Martin Fowler's unscientific agglomeration of opinion on version control tools - adam-_- http://martinfowler.com/bliki/VersionControlTools.html

<comment><USER2> _"I used to hear people say good things about Perforce, but now the feeling seems to be that it doesn't have compelling advantages over Subversion, let alone the DVCSs."_

Perforce still has better support for branches than Subversion does - <AUTHOR> particular, it has robust support for repeated merges between branches. Subversion 1.5 added "merge tracking" which is supposed to address this problem, but in my real-world use Subversion still failed relatively often at repeated merges and the recovery process is tedious and annoying.

On that particular project we ended up switching to git, but I would definitely choose p4 over svn for use cases (like very very large repositories) where they are both better than git or hg.

<comment><USER3> The biggest advantage that Perforce has is better performance with large code bases than subversion, git, or mercurial.

My guess is that most of us don't work with large and active enough code bases for this to matter. But if you do, consider Perforce.

<comment><USER4> These said large code bases are usually much less of code and much more of binaries, test images or media streams, complete devtool suites, arch compilers, and almost anything that generally would require less version control and more availability control.

In other words, stuff you would actually want to live on a network drive or some other sharing mechanism. But if it's easy enough to shove 10 gigabytes to Perforce, it will happen.

<comment><USER5> For some of these things, sure. But if you put your compiler tools, external binary references, etc. on some share somewhere outside of version control you will find that when you go to create a patch for some older release you are well and truly effed. Being able to sync and build with nothing but a bare OS and the relevant source is a HUGE benefit when you have to support older releases on the level that, say, Microsoft does.

<comment><USER4> It is still the wrong solution.

Disk space is cheap and what you really want is _access to cumulated, unchanged old versions_ \-- not version control: you generally don't diff or merge between compilers or test images.

Instead, you can store builds of each and every gcc version you've ever used on a network disk with very little money and then properly use the version control system to have the different revisions of the source code point to the correct set of tools and resources.

It's like a persistent data storage with good accessibility and no delete command. This is the only real reason why people abuse their version control system with huge binaries and it's the only reason I can think of. I shall bow to anyone who has the guts to refuse to abuse and do it properly instead.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I would suggest a different checklist to pick version control systems. Point one my list would be: "does the system preserve or damage your original?" CVS and SVN both fail on this by writing dot files in each and every directory of what you are trying to manage (breaks some non-compiler applications)- so I would lean more to Git, Mercurial and BZR.

</comment><comment><USER7> TFS is not that bad... the issue is that you have to pay through the teeth to have it and it is not that good.

When it comes out of the box as a bag of bits that you're going to have to configure, hack and code for hours to get what you want you sometimes wonder why you didn't just go SVN + Cruise Control.

For the record, I just wanted my test pass/fails to be emailed to us in a NUnit gui way (red + green). Maybe i'm stupid but that took way too long for a tool that costs so much.

<comment><USER8> TFS has some redeeming qualities when looked at as part of a holistic software development platform - bug tracking, work items ect. but purely as a source control system it is bad.

Day to day experience is just friction, friction, friction.

And guess what keeping source control and your IDE seperate is actually a good idea. Also why do I care that Alex down the hall has opened a file - what am I supposed to do with that information...

<comment><USER7> "And guess what keeping source control and your IDE seperate is actually a good idea. "

Too true. Killing time watching your IDE lock up is not fun. Nor is the fact that _some_ IT departments still haven't performed the upgrade from TFS 2005 _unservicepacked_

.. ..

 _cries_

</comment></comment></comment><comment> adam-_- If you can't be bothered to read the whole article, he recommends (based on anecdotal evidence) subversion, git and mercurial.

</comment><comment><USER9> Wow, the article says "Historically git worked poorly on Windows, poorly enough that we'd not suggest it. This has now changed, providing you run it using msysgit and not cygwin.". I find that interesting, and have 2 comments:

1) friends don't let friends use Windows without Cygwin :-D

2) I've been using git _under Cygwin_ on Windows XP since mid 2007, and have _never_ thought that it worked poorly. In fact I would say that it has always worked beautifully.

Perhaps the problem(s) with Cygwin git only rear their ugly heads on multi- developer projects. My experience has all been on single-developer projects.

</comment><comment><USER10> When I first started using clearcase I hated it. Now many years later, I really appreciate the power it brings to the table. Sure it has negatives just like all vc tools too, but the easy branching, dynamic vs snapshot views, automatic merging, the ability to merge directly from a fellow developers views, etc. has really made my team more productive. However I will say that it takes considerably more expertise to setup and maintain that something like svn or git. So there is the added expense of having full time clearcase admins.

</comment><comment><USER11> "Subversion encourages a simple central repository model, discouraging large scale branching. In an environment that's using Continuous Integration, which is how most of my friends like to work, that model fits reasonably well. As a result Subversion is a good choice for most environments."

...using continuum you can just plug in a POM with a git connector and no trouble with CI and git...

<comment><USER12> I think you missed the point, which is that Subversion discourages branching, which is fine, because most of the people he knows do CI. His point is not that you can't do CI with GIT.

<comment><USER11> My point was that I don't see how the two are related - if you're building off a branch you can still write a pom that builds your particular branch and the rest of the trunk code and gives you all the benefits of CI.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This review (at least it's admittedly unscientific) suffers from a common problem of many critiques of software development practices: a lack of appreciation for diversity. Software development spans a much wider range of conditions than almost any other human activity, scaling from a lone developer working part-time on a personal project up to teams of thousands of devs and testers working on billion dollar or perhaps even life-critical software.

Software development efforts can span 6 or more orders of magnitude difference, and can differ in character enormously (such as between a scheduled release cycle of unpatchable, life-critical software vs. a constantly updated web site). Yet despite this huge diversity, most commentators insist on ignoring it and giