problem in public acquisition - projects are tightly funded to meet specific customer requirements and cannot themselves resolve enterprise-level problems. Building for re-use tends to add complexity / cost and a hard-nosed PM will not easily be pursued to solve someone else's problem. It seems to require top-down commitment of intent and resources - <AUTHOR> a big stick - to make individual projects do the right thing.

Obviously there can be situations where common approaches are developed and used but this seems to be the exception rather than the norm.

(source - I've spent 10 years trying to work this issue in a UK public acquisition context)

<comment><USER4> This is an issue in enterprise situations as well, I have 100s of servers which are supposed to be "managed" but each project / product manager just adds their own company card to amazon and builds their own platform. The only way this can be solved is if it gets escalated to VP / CTO levels and they force everyone to follow the "standards".

<comment><USER5> oddly enough most enterprises I know have servers "standards" for their own data centres and would dearly love to just fork cash to amazon to get them out of that hell

<comment><USER6> Yup. The heads of IT at enterprises are begging to just switch everything to AWS/GCP/etc., while all the mid level IT guys are starting to see the writing on the wall. Much of what they do will not exist anymore and they will need to retool themselves and/or find a new job.

<comment><USER7> There is just as much work in the cloud, if anything there's more.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Lead Dev for Open MCT here, excited to see this show up while I was reading the news last night! Happy to answer questions if I can, and please don't hesitate to contact us using the email address on the website as well.

</comment><comment><USER9> Open MCT is fun to work with. We're using it as an IoT dashboard at our hackerspace:

[https://bergie.iki.fi/blog/nasa-openmct-iot- dashboard/](https://bergie.iki.fi/blog/nasa-openmct-iot-dashboard/)

<comment><USER10> How much better is it that Grafana?

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Definitely planning on using this on my next space mission.

</comment><comment><USER12> "Houston, we have serious problems here. We're tumbling end over end. We're disengaged from the Agena."

"Try increasing left-pad."

(But seriously, this is really cool and I'm looking forward to trying the Kerbal Space Program plugin.)

<comment><USER13> We use them more and more in the public sector, and they can be perfectly fine.

It's a little silly, but it's where most of the UI innovation and technical skills lie at the moment, and we're frankly getting to the point where there isn't that much of an alternative.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Does SpaceX use similar tool? KSP does[1].

[1]: [https://github.com/hudsonfoo/kerbal- openmct](https://github.com/hudsonfoo/kerbal-openmct)

<comment><USER15> I'm pretty sure SpaceX is just Elon Musk reproducing his KSP campaign IRL.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> This is great. What did NASA use before? I always got the impression they were still using a Unix-type OS and CDE or some other Motif based WM far into the 2000's.

This would really modernize things. And I love how the whole project is so clearly made to enable contribution from the open source community. Really aspiring to leverage open source in the best possible way.

I guess they'd have to make it as easy as possible because the project might not have many uses outside of NASA.

<comment><USER17> I spent the bulk of the first 8.5 years of my career in and around JPL's Spacecraft Assembly Facility (SAF), Test Engineering Lab (TEL), Assembly, Test, and Launch Operations (ATLO), aka, Building 179.

A lot of software systems in Operations a little more than 10 years ago were (Open?)Motif on Solaris. I remember helping a colleague transition to Qt when Motif's event system just couldn't handle an extra 30 data streams we were projecting for use by Mars Science Lander. It was something like a 30 minute demo of Qt Designer (with Hal, the software engineer actually tasked) and him giving up a weekend to full replace all the Motif code. The codebase had shrunk by more than half, all 30 additional data streams had been added, and the Ops Engineers reported that the app was noticeably snappier even with the new streams.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> This is very cool! i got into high powered model rocketry as a hobby and made my own very basic, command line driven, mission control software. My rocket has a little raspberry pi zero wired up with an IMU and some other sensors. On the pad it connects to my mission control system over wifi running on my laptop. I get to do the whole launch sequence and "the launch computer has taken over the countdown" thing (technically a no-no but it's just for fun on my own). The onboard flight computer detects apogee using a barometer, accelerometer, and a kalman filter which then deploys the chute with a little black powder charge. It's a very fun and educational hobby but can get $$

</comment><comment><USER19> It's great that all dependencies have been made to satisfy stringent NASA software assurance standards. A great day for entire NPM ecosystem.

<comment><USER20> I think this is sarcasm. At least I _hope_ it is.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> I don't know how I feel or what I think about running mission control from a browser. Seems like it'd probably lead to lower defects to build something very simple very close to the metal — and _probably_ not at a prohibitive level of cost, either. The advantage would be cutting out the OS, the desktop environment, the fancy GPU software, the browser, the JavaScript interpreter, the JavaScript dependencies &c. from the critical path. The disadvantage of course would be running homegrown software which performs some (but not all!) of those functions.

Maybe I'm wrong, though. I'm certainly open to being persuaded.

<comment><USER22> I made the transition from writing native QT applications in C++ to javascript front ends (generally React) a few years ago. In my experience, writing robust front-end applications was much harder in C++ than it is in javascript. The memory management in QT can get pretty complicated for large applications, and a single mistake can get you a segfault crash. Not to mention that it's much easier to hot-patch a javascript file on the server and then ask everyone to please hit CTRL-R on their browsers than it is to recompile and redistribute a binary to all my clients. At this point, all of the UI components at my company are js based and I couldn't be happier.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> For those interested, Ball Aerospace has a similar open source tool called COSMOS written in Ruby. It has been used for a number of missions there as well as some CubeSats:

[https://cosmosrb.com/](https://cosmosrb.com/)

</comment><comment><USER24> Great to see this getting open-sourced but let's be honest: without support for PUS, CCSDS and other ECSS standards (or any alternative) this only covers a single-digit percent of the effort needed to develop a mission control system.

<comment><USER8> Correct-- there are other components of a ground data system which handle the space link and and other services, but that is outside the scope of Open MCT. We integrate with a large number of those systems via plugins although it is difficult (for non-technical reasons) to open source all of that work.

"mission control" is a relatively opaque concept and I hope that by open sourcing components we can shed more light on the overall architecture and complexity of mission systems and perhaps even begin to simplify them.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Looks like their live demo site [https://openmct- demo.herokuapp.com/](https://openmct-demo.herokuapp.com/) has an error.

<comment><USER8> Should be back online now.

<comment><USER26> Works very nice! Only minor thing, couldn't come back her on mobile :p pretty astounding otherwise, and also astounding even if that isn't fixed, heh.

<comment><USER27> Yes, the back button is badly broken. It's like NASA secretly telling us "there is no going back"

<comment><USER20> Or perhaps that commanding space missions from your mobile isn't a priority ;)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> I recently uploaded a video in youtube from Jay Trimble's talk about Open MCT from the Open Source Cubesat Workshop 2018 that took place in Madrid. Feel free to check it out: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y6Dh74INR_I](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y6Dh74INR_I)

</comment><comment><USER29> On the one hand modernizing such things is really, really good initiative. On the other hand JavaScript/CSS frameworks tend to be very actively developed, thus changing the API or even deprecating the whole framework. This might be the problem for mission critical software.

<comment><USER30> Why would it be a problem? You freeze the dependencies and then occasionally remind yourself that despite your use of web technology you absolutely do not want to control your mission from devices exposed to the regular web, where Updates Matter.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> It uses a lot of CPU for no apparent reason.

<comment><USER32> Angular.

<comment><USER33> No. It uses Vue.

<comment><USER8> Still angular 1.4 on master, with all the problems of large watch count and high digest rates causing a lot of cpu usage just to make a clock tick.

We're in progress on refactors to remove angular, which is no small feat given the number of things which angular does for an application.

<comment><USER34> Are you swapping Angular for VueJS, or something else?

<comment><USER8> VueJS will replace a subset of our Angular 1.x usage, and we will remove Angular 1.x, but it's not fair to describe it as a "swap": they do different things.

<comment><USER34> Yeah, I struggled to find the right word, but settled on using "swap" since I couldn't think of any better description at the moment.

That said, there is significant overlap between the two.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> I guess it is time to say goodbye to Netbeans based UIs used at NASA then.

The UI demo does actually look quite good.

</comment><comment><USER36> Excellent stuff, now I just need them to open source the spaceship too.

<comment><USER37> and the bank account.

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> Great, now I can launch that space mission I've been planning to since forever.

</comment><comment><USER39> you lost me at Angular sorry...

</comment><comment><USER40> Very cool. I visited Johnson Space Center mission control in Houston last week and was reminded how really smart people are monitoring and flying the ISS 24/7.

ISS has planned communication outages resulting from satellite signal loss. Everyone in mission control knows when these disconnects will occur and how long they'll last and plan their breaks around them.

<comment><USER41> I hope you will see this comment. I wanted to let you know that your account has apparently been "shadowbanned", which means that you can see your own comments but no one else sees them unless they have "showdead" turned on in their account settings.

If you view an HN page that you commented on in an incognito window, you will see what I'm talking about.

I can only guess that the moderators took this action because of the large number of Amazon affiliate links you have been posting.

Its fine to post an occasional product link when it relates to the topic, but affiliate links are not so welcome - especially when they are disguised behind an amzn.to shortened URL. Just post an original Amazon link, with everything removed from the URL except the minimum required to go to the correct page. The URL should look like [https://www.amazon.com/dp/NNNNNNNNNN/](https://www.amazon.com/dp/NNNNNNNNNN/) where the N's are the ASIN.

Some of your other comments, like this one, are good quality and people have "vouched" them which makes them visible to all.

I suggest you email the moderators (address is somewhere in the links at the bottom of every page) with an apology and a promise to not post any more affiliate links. Maybe they will reinstate your account.

<comment><USER42> 0 points 1 hour ago | parent | edit | on: A web-based mission control framework by NASA

<comment><USER41> Yes, as I said, this is because someone vouched it. Try turning on "showdead" in your account settings and view their comments in a logged in window, and you will see all the dead comments. Then view the same URL incognito or without showdead and you will see what I'm talking about.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=alwaysreading](https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=alwaysreading)</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Pair programming anti-patterns? - <AUTHOR>

The following are some pair programming anti-patterns" (ok, maybe just bad behaviors) that I've noticed:
1. Prematurely trying to optimize code.
2. Long unrelated discussion. (Note: this one you just have to let go and accept, or you risk #3.)
3. Being anti-social.
4. Always not sharing the screen. (e.g. Pair partner brings a macbook and then basically proceeds to program as if they aren't sitting next to you.)
5. Not listening to your pair partner because you are too busy doing something else.
6. Not doing what you said you'd do/doing more than you said you'd do.
7. Just not communicating.
8. Not ping-pong'ing/both partners not staying active (which results in zombie state).
9. Listening to partner, but ignoring feedback, as if they are an annoying popup in your IDE.
10. Providing too much (esp. negative) feedback to partner.
Those are just a few. What pair programming anti-patterns have you experienced? <comment><USER2> Difference in skill levels makes one lose heart because they can't do what the other can. Then they get passive. They forget they can still contribute on different things.

</comment><comment><USER3> Pairt programming for more than 20 minutes at a time. The best pair programming experience i've had was when it was occasional and my boss or another engineer would come over or I would go to them and we'd work on a bit of code together where the combined expertise of the two of us was more Than either of us alone. This made it very productive to solve integration problems or implement specific algorithms. The rest of the time, i can think faster than I can type. So, for me, pari programming works best as ashore term thing, and in posing it or trying to do it all days an antipatternl</comment>


Why does the SpaceX droneship camera cut out? - <AUTHOR> https://youtu.be/hH75bVG7HBo <comment><USER2> Probably to deny the media video footage of any accident, which sensationalist media organizations might choose to focus on instead of covering the more important aspects of the mission.

(This has happened before.)</comment>


McLaren F1 Tech Applied to Other Industries - <AUTHOR> http://www.wired.com/2015/08/mclaren-applied-technologies-f1/

<comment><USER2> The technology in Formula 1 is just impressive, there's far more to it than meets the eye of a casual observer.

Just to name a few things related to McLaren... Their headquarters has an artificial lake to cool down the airflow in their 145 meter underground wind tunnel [1]. And when the cars are out on track anywhere in the world, their engineers and strategists are hard at work in their mission control room [2] that resembles something out of a space program more than a racing team. Not to forget that they are pioneers in using composite materials in racing and other applications.

But I really had no idea that they had something to do with toothpaste.

Now, I'm a bit gutted to see such a great team having such a horrible season in racing with their new engine supplier.

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McLaren_Technology_Centre](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McLaren_Technology_Centre) [2] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vYhl7csZJHw](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vYhl7csZJHw)

</comment><comment><USER3> I would honestly prefer to watch an F1 competition where we get to watch all the back-room engineering and support infrastructure than the actual F1 car on the track itself. I've always been a fair-weather F1 watcher, but I'd really dig seeing more of what goes on behind the scenes as part of the battles between engineering teams.

<comment><USER4> Secrecy is an inherent factor in F1 - no team wants to give away valuable data to their rivals.

If you're interested in the technical side of the sport, there are many journalists providing very detailed analysis. Craig Scarborough, Matt Somers, Steven de Groote and Ted Kravitz spring to mind, but there are plenty of others.

<comment><USER3> Yup, it's all shrouded in huge secrey because it's each team's differentiating factor given that the cars are so standardised. It doesn't reduce how much it fascinates me :)

I will check out some of those journalists. Thank you for the suggestion, I greatly appreciate it!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> > _"We didn't tell the shop-floor workers what to do," McGrath says. "We put > them in McLaren overalls and let them play with the system. They saw for > themselves what had to change." The Maidenhead team developed a seven-step > process that began before the changeover, mirroring McLaren's cycle of > simulation, pre-planning, debriefing and continuous improvement. Changeover > times fell by 60 percent, dropping from an average of 39 minutes to 15, > equating to an extra 20 million tubes by the end of the year. "We used to > see changeovers as down time," Glover says. "McLaren sees pit stops as an > opportunity to win the race."_

It seems like it boils down to this. Which means it's a management issue, in a way.

<comment><USER6> It's nothing new, either. In the industry, this sort of attack on down-time is core to (the original) lean principles: [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single- Minute_Exchange_of_Di...](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single- Minute_Exchange_of_Die)

I've done analysis in manufacturing lines where I found 95% reductions in set- up time to be possible. Getting buy in to make the necessary changes is never easy, though, and using the McLaren brand to facilitate is genius.

<comment><USER5> Yeah, it sounds great from the "irrational human" perspective, which shouldn't be underestimated in importance.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Metcals, Mantises, own reflow line, they certainly dont eff around. F1 bans testing? they Matrix tests. Im all jelly.

This is certainly a good PR piece, makes me want to work there.

</comment><comment><USER8> > "We used to see changeovers as down time," Glover says. "McLaren sees pit > stops as an opportunity to win the race."

This is a compelling way to change the frame-of-reference. Business X has a factory that makes widgets. By framing the downtime as a "pitstop" instead of a "break", it totally changes the mindset, expectations, and pace of the participants.

<comment><USER9> > "We used to see changeovers as down time," Glover says. "McLaren sees pit > stops as an opportunity to win the race."

This is news to me, having watched F1 over the years, I was actually under the impression McLaren saw pit stops as an opportunity to lose races it really should have won.

Ok, the above might be somewhat tongue in cheek, but 2012 was the height of this when they had, at least in Hamilton's hands, probably the best car on the grid, but only he only ended up 4th in the Drivers' championship largely due to numerous pit stop errors.

Admittedly they aren't the only team that has made mistakes, but they are the only team I know of that tries to sells it's expertise so openly to other industries.

I know they set this division up several years ago, when the team was much stronger, but now that the team has become a shadow of their former self, it must make their marketing of these services that much harder.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Seemingly a puff piece on McLaren...

<comment><USER11> Ron Dennis has always wanted to diversify, to use the Mclarent know-how and brand elsewhere, and that was good when they were winning races. The embarrassing spectacle of both Mclaren cars at the back of the grid, being lapped, has to make one wonder if _all_ group energy and bandwidth should be spent on the F1 operation rather than potential distractions. The brand is currently being damaged.

<comment><USER12> McLaren Applied Technologies is now working with and helping to attract racing team sponsors. I don't think it is a distraction so much as an aid.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> just to supplement a really interesting article on how the same principles were applied from engineers is Japan

[http://goo.gl/jkFaJZ](http://goo.gl/jkFaJZ)

</comment><comment><USER14> I'm so proud of my previous work, put to such a good use.</comment>


Kashmir, Cut Off from the World: 'A Living Hell' of Anger and Fear - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/10/world/asia/kashmir-india-pakistan.html <comment><USER2> It is pretty crazy that the world has not taken greater notice. Cutting off a large population completely and then changing their constitutional status is pretty inhumane treatment and will just make matters worse in the subcontinent. I hope all major democracies and the United Nations forces India to end the communications blockade and undo the changes.

<comment><USER3> Created your account to just post this?</comment></comment>


How to Be a Good Boss to Yourself - <AUTHOR> http://www.thedailymuse.com/entrepreneurship/6-rules-for-being-a-good-boss-to-yourself/

<comment><USER2> Not of Hacker News quality.</comment>


The mystery of silphium, a lost Roman herb (2017) - <AUTHOR> https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20170907-the-mystery-of-the-lost-roman-herb <comment><USER2> The idea of finding "lost" plants immediately reminded me of this story on the stupendously compendious "Spitalfields Life" daily blog by the notionally anonymous "Gentle Author", whom details the past and present of a specific part of East London.

[https://spitalfieldslife.com/2018/05/11/wild- city/](https://spitalfieldslife.com/2018/05/11/wild-city/) \- "A Lost Botanic World In Aldgate"

"Last year, I joined a group of intrepid plant hunters descending into the depths of the last remaining bomb site in the City of London. We climbed all the way down into the hole until we reached the level of the platforms of what was formerly part of Aldgate East Station, until a V2 bomb dropped nearby in the Second World War.

Consequently, the plant life that flourished in this rare haven of nature remained untouched in all these years because the proximity of the tube line precluded any redevelopment until now, and so the project was to record this lost world of botanic richness at the eleventh hour. The plant species collected included many that were once commonplace throughout the City and the East End yet which no longer thrive here."

Of course in this case the plants are not "lost" per se, but the population is a snapshot of a lost _ecosystem_, left untouched more or less, telling you something about how London used to look (and smell).

<comment><USER3> "last remaining bomb site" \- [https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england- london-51361924](https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-london-51361924)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> The article also mentioned a former staple of the Roman dinner table called lovage; this herb is still commonly used in Romanian cooking where it is known as leuștean. It's quite tasty if you ever get the chance.

<comment><USER5> It is known in the UK as well, but rarely used. There is even a Lovage liqueur though I've never tried it.

<comment><USER6> Lovage is a perennial. It's hard to find in England, but I've bought whole plants at garden centres, as well as at a market in Wallonia (where it's called livèche). I haven't seen it sold as a herb in shops. It tastes like very strong celery, but is more fragrant.

It should not be confused with a different herb, called ajwain, whose seeds are sometimes sold as lovage in shops which sell indian spices, where you can also buy hing, which is asafoetida, the silphium substitute.

<comment><USER7> If anyone wants to find where to buy it in the UK [https://www.rhs.org.uk/advice/grow-your- own/herbs/lovage](https://www.rhs.org.uk/advice/grow-your-own/herbs/lovage)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I grow medicinal herbs in my garden and really enjoyed this article, which starts off talking about a mysterious, long-lost aphrodisiac plant and ends on a word of warning on over-harvesting. Plants, their chemical compounds, and their effects on the body are so fascinating!

</comment><comment><USER9> Discussed at the time: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15197503](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15197503)

</comment><comment><USER10> Huh. We picked fruit from what the landowner claimed were 'huckleberry plants'. Made jam - pretty good, a little bitter but tasty. Threw the strained seeds into the compost heap.

The next summer had the most lush patch of huckleberry plants there, complete with plentiful fruit.

So either those weren't huckleberries, or somebody has solved the huckleberry reproduction issue.

<comment><USER11> Probably blueberries or bilberries.

Quote from some random search result[1]:

 _Huckleberries are edible and quite tasty. The small, round berries resemble blueberries. In fact, in some parts of the United States, huckleberries might be called blueberries and blueberries might be called huckleberries. They 're not the same fruit, though._

[1] [https://www.wonderopolis.org/wonder/what-is-a- huckleberry](https://www.wonderopolis.org/wonder/what-is-a-huckleberry)

<comment><USER10> Interesting. Do blueberries come in more astringent forms than the commercial one? With quite a different flavor?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> The seed pod of this medicinal herb may have inspired the traditional heart shape in wide use today — [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silphium#Connection_with_the_h...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silphium#Connection_with_the_heart_symbol)

You can see visit silphium fields in Assassin's Creed: Origins.

</comment><comment><USER13> Gastropod did a podcast episode on Silphium and other "ghost foods." [https://gastropod.com/of-ghost-foods-and-culinary- extinction...](https://gastropod.com/of-ghost-foods-and-culinary-extinction/)

Apparently inspired by a book: Lost Feast: Culinary Extinction and the Future of Food

</comment><comment><USER14> silphium sounds like silvia which might derive from salvia?

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

<comment><USER15> AFAIK only if you ignore a bunch of Latin and Greek phonetics.

The <ph> was an aspirated /p/ before it was an /f/.

The Romans said <v> as a /w/ sound.

Maybe someone can correct me but I don't think an [i] to [a] change or vice- versa is that common in Latin derivates.

If you're saying "silvia sounds like salvia", maybe we should also conclude the Latin word for "forest" also derives from that? But the etymologies are actually totally different in that case, the similarity is just a coincidence.

<comment><USER16> Just in case anyone was actually wondering.

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

>The name Salvia ("salviya") derives from the Latin salvere ("to feel well and healthy, health, heal"), the verb related to salus (health, well-being, prosperity or salvation), referring to the herb's healing properties. Pliny the Elder was the first author known to describe a plant called "Salvia" by the Romans, likely describing the type species for the genus Salvia, Salvia officinalis.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Also known as "laser".

</comment><comment><USER18> This is from todays

What was a great thing ruined by popularity? : AskReddit

[https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/ey5tm0/what_was_...](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/ey5tm0/what_was_a_great_thing_ruined_by_popularity/)

Which fits with most of the reply's of romanticising the past.

"first genuinely effective birth control"

In the old days meant a poison when taken in a light dose probably would kill the fetus and not you.</comment>


Monitoring-Driven Development - <AUTHOR> http://benjiweber.co.uk/blog/2015/03/02/monitoring-check-smells/ <comment><USER2> Yeah I agree. Rob Ewaschuk at google has an excellent document called something like "my philosophy on monitoring". It's fresh in my mind because I've been using it as a kind of social proof for improvements I've been making in the monitoring of our application.

Symptom vs cause based monitoring he calls it and I find the terminology works really well.

He doesn't mention what you allude to - this approach works very nicely alongside teams who's development practices see them iterate on features.

<comment><AUTHOR> I guess this is the document you mean: [https://docs.google.com/document/d/199PqyG3UsyXlwieHaqbGiWVa...](https://docs.google.com/document/d/199PqyG3UsyXlwieHaqbGiWVa8eMWi8zzAn0YfcApr8Q/edit)

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Similar to what Steve Yegge said in his unintentionally published platforms rant:

 _\- monitoring and QA are the same thing. You 'd never think so until you try doing a big SOA. But when your service says "oh yes, I'm fine", it may well be the case that the only thing still functioning in the server is the little component that knows how to say "I'm fine, roger roger, over and out" in a cheery droid voice. In order to tell whether the service is actually responding, you have to make individual calls. The problem continues recursively until your monitoring is doing comprehensive semantics checking of your entire range of services and data, at which point it's indistinguishable from automated QA. So they're a continuum._

[https://plus.google.com/+RipRowan/posts/eVeouesvaVX](https://plus.google.com/+RipRowan/posts/eVeouesvaVX)

<comment><USER4> This was a great rant and I wish I could have access to all those "learnings". Are there any books or blog posts with that knowledge already? The best resource I know are Martin Fowler's posts on the subject...

<comment><USER3> I'm not aware of anything really in-depth.

There is one paper I like about operational issues in general: [https://www.usenix.org/legacy/event/lisa07/tech/full_papers/...](https://www.usenix.org/legacy/event/lisa07/tech/full_papers/hamilton/hamilton_html/) . It lists a lot of criteria that must be met for a system to be highly automated.

<comment><USER4> That material is great, thanks! The style reminds me of c2 wiki.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I've always followed the "metrics driven development" school of thought. If you make capturing "application telemetry" part of the deployment and running of your application, you make it super easy to monitor via a more or less full on integration test using production traffic. Api response time > 300ms for > 5 seconds? Pager duty!

</comment><comment><USER6> Interesting. My tentative 39000-foot-view understanding of Booking.com is that they run what might be thought of as an A/B-test-driven development shop: you know your code is busted when it makes less money. It appears to be working out for them, so there must be _something_ to it.

(Rumor also has it that they're actively hostile towards more traditional automated testing and test-driven development, which I assume is a prime reason they didn't want me to work there, so I can't tell you more...)

</comment><comment><USER7> I'd tend to agree. I've found many times that when a system is hard to monitor that it's also difficult to manage more generally, and that a rearchitecture is in order.</comment>


The US Department of Defense has 42 million billion billion billion IPv6 addresses - <AUTHOR> http://royal.pingdom.com/2009/03/26/the-us-department-of-defense-has-42-million-billion-billion-billion-ipv6-addresses/

<comment><USER2> That's a little misleading if you're thinking of it in ipv4 terms, since an ipv6 subnet is always a /64 (the entire ipv4 address space is only a /32). So really, since there will be no NAT, the DoD has only set aside 2^51 subnets for itself; a bit over 2 quadrillion separate networks. A reasonable buffer for growth.</comment>


Judge Throws Out Conviction in Cyberbullying Case - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/03/us/03bully.html

<comment><USER2> Sounds about right. This wasn't computer fraud or abuse. It may have been harassment though. It seems like people forget that we had laws for punishing conduct we did not condone before the Internet, i.e. ones that never mentioned computers in any way. Back then they were called "laws." Why are these no longer applicable?

<comment><USER3> Possibilities:

* Prosecutor sees this case as some sort of 'new' offense and to _seize_ the opportunity to get his name into the law books.

* Prosecutor sees the harassment conviction as 'too hard to get'

* Prosecutor sees harassment maximum punishment as a slap on the wrist and tries to get 'creative' in getting something else to stick to the woman.

* Prosecutor sees the word computer, says 'Hurrr Durrrr', immediately starts looking at what 'computer law' applies to the case, sees that there isn't a 'computer law' against this particular crime, tries to shoehorn whatever 'computer law' he/she can fit into the crime and turn on the over-confidence in his/her persuasive court room skillz, hoping that the judge doesn't use moree than 2 brain cells during the case.</comment></comment>


Dempsy: Distributed Elastic Message Processing System - <AUTHOR> http://dempsy.github.com/Dempsy/

<comment><USER2> Storm [1] and Spark [2] are two other distributed stream processing libraries in this family. Lots of good work being done in this area; batch-processing a la Hadoop is simply unnecessary for a lot of incredibly useful algorithms.

[1] <https://github.com/nathanmarz/storm> [2] <http://www.spark-project.org/>

<comment><USER3> As is Streams [1], which I work on. There are many research papers on the project which use the research name System S to differentiate active research from the product.

[1] <http://www-01.ibm.com/software/data/infosphere/streams/>

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Sounds cool and looks like it has very good documentation.

A benchmark of how it performs against the other solutions would be great!

</comment><comment><USER5> Links in the left menu of this site aren't working. I had a quick squiz at the source and see that there aren't any anchors.

</comment><comment><USER6> You lost me at JVM.</comment>


Apple loosens SDK restrictions, allows VoIP over 3G - <AUTHOR> http://www.macnn.com/articles/10/02/09/sdk.offers.new.tools.for.ipad.content/

<comment><USER2> If VOIP over 3G is enabled, it is the beginning of the end for the profits of the big cell phone providers. They will be relegated to being a "utility" or commodity provider.

<comment><USER3> More likely they'll set data prices such that a VoIP call costs more than a circuit-switched voice call. This wouldn't even be evil, since a VoIP call uses more bandwidth than a circuit-switched call.

Also, VoIPo3G generally sucks: [http://gigaom.com/2010/01/19/iphone-the-lack- of-voice-over-3...](http://gigaom.com/2010/01/19/iphone-the-lack-of-voice- over-3g-alternative-theory/)

<comment><USER4> They could also do what 3 have done in the UK with Skype - all their new phones have a 3-produced Skype app preloaded which appears to work just like any other installation of Skype.

Behind the scenes, updating your contact list and sending / receiving IMs are done over the data network - however, when you make or receive a Skype call it's routed over the voice network and simply not charged.

<comment><USER5> That's crazy-backwards.

The IMs are 1kBit of data, whereas a phone call (considering voice coding at 16kBit/s for skype-ish quality) probably amount to megabytes of data having to go at near-realtime rates.

It's good that they're still in business, I suppose.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Game of Thrones Curtain Raiser - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wtLWyAbzjjY <comment><AUTHOR> Some college kids from BITS Pilani university in India made this video which was adapted from Game of Thrones opening sequence

</comment><comment><USER2> This is super cool. Thank you for sharing this.</comment>


Excaping poverty requires almost 20 years with nothing going wrong - <AUTHOR> https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2017/04/economic-inequality/524610/?link_id=7&can_id=27faa9d5d551d2c06e8320593c13153d&source=email-todays-headlines-jobs-with-justice-42817&email_referrer=todays-headlines-jobs-with-justice-42817&email_subject=todays-headlines-jobs-with-justice-42817&utm_content=buffer88c2b&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter.com&utm_campaign=buffer&single_page=true <comment><USER2> recent discussion, [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14225804](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14225804)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks. Surprised this wasn't auto-flagged as a dupe. Perhaps because the original thread was flagged by people who didn't like the news.</comment></comment>


Best 6.5 Speakers - <AUTHOR> https://www.saitekaudio.com/best-6-5-speakers/ <comment><AUTHOR> Hello, I am Stuart Williams. Thanks for visiting my profile page. This shows that you want to know more about me. This is really exciting. Thanks. After reading this list of 11 [https://www.saitekaudio.com/best-6-5-speakers/](https://www.saitekaudio.com/best-6-5-speakers/), you can certainly think that the most expensive headphones in the world is not just the best sound quality.</comment>


Intel ousts its chief engineer, shakes up technical group after delays - <AUTHOR> https://www.reuters.com/article/us-intel-reorganization/intel-ousts-its-chief-engineer-shakes-up-technical-group-after-delays-idUSKCN24S2O6 <comment><USER3> > Ann Kelleher, a 24-year Intel veteran, will lead development of 7-nanometer > and 5-nanometer chip technology processes. Last week, the company had said > the smaller, faster 7-nanometer chipmaking technology was six months behind > schedule and it _would have to rely more on outside chipmakers to keep its > products competitive_.

I hope Intel keeps its US-based fabs and continues to upgrade them. It would be a mistake to cede this capacity to outsourcing like so much of our other manufacturing capacity. Interestingly, it seems the US is almost unique in our mass deindustrialization. Japan, Germany and South Korea have avoided this.

<comment><USER4> This deindustrialization was driven by Wall Street. The important metric is return on invested capital.

Manufacturing companies use a lot of capital for their factories. Shut down the factory and outsource to China, and you have the same sales with a lot less capital, so the stock goes up. Great success.

Maybe repeat by having your suppliers do more and more of the engineering. At a certain point, you are just a brand, with no actual engineering capability.

You can't compete with the people who actually know how to make the things. Then you die. See Hewlett Packard.

The US taxing companies on global income at high rates also has an effect. Say you have 50% of your sales outside the US. You pay taxes in the country where you sell the product. Then you have profits overseas. If you bring that cash back to the US, you pay the difference between the corporate rate in country X and the US, which can be a lot, say 15%. Might as well take that money and use it to pay for manufacturing at e.g. Foxconn. So it's 15% better to invest in manufacturing capacity outside the US.

The poor health care system in the US drives up costs as well, twice what it is in other industrialized countries for worse outcome. Same for cost of housing because zoning laws won't allow building. Google was allowed to build offices in Mountain View but not residential property for the employees to live in. So everyone has to commute from somewhere else, and cost of rent is driven by how much misery you can handle.

Failures in government policy make US workers much more expensive without creating any more value or improving the quality of life for the employees.

<comment><USER5> > You can't compete with the people who actually know how to make the things. > Then you die. See Hewlett Packard.

Innovation happens on the factory floor. Pretty soon the countries we outsourced to will come up with better designs too. The U.S. thesis for outsourcing is that the manufacturing countries are filled with braindead automatons who can't compete with our "Designed in California". That may have been true in the 20th century when the U.S. brain drained all the top talent, but now other nations are in a position to pay their engineers more than U.S. companies. The "Designed in California" cope can only last so long.

<comment><USER6> > but now other nations are in a position to pay their engineers more than > U.S. companies.

No. Please write 1 country.

<comment><USER7> Switzerland? Aiui (on 2nd hand knowledge) salary for a SWE ranges from 80k usd to 250k usd

<comment><USER8> The top of your range would be the bottom of the range for a Google beginner with 3-5 years of experience.

<comment><USER9> But Google is in Switzerland too. It probably doesn't make sense to compare country level averages to the pay off a single company famous for huge comp.

<comment><USER8> The question was whether you can get FAANG like compensation in other countries. While Google has an office in Switzerland, it is minuscule in comparison to the US.

<comment><USER9> There are over 2000 workers there. That's "miniscule" compared to the HQ in California of course, but it's the biggest engineering office they have in Europe. The city it's in only has about 350,000 people, so it's a non-trivial local employer.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> A CEO who is really a CFO is probably not what Intel needs right now. It's clear that their engineering culture is compromised, and i would hope that Intel would go back to their roots.

<comment><USER11> Take a look at the past achievements and qualifications of AMDs CEO Lisa Su. Its no wonder AMD is doing so well right now.

<comment><USER12> The CEO before Lisa Su was the precursor that initiated most of the future growth, e.g Zen

<comment><USER13> Prior leaders are often underrated.

I don't know the specifics of this case but I know a lot of coaches refuse to be the person in charge of "rebuilding" because they know they will get 80% there just in time to get fired & watch someone else get all the credit.

<comment><USER12> It might apply to some extent to some countries Presidents too

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> "Renduchintala was one of several key hires from outside Intel, which had been famous in Silicon Valley for developing and promoting talent from within. He was hired as part of a strategy to go after broader markets than the central processing units, or CPUs, the company became known for in the PC era."

I feel like this will go down in history as one of technology's most expensive decisions (that's not a knock on Renduchintala as much as it's my own astonishment at Intel thinking they were safe as recently as 2015).

I'm also a bit saddened by this. It confirms what we all suspected but what I secretly hoped wasn't true.

Intel for over a decade coyly hinted they had aces up their sleeves that would already have been played if they faced more competition. Graphene got kicked around in conversations for a while and then when that turned out to be a no go they talked about black phosphorus.

So after all that, aside from marginal tweaks and pretty meager die shrinks here and there, they were doing.. nothing?.. for _ten years_?

<comment><USER15> I mean, trying and failing isn't the same as doing nothing. But regardless, necessity is the mother of invention, so I'm sure they'll figure something out. They have 20b of cash (1/4 of AMD's total market cap) and their profits are damn good.

Make no mistake, Intel is very much aware this is a do or die situation, and I expect them to deploy all the resources at their disposal to fight both AMD and ARM. They don't have much debt and can borrow heavily and at great rates if necessary.

<comment><USER16> Why is it do or die just because they can't make faster CPUs? AMD can't make them either. It's the end of an entire era technologically. We all knew this day would come.It's a hard problem that requires a whole new paradigm probably. Hopefully both AMD and Intel will have enough money to keep doing research by trying and failing with various radical approaches or we may never see faster CPUs again. Why would they need to worry about ARM? That is low power mobile devices, a sector they got out of a while ago.

<comment><USER17> I believe the current super computer leader uses ARM.

<comment><USER18> With crazy wide vector SIMD, which gives you nothing but Linpack Flops.

<comment><USER19> The Fujitsu ARM chip has an even MORE impressive HPCG score than Linpack actually.

I expect the Fujitsu ARM to be the greatest HPCG computer for years to come. No other design comes close.

<comment><USER18> Is HPC moving away from purely ALU throughput benchmarks? If so, I think that would be good news.

<comment><USER19> HPCG has been reported for years.

Linpack is the "legacy" benchmark on pure FLOPs throughput. But HPCG is the more realistic benchmark that better tests the interconnects.

HPCG is a sparse-matrix, which more accurately represents many HPC problems. Linpack is a bit of a legacy, but still represents dense-compute pretty well.

Its still a GFLOPs / TFLops style measurement, but HPCG has a LOT more data movement.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Wonder if this has anything to do with Jim Keller also leaving about a month ago?

[https://www.anandtech.com/show/15846/jim-keller-resigns- from...](https://www.anandtech.com/show/15846/jim-keller-resigns-from-intel- effective-immediately)

<comment><USER21> To be fair, Keller never stays anywhere long

<comment><USER22> Two years is his shortest tenure, not enough time to make a massive difference to a company as big as Intel.

<comment><USER23> He carries enough weight in this industry to have no problem changing the orbit of even a company the size of Intel. It depends how hard the managers are going to try and pull it back in the old direction.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> So they promoted the CFO to CEO and now they are firing the chief engineer - that tells a lot on where the company is going and I'm afraid it's not a good place.

<comment><USER25> As Steve Jobs said:

"If you were a product person at IBM or Xerox, so you make a better copier or computer. So what? When you have monopoly market share, the company's not any more successful.

So the people that can make the company more successful are sales and marketing people, and they end up running the companies. And the product people get driven out of the decision making forums, and the companies forget what it means to make great products. The product sensibility and the product genius that brought them to that monopolistic position gets rotted out by people running these companies that have no conception of a good product versus a bad product."

<comment><USER26> Ironically, this happened to Apple.

<comment><USER27> By what measure? They seem to be moving tons of product, with competing products that don't come close to its margins.

<comment><USER28> I would argue the MacBook Pro. Taking out the SD slot (so you can't expand storage, and have to buy a more expensive or replacement machine) and replacing the function keys (with a Touch Bar, which looks good in ads but sucks to use) were driven by marketing/sales people, not product people.

This machine is awful to use and I'm in the processing of researching something to replace it with.

I would happily switch back to a 2015 model, even with the drop in CPU and GPU power.

I actually like typing on the butterfly keyboard, I'm doing it right now - <USER2> it has reliability issues.

They also took the headphone jack off phones - making it a worse device, because the AirPods/HomePod marketers didn't want anyone plugging their phone into their existing headphones or speakers.

The awful mess they've made of Lighting/USB-C ports on different devices is also confusing and irritating.

I wish every device of theirs had the attention to usability the Apple Watch does. That thing is a pleasure to use, it's just expensive and incompatible with Android. But the way they're going, they'll put a verification chip in the strap, to make sure you have to buy those from Apple too.

Unfortunately they have by far the best chips, trackpads, and smartwatches on the market.

<comment><USER29> Apple has always moved fast into stopping using technologies that didn't fit their product vision. If removal of the SD card slot (that one isn't even one of my top 10 feature-removal grievances from Apple and I have music and photography as hobbies so plenty of use for it), headphone jack, etc. is shocking for you then you haven't used Apple for long.

Apple really don't care what you think you need as features (or at least Steve Jobs didn't), they have a vision and they will try to sell you it, not the opposite.

I don't have strong opinions about this, personally I think it's interesting that some companies (such as Apple) want to stick to their philosophy instead of just chasing dollars around by pumping out products designed by committees.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Intel processor architecture is not a leading design for 2020. Intel security is a nightmare, think Meltdown and many others. The whole BIOS and ME stuff are nightmares. So every setback for Intel could be a step forward for the IT industry and for software development. Who is worried that we don't use steam engines any more and their manufacturers have disappeared from the market? Unfortunately the long-lasting close-to-monopoly of Intel has not left too much room for new winners to develop.

<comment> g-b-r AMD is not that much better, unfortunately

<comment><USER30> How would it be. It's mostly compatible.

<comment> g-b-r Processor architecture, most bugs, ME and a lot of other things would not need to be "compatible". Still they copied ME with the same stubborness in refusing to make it more transparent, they stopped allowing open-source initialization and they don't have a much better record in security

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> Apple moving away, AMD kick in, ARM taking dominance. I guess we are about to witness the fall (may be death) of another titan.

<comment><USER32> For me the first sign will be Intel going thru their patent pool and seeing who they can sue.

<comment><USER33> "Intel fires warning shots at Microsoft, claims x86 emulation is a patent minefield" (2017)

[https://arstechnica.com/information- technology/2017/06/intel...](https://arstechnica.com/information- technology/2017/06/intel-fires-warning-shots-at-microsoft- claims-x86-emulation-is-a-patent-minefield/)

<comment><USER34> Meanwhile, Apple is gearing up for extensive x86 emulation capability within macOS on Apple Silicon, so I guess the minefield isn't as dangerous as Intel implies.

Or perhaps Apple is happily licensing patents? If so, that suggests that Rosetta 2 will be a limited-time feature just like Rosetta 1. Apple won't be interested in paying for patent licenses forever.

<comment><USER33> Patents have a 20-year lifespan so the common x86_32 patents must have already expired.

As for x86_64, the patents would expire in either 2020 or 2023 depending on if you count from the first published documentation or from the first shipping CPU (IANAL).

Of course that is only the baseline ISA (and SSE2). The future extensions (SSE3+/FMA/AVX and AES-NI/RDRAND/...) would not yet be patent-free but most software is really just compiled against the baseline. Apple managed to split x86_64 into a sub-architecture x86_64h for post-Haswell, but broadly speaking, nobody else has: [https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Changes/x86-64_micro- architec...](https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Changes/x86-64_micro- architecture_update)

<comment><USER34> > As for x86_64, the patents would expire in either 2020 or 2023

Those patents (if any) would surely be held by its inventor, AMD, to which Apple has a healthy corporate relationship.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> Expected outcome for the delays in 10nm and now the 7nm fabrication nodes...

What I find surprising is:

1\. This former chief engineer was originally poached from Qualcomm back in 2016. Qualcomm was (and remains) not comparable to Intel for market and silicon development, so why was this hire made and picked to run the entire division?

2\. The original group, Technology, Systems Architecture and Client Group (TSAC) is monolithic. For as a critical item as fabrication node development, that seems counter-intuitive.

<comment><USER36> Qualcomm was and still is kicking Intel's ass at making modem chips, and I'd imagine that's why this hire was made. At that time, Apple was having Intel attempt to build modem chips for iPhones so that Apple could have an option other than Qualcomm. That didn't pan out.

<comment><USER37> >Apple was having Intel attempt to build modem chips for iPhones so that Apple could have an option other than Qualcomm. That didn't pan out.

It didn't pan out? Well Apple buying Intel's modem chip business seems like the opposite of it not panning out, at least for Apple.

[https://www.theverge.com/2019/7/25/8909671/apple- intel-5g-sm...](https://www.theverge.com/2019/7/25/8909671/apple- intel-5g-smartphone-modems-acquisition)

<comment><USER38> Apple didn't want to buy modems from Qualcomm so they supported and bought Intel modems, but Intel failed to develop 5G modem to match 2020 iPhone so Apple make a agreement with Qualcomm (settle lawsuit) to buy Qualcomm's 5G modem chip and concurrently buy Intel's modem department to develop own modems.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> Intel getting beat by both AMD and TSMC. I'm not surprised a Qualcomm guy would be at the helm of that listing ship.

<comment><USER3> AMD uses TSMC for manufacturing.

<comment><USER40> GP probably meant AMD is beating them on CPU design and TSMC at fab.

<comment><USER41> > AMD is beating them on CPU design

How is this possible to know?

<comment><USER42> Can you elaborate on why it isn't possible to know this?

<comment><USER43> As outsiders it's very difficult to tell which aspects of the overall product are due to design differences and which are due to different manufacturing technologies. It's possible both design and manufacturing are better (for AMD/TSMC), but the only one that is obviously true is that the manufacturing is better. We simply would not have a conclusive answer about who has the better designs unless they used the same fab, giving them the same possible feature set. And if they did, I suspect AMD would have a huge advantage from their existing relationship working with TSMC.

<comment><USER44> TSMC's feature size improvements are shown by chips being released from the latest fab (and with pretty good yields, too, apparently, as AMD just released the XT series of higher clocked chips). AMD's designs are good because Zen+ was better than Zen, and Zen 2 is better than Zen+. Some of the gains may be from die shrink, but if die shrinking was all you needed to do, TSMC would license a z80, drop it on their latest process and call it a day.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER45> Nobody seems to want to talk about delays.

I work at a hard tech startup, and all I have been seeing are delays in launching our product. I keep seeing more work as work gets done. Much of our progress till date has been incremental. It came from either fixing bugs in sprints or unlocking new capabilities by solving hard problems.

I have never understood the point of timing work. Work takes as much "time" as it needs for getting done. It can't be accurately estimated with out actually spending time actually working on it. Clarity seems to be the most critical piece for productivity for me. Drive that, and people just can't help but work. Dealing with drudgery seems inevitable.

Add on top of this people's incompetence or I should say unreadiness for situation, it irks the managers and people responsible for delivery. Delays cascade up. But I think most delays are due to unrealistic expectations of people higher up. Irony being the expectations set by the ones that are supposed to carry out the work.

<comment><USER46> It is human issue. Business requires goals and timelines. I agree that the issue comes from a lack of transparency, poor culture, and the human desire to be "right". Not setting a deadline is unacceptable to business though. I can't imagine sales or the end customer would ever accept not knowing when they can expect product delivery. If delays are communicated, engineering is respected, and no one is looking to blame someone for delays then the whole thing runs fine. As long as company culture does not run around making people feel bad about not hitting timelines you get more honest timelines from people. But as a product manager I am forced to ask engineering to try and deliver some things sooner than they estimated. Just like I have to disappoint customers by saying products are delayed, or sales that something is more expensive, I have to disappoint engineering with getting something out there sooner than people are comfortable with. Obvious exceptions are when we are confident we cannot hit the timeline with even an MVP.

</comment></comment><comment><USER47> > Renduchintala,

> widely seen as a No. 2 to Swan,

> has been on Accenture's (ACN.N) board since April 2018.

> Renduchintala eventually took responsibly for turning around Intel's process > technology,

A very odd choice of a person to develop a fab process

<comment><USER48> Here is is bio page from intel:

> Renduchintala has spent a substantial part of his career in the SoC, mobile > and internet of things areas. Prior to joining Intel, he was executive vice > president of Qualcomm Technologies Inc. and co-president of Qualcomm CDMA > Technologies, where he led its semiconductor business in the computing and > mobile segments. He joined Qualcomm in 2004 from Skyworks Solutions > Inc./Conexant Systems Inc., where he was vice president and general manager > of the company's Cellular Systems Division. Prior to Skyworks, he spent a > decade with Philips Electronics, where he progressed to become vice > president of engineering for its consumer communications business.

[https://newsroom.intel.com/biography/dr-murthy- renduchintala...](https://newsroom.intel.com/biography/dr-murthy- renduchintala/)

<comment><USER47> But I don't see anything that suggests that he had any practical, and hands on experience with microelectronics, or just EE in general.

Per my standards, the word "Accenture" in the resume alone is just such a giant red flag...

<comment><USER49> From [https://newsroom.intel.com/biography/dr-murthy- renduchintala...](https://newsroom.intel.com/biography/dr-murthy- renduchintala/)

 _Renduchintala holds a bachelor's degree in electrical engineering, a PhD in digital communications and a master's degree in business administration from the University of Bradford in England._

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER50> I was cautiously optimistic for Intel, when they bought Altera in 2015. I was also simultaneously worried for innovation in the FPGA industry.

AFAICT Intel has dropped the ball and failed to produce anything particularly amazing as a result of the 2015 acquisition. I would have been all over that.

Did I miss something? Why didn't they run with this.

</comment><comment><USER51> How many hardware engineers were lost in the layoffs in 2016? [1] How much aggregate experience at developing a new process node and fixing the issues was lost in those layoffs?

It's often the senior staff who go in these exercises - they are more expensive and are more likely to be attracted to early retirement.

[1] [https://www.oregonlive.com/silicon- forest/2016/04/intel_quar...](https://www.oregonlive.com/silicon- forest/2016/04/intel_quarterly_results.html)

</comment><comment><USER52> Intel has been fumbling _stupid_ executive decisions that are eroding both their competitive advantage and consumer loyalty. Most recently, they decided to lock memory speed behind enthusiast chipsets.

And they oust _an engineer?_ They are clearly searching for blame in all the wrong places.

<comment><USER53> They fired a politician, just a bit too late: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1nsX9nUFIBc](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1nsX9nUFIBc)

</comment></comment><comment><USER54> I really hope that Intel wakes up: struggling with fab processes is not their biggest problem, their marketing strategy is. There are some really talented engineers in there, but the product segmentation and the way the "features" are sold is in my opinion not good at all.

Linus Tech Tips made a great video about it: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Skry6cKyz50](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Skry6cKyz50)

</comment><comment><USER55> So what was the underlying story? Progress not as rapid as they had put out as plan, and direct reports to Swan afraid to break the bad news early?

</comment><comment><USER56> Why does Renduchintala's head roll and not Swan's?

<comment><USER57> It's time for Swan to go back to bean counting and MBA activities and bring in a technical CEO who can push innovation like Lisa Su is doing at AMD. With that said, I am very much considering taking a stock position in Intel. It's very cheap, very solid divvy (2.6%), and eventually will come back.

<comment><USER58> What possible evidence do you have for it coming back?

It could be start of a Hertz-like death spiral for all you know.

<comment><USER57> The fact that you compare Intel to Hertz is comical. Chips aren't going anywhere, there is only going to be more and more computers, servers, and silicon demand. Intel, despite AMD's gigantic moves is still very entrenched with enterprise (servers). I don't see AMD being the only single player, I see a resurgence of Intel mid-to-long term and both will split the pizza pie.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER59> The title is misleading. From the article it sounds like the chief engineering _manager_ is leaving. Still not a great sign, but quite different from a chief _engineer_ leaving. Some might argue that that's what happened with the earlier departure if Jim Keller, but Keller probably didn't do that much engineering anymore either.

</comment><comment><USER60> If I'm not mistaken, Intel's financials are still very good. Will the rot set in before they run out of safety net?

</comment><comment><USER61> its interesting how Intel and TSMC all use ASML EUV and maybe some of machines from the same vendor like LAM research.

TSMC make it work while Intel struggle. craft is real.

<comment><USER62> My understand is intel is in this situation exactly because they don't use EUV - but "older gen" DUV - deep ultra violet and are pushing the technology farther by upping the scaling factor see[0] for more information

[0]: [https://www.anandtech.com/show/13683/intel-euvenabled-7nm- pr...](https://www.anandtech.com/show/13683/intel-euvenabled-7nm-process-tech- is-on-track)

</comment></comment><comment><USER50> Do Intel's U.S. based fab's really matter _that much_ when all the high-end machines that do the lithography all come from one company (ASML) anyways?

I'd say it's important, and it's an advantage for Intel, but not as big as anyone is making it out to be.

<comment><USER63> Isn't that the "hard part"? I wonder why they're having so much trouble compared to tsmc.

</comment></comment><comment><USER64> Is it reasonable to oust a lead engineer because of a product delay while COVID-19 is causing such a massive disruption?

Are any tech companies seriously expecting that their engineers can turn on a dime and perform at the same level they were before the sudden mass exodus to WFH?

<comment><USER65> According to reddit comments he was not a good leader [https://old.reddit.com/r/intel/comments/hz0ynt/intel_makes_c...](https://old.reddit.com/r/intel/comments/hz0ynt/intel_makes_changes_to_technology_organization/fzgddi4/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER66> And now I understand why Jim Keller left Intel. It's not technology that is lacking at Intel, it's the management.

</comment><comment><USER67> > Intel said it is reorganizing its technology, systems architecture and > client group. Its new leaders will report directly to Chief Executive > Officer Bob Swan.

This is similar to Apple in 1997, when the CEO was ousted and Jobs stepped in as interim CEO to restructure Apple's product line. Maybe this will be Intel's comeback?

</comment><comment><USER68> [https://analyticsdrift.com/intels-misery-from- losing-42-bill...](https://analyticsdrift.com/intels-misery-from- losing-42-billion-to-changing-leadership/)

</comment><comment> g-b-r How much of this TSMC dominance is due to the patent system? Could it be that there is no way to manufacture chips at these sizes without using some TSMC patent?

</comment><comment><USER69> If it was just a firing I would be hopeful.

But a firing coupled with a reorg?

Good luck!

Even a fingerless man could hold up the correct number of digits needed to express the number of times a reorg has solved a problem.

<comment><USER70> > Even a fingerless man could hold up the correct number of digits needed to > express the number of times a reorg has solved a problem.

I couldn't disagree more.

As companies grow/change, existing structures that used to work at some point, can start to break down and a reorg can (and often does) solve that.

A typical example are smaller companies that start with centralized services that support all BUs, but that break up these services as they grow, because per-BU needs might diverge too much or because the distance/sense of ownership of a central group doesn't always align.

It doesn't always work, but I've seen it done right multiple times.

<comment><USER69> Successful reorgs are done in response to growth, changing markets, and new lines of business.

Just like the examples you gave.

This is either a desperation or punitive reorg.

There are also boredom and "make my mark" reorgs and this ain't them.

<comment><USER70> > Successful reorgs are done in response to growth, changing markets, and new > lines of business.

> This is either a desperation or punitive reorg.

One could very well characterize the reorganization of IBM in the mid nineties as a desperation reorg and a punitive one (100K employees laid off.)

It was also a very successful one.

<comment><USER71> Was it? It could have been IBM who invented the smartphone or hardware as a service.

<comment><USER72> They survived.

<comment><USER71> Surviving cannot be the ambition of IBM.

<comment><USER72> Clearly you haven't worked at IBM.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER73> Wow! They are losing a genius in Murthy. This is a bear case for Intel.

</comment><comment><USER74> Is he a fall guy? A patsy?

</comment><comment><USER75> Intel is a dying company

</comment><comment><USER76> Well, even using older 14nm tech, their CPUs are still competitive.

<comment><USER11> The Intel i9 is about 1/3 slower than the ryzen 9. It also costs more and uses more power. Intel cpus are such bad value right now its insane.

<comment><USER16> I cannot afford $1000+ CPUs, but can you link to a review that actually shows this? I just read an anandtech review that compares AMD and Intel and I am not seeing that at all. In fact it looks like Intel still has a lead on single threaded performance which is really pathetic at this point. Maybe AMD should start firing and reorganizing too.

I also am not thrilled with the engineering logic of bimodality and other compromises that AMD seems to have made in their engineering to beat Intel on core count. As a purist I hate these sorts of shortcuts. On that alone I would favor Intel. History shows that they tend to go for engineering purity over shotgun approaches, but of course that sort of corporate culture can change at any time. There is something to say for engineering elegance and purity over meaningless benchmarks.

<comment><USER11> Intel has the tiniest advantage in single threaded which results in close to 0 noticeable improvement. Having double the cores on your cpu results in a massive noticeable improvement. When performing CPU intensive tasks like compiling code, AV1 encoding, etc, its all about core count. AMD also manages to have so much greater performance with a lower power consumption.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: Scratch –  Powerful automated workflow for WordPress developers - <AUTHOR> http://scratchtheme.com/

<comment><USER2> Very nice mate. I built something similar as well, in truth it's just a starter theme I use for client projects running on Wordpress. Feel free to borrow ideas from it (if anything interests you): [https://github.com/Vheissu/Startpress](https://github.com/Vheissu/Startpress) \- in my theme I am using Gulp instead of Grunt to compile/minify/compress images in the theme, I also added in a JSON API (turn any page into an API) by appending stuff to the URL.

Some advice I have is:

* Move all of the HTML out of the function mobile_meta() in your functions.php file. You could just edit the header.php and add it in there, that way you're not polluting your functions file with HTML. * Maybe consider implementing a front-end package manager like Bower for dependencies (I'm in the process of doing this for my theme) * Remove the inline Javascript from the footer.php into a theme specific Javascript file (that way it gets minified/combined with the rest and is easier to manage)

Other than that, looks pretty awesome. You've done a great job and it's nice to see other developers out there wanting to make the process of building Wordpress themes more automated and nicer.</comment>


Japan plans to create 10B 14-digit phone numbers with 5G era approaching - <AUTHOR> https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2019/05/14/national/japan-plans-create-10-billion-14-digit-phone-numbers-5g-era-approaching/ <comment><USER2> As many seem to wonder about details, this is my understanding of the situation (I've posted some below, but this format would be better):

\- 070, 080 and 090 prefixes are being used for mobile phones and M2M (machine-to-machine) communications since 1999. They are 11 digits long and the future shortage was expected.

\- 020 prefix was created exclusively for M2M in 2017. The existing M2M numbers do not have to migrate, but it is recommended for most cases as 020 prefix has no requirement for the number portability and QoS. So the creation and expansion of 020 prefix is irrelevant to the population estimate.

\- Since 0204 prefix was already used for pagers, and since 0 is a trunk prefix in Japan, there were initially 80 million numbers available, starting with 0201--0203 and 0205--0209.

\- It was envisioned that 80 million numbers do not suffice for the future expansion of IoT devices, so there was already a plan for 13- or even 14-digit numbers at the time. Note that while 14-digit numbers are within the E.164 recommendation (e.g. +81-20-XXX-XXXXXXXX = 020-XXX-XXXXXXXX) it does seem to cause some serious engineering problems to tackle.

\- 020 prefix was allocated in the increasing order, so numbers up to 020-536-XXXXX are allocated as of May 2019 [1]. It is expected that the digit expansion will happen in the remaining area.

\- While 020 will greatly postpone the exhaustion, existing 070--090 prefixes would be eventually full in the future. 030, 040 and 060 prefixes once used but now vacant are reserved for this inevitability.

[1] [http://www.soumu.go.jp/main_content/000477284.pdf](http://www.soumu.go.jp/main_content/000477284.pdf)

<comment><USER3> But why would Japan run out of phone numbers with the population shrinking?

While of course IoT devices need to be addressable, that's more of an IPv6 problem than a phone number problem.... right? A person might have a few numbers, at most - and a flat if not shrinking number (I used to have home, work, cell; but have only had cell for a while now)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> What do we have IPv6 for? I thought these 4G/5G networks run a TCP stack and telephony on top of it. Why do we phone numbers for device to device communication?

<comment><USER5> Give me a call at [2607:f8b0:4004:802::200e] and I'll tell you.

<comment><USER6> A phone number is just an entry in my phone's address book - I don't think I dial them by hand any more often than I type an IP address by hand.

<comment><USER7> Exactly. I don't know my moms phone number. Or my sons. Or any friends or colleagues. The only phone number I remember is my childhood home phone number that was drilled into me 35 years ago, and my own number.

<comment><USER8> There are exactly 6 phone numbers I can recall from memory, one of them is my grandfathers which I've known since I was little, the others are family members on my phone plan because we got assigned a block of contiguous numbers when we switched to T-Mobile.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Considering > about 32.6 million of the 80 million numbers starting with 020 had already been assigned

It seems a bit odd that they're putting the 14 digit numbers on the same 020 prefix that half the 11 digit numbers have already been released for. Seems like some chance for confusion where the first 11 digits collide. I'd have thought it'd make more sense to give a new 3 digit prefix for this class of numbers.

<comment><USER10> Someone mentioned they've been assigning prefixes in 020 to carriers in order. The thing to do then is make say 020 [0-3] be 11 digit numbers, and 020 [4-9] be 14 digit numbers. Then it's easy to validate.

I doubt they would assign 14 digit numbers where the 11 digit prefix was assigned to someone else, but, if they were desperate for space, they might make the 020 prefix all be maybe 11, maybe 14 and as 11 digit numbers were released, issue 14 digit numbers with the same prefix.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> How are these allocated under the hood? Wouldn't it make sense to stick all of these phone numbers in an IPv6 /64 at this point, with the "14 digit" just being a convention mapping to some range in that space?

<comment><USER12> Is a simcard always supposed to have the same ip ? How would ip spoofing would affect the phone network ?

<comment><USER13> Why not, a single /64 has way more address space than a MAC-48 and we've been permanently assigning those to hardware (including phones) for years.

I don't think the spoofing question would change based on what identifier you use. Whatever identifier you give you have to ask and answer the question.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Regarding machine-to-machine communications, I'm wondering if these extra numbers are needed because mobile devices require a phone number to interface to mobile networks, even thought they typically only initiate _data_ exchanges. Or‡ are there devices that actually receive phone calls - as in dial-up?

‡ not familiar with tech in Japanese infrastructure

<comment><USER15> There are certainly cheap GPS trackers that send SMS messages. Of course, those are usually sold to consumers rather than into the M2M market.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> M2M should just use IPv6 natively which would leave enough 11 digit numbers for human use.

And the fact that they are willing to go to 14 digit means they know that few people dial numbers manually anyway.

</comment><comment><USER17> In case anyone is wondering, ITU E.164 specifies that maximum length of a phone number is 15 digits:

* [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E.164](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E.164)

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

Given that Japan's country code is +81, that leaves thirteen digits for however Japan wants to assign it internally.

</comment><comment><USER18> Given that the population of Japan is <130M and is only going to go down from now on, what's the point? :)

14-digits?!?! Yikes. Not looking forward to using that!

<comment><USER19> For those that haven't RTFA Japanese phone numbers have 11 digits, 123-1234-1234, of which the first three are reserved as identifiers. A lot of people also carry two phones. Many companies also still have fax machines. Even my pocket wifi has its own phone number (can't be dialed).

8 digits is only 100,000,000 possible unique numbers. So it looks like they're simply running out of numbers.

<comment><USER20> >Japanese phone numbers have 11 digits

10 digit numbers are still in use:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telephone_numbers_in_Japan#10_...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telephone_numbers_in_Japan#10_digit_numbers)

<comment><USER19> I've always thought of those as having an invisible 0 that's filled by the system, like when you call a landline number.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> At some point we should stop using numbers and use something like an email address.

<comment><USER22> How would international calls work?

<comment><USER23> The same way website addresses work, DNS type of thing?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> What's wrong with case insensitive letters?

US-ABC-900-900 can be a beautiful phone number and global. 165,216,101,262,848 numbers per country.

US-ABCD-900E-900R in case we run out of numbers again.

<comment><USER25> Most countries don't use the English alphabet, so I'm not sure if that would work outside the US.

<comment><USER26> _Most countries don 't use the English alphabet_

I strongly suspect that most countries (and certainly a majority of the world population) use a super-set of the English alphabet though.

<comment><USER27> Your suspicions are incorrect. Only 36% of the world's population uses the Latin alphabet.

[https://www.worldstandards.eu/alphabets/](https://www.worldstandards.eu/alphabets/)

<comment><USER28> If you count Chinese who are using Pinyin that jumps to being a majority using latin.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Can't we use email addresses instead?

<comment><USER30> Why ?

<comment><USER29> Why not? Federation, one less identifier to remember, can send an email, if the callee unavailable.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> 14-digit!? No one can possibly remember that easily... Why not alphanumeric and make the address space so big that people can chose one that would be possible for a stranger to remember immediately - like we have domain names, e.g.: cecelia_alberto OR charlotte1231

<comment><AUTHOR> Does anybody actually remember phone numbers these days ?

Edit : I do remember the half a dozen I use or might really need, and already feel like an outlier. ( And as pointed in another comment, they're already 11 digits each. Not that much of a difference. )

<comment><USER31> No, properly not perhaps. But it would be a nice feature when you have to exchange phone numbers.

<comment><AUTHOR> We exchange cards as a matter of daily interaction. The biggest issue is reading properly a name ( kanji ), not the other data in them.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Tax the Childless - <AUTHOR> http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/politics/2014/03/tax_credits_and_children_parents_should_pay_lower_taxes_and_childless_people.html

<comment><USER2> I'm not sure why government taxes should care whether someone has kids or not, it is your choice. If you can't afford to have kids, you probably shouldn't have kids.

It's easy to be in a painful situation and come to a conclusion "Things should work this way because that would benefit me". There are other things the government should do, such as tax breaks for students, and people with student loans - fostering growth and a successful youthful population is very nice. Tax breaks for people with a highschool education and better grades. Tax breaks for people who do community service, etc, etc...

<comment><USER3> "I'm not sure why government taxes should care whether someone has kids or not, it is your choice. If you can't afford to have kids, you probably shouldn't have kids."

Because having kids benefits everyone. It's an integral societal good with a staggeringly high individual cost. There's a reason western European countries give such generous benefits to parents like lengthy maternity/paternity leaves.

<comment> vezzy-fnord Whether or not it is an "integral societal good" depends on the child's upbringing and its eventual contribution to society, neither of which are guaranteed to be positive. In fact, by doing this, you would be encouraging more people (including ones who are ill suited) to raise children merely to pay less taxes, and consequently have more numbers, but less utility.

<comment><USER4> no parent would recommend having a child to pay less taxes.

<comment><USER5> ... and no parent would have more kids just to receive more welfare money. Oh, wait.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Genius. I can't think of a better idea than incentivising people to reproduce more and as soon as possible. This is exactly what the world needs.

Some people might say that this is a puritanical and unacceptable meddling of the state in deeply personal choices, but I say fuck them! If we play our cards right we can evolve into being social insects in less than one century.

<comment><USER7> > I can't think of a better idea than incentivising people to reproduce more > and as soon as possible

And for those who can't...? Just keep penalising them to teach them a lesson?

For 30 years I had no intimate or sexual relations with anyone. Not my choice by any means, but this proposal would have financially punished me because no- one else wanted to have a relationship with me. Thanks! A double-whammy of unhappiness.

And what about the gay community?

What about sterile people?

I am in a relationship now, with children, but strongly oppose this idea.

<comment><USER6> Of course. I was being sarcastic.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I'm still trying to understand why anyone would want to encourage population expansion in a world with nearly 8 billion people.

Is it tied into the general western notion that growth of any kind is always good? That more children will raise the GDP?

Are people afraid of what happens when the Social Security pyramid begins to crumble?

The author only gives us this unsatisfying snippet: > a steady stream of barely postpubescent brainiacs writes catchy tunes and invents breakthrough technologies that keep us entertained and make us more productive

<comment><USER9> > I'm still trying to understand why anyone would want to encourage population > expansion in a world with nearly 8 billion people.

That's easy to answer. Imagine you own a factory. The factory has two doors. In one door comes customers. In the other door comes workers.

* If you can get more customers competing for limited products in your showroom, you can raise prices and become richer.

* If you can get more workers competing for limited positions on your factory floor, you can reduce wages and become richer.

* In every way, population increase enriches the owners of (a) capital, and (b) means of production.

So, exactly why would you _not_ argue for a higher population? And why would you not fight birth control, contraception and abortion, education, voting rights and gender equality for women, and sex education in the schools?

I'm sure it's just a coincidence that the conservative agenda just happens to fight for unlimited population growth, both here and abroad.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> It's not my job to pay for others children, not thru direct taxation. I already pay a whole bunch of incidental socitial costs, and I'm OK with that - It's part of being a good citizen.

I chose not to breed - I have bad genetic stock, I don't think its wise for me to contribute my portion forward.

<comment><USER11> Children are a social benefit.

If not through taxes, then how?

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> is this not already the case? [http://www.irs.gov/uac/Ten-Facts-about-the- Child-Tax-Credit](http://www.irs.gov/uac/Ten-Facts-about-the-Child-Tax-Credit) in effect, i don't see any real difference, the author is just asking for more of the same.

the author also assumes more children are a good thing. i think in the future people who look at china's one child policy as barbarism will change their mind.

<comment><USER13> The child tax credit is only one of the tax benefits that parents get. Here are two others:

\- They get a deduction for each child (since they're dependents). This came to $3800 per child on the 2012 tax form (that amount is exempt from taxes).

\- If your filing status is "head of household" (e.g., you have dependents), you pay lower tax rates than a single person.

Plus, there are similar benefits on state income taxes.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> I do pay more taxes than those with children. I take the extra cash amassed that I'm not spending on a family and I invest it or I spend it. Both add tax revenue. Across my investment properties I pay 35K in property taxes annually, then I pay income tax on income generated from rents across multiple units. I'll also pay sales taxes on those buildings when I sell them. Lastly, because I do not have any dependents, my tax bracket is set squarely in "are you mad?!?" range. I pay a lot of taxes.

</comment><comment><USER15> (onion.com) would be more appropriate for this nonsense idea.

<comment><USER16> We already tax the single. It would make sense to move that burden to the childless.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Or perhaps tax those with children, since they draw more public services. Having children is (most of the time) a choice. If you don't have the financial resources to support offspring, the don't have them. Note: I have (and chose to have) two daughters. My financial situation was one of the inputs into the decision.

<comment><USER3> "If you don't have the financial resources to support offspring, the don't have them."

This is exactly the problem. People are choosing, quite wisely, to not have kids, so our birth rates are sub-replacement. That's bad, so we need to incentivize people to have more of them. Raising children is a pretty classic externality: benefits accrue to society because we all benefit from continued human existence, but the costs are borne by individual parents.

<comment><USER18> >People are choosing, quite wisely, to not have kids, so our birth rates are sub-replacement

maybe for your chosen social group, but global population growth is about 1.2% per year.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Dumbest thing I've read this week, and I read the comments on Yahoo News articles.

</comment><comment><USER20> Wow, yeah. Let's give them a living income too, so they can spend more time with their kids. Might as well give them a free iphone for every child. Who needs to be educated when you can pop out kids and complain about those who break their back going to work so we can one day start to pay for an imaginary retirement. Accountability has become a joke in america. I will be programming till I'm 100 years old at that rate. which I would want to do anyways but that's not the point. I work to hard for such nonsense. if were going to adopt socialism then let's go all the way and enforce Plato's republic. I'll opt in to be a philosopher and not have kids. We can all raise everyone else's kids in an equal society.

</comment><comment><USER21> Why was this posted here? What's the relevancy?

</comment><comment><USER22> Anyone who says "I and everyone else in my circumstance should be taxed more" should just shut up unless the post also includes a scan of a big cheque demonstrating some voluntary contribution to the cause. Otherwise it's nothing more than demanding others pay.

</comment><comment><USER23> She can take money out of my pocket only if she is required to get my approval before having a child.

</comment><comment><USER24> As a parent all I can say is: What a load of shite. Enjoy your childless freedom, you have made the right choice. A child brings little joy to your life with eternal stress and worry and pain and sleepless nights and oh did I mention worry?

<comment><USER3> ...this is exactly why policies like this are a good idea. Just looking at the costs in terms of time, money, and stress, having kids is a pretty irrational decision, so it's no surprise that in modern developed nations, birthrates are pretty low. Sub-replacement birthrates are bad for society. But we can choose to compensate with government policy.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Childless couples already pay tax for school and healthcare for the kids of others.

</comment><comment><USER26> This would get crushed under bureaucracy, as there would need to be a ton of exceptions. Males with Cystic Fibrosis have a 98% infertility rate. So you'd essentially be taxing someone based on their genetic makeup.

<comment><USER26> Also, wouldn't this unfairly punish those in gay marriages? Adoption is of course an option, but I'd speculate there's a much higher rate of childlessness in gay vs. straight marriages.

<comment><USER3> Adoption and surrogates/donors are both options in gay marriages.

<comment><USER27> And so are they in non-gay marriages. What's your point?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Here's an idea. Rather than taxing the childless maybe you should get a tax break from taking care/raising children made by someone else instead? I.e. the last thing this planet needs is new people.

</comment><comment><USER28> In Europe, this is already implemented. Parents get subsidies and cash money for every child they have, while childless hard working citizens get nothing. This idea is not new, it's already in place :P

</comment><comment><USER9> Yeah, great idea. The single most important world problem we face is overpopulation. Why not make it easier to have children than it already is? Why not tax those who made the right choice and give the money to those who made the wrong one?

The Chinese have the right idea -- they encourage one child per family (an idea that works better in cities than in the countryside), against substantial public ignorance and resistance. If we adopted the opposite policy, we would once again show ourselves to be far behind the times.

<comment><USER29> > The single most important world problem we face is overpopulation.

Citation needed.

<comment><USER9> [http://www.wfp.org/hunger/stats](http://www.wfp.org/hunger/stats)

Quote: "Poor nutrition causes nearly half (45%) of deaths in children under five - 3.1 million children each year."

I invite anyone to try to dismiss the fact that 3.1 million children starve to death each year.

<comment><USER30> For the most part, the present problem is not due to a global shortage of food:

[http://www.wfp.org/hunger/causes](http://www.wfp.org/hunger/causes)

100 billion seems like it would be a challenge.

<comment><USER31> I'd also note, from the earlier link:

 _" 842 million people in the world do not have enough to eat. This number has fallen by 17 percent since 1990."_

We have 1.9 _billion_ more people today than we had in 1990, and we are failing to feed _fewer individuals_. We're not just feeding more people. We're not even just leaving a smaller percentage starving. We have many more people, and _fewer people are starving_. "There are too many people, relative to how much food we can produce" is not the dominant effect here.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> You telling me that age of having a child should be dictated by the government?

</comment><comment><USER33> We already do this.</comment>


Earbits (YC W11) Tunes Into Bay Area Music - <AUTHOR> http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/earbits-tunes-bay-area-music-213407

<comment><USER2> Um, why does the link in the article go to a login screen for an MS Exchange account? Other than that, congrats to Earbits on the deal!

<comment><USER3> Kill me.

<comment><USER2> ?

<comment><USER2> Yeah that is a bummer. Oh well. Is that actual address up?

<comment><USER3> Yes, and now the link has been fixed, thanks to your head's up. ;)

<http://sfgate.earbits.com>

<comment><USER2> Cheers =) Glad to see they fixed it. I'll tune in tomorrow and take a listen.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>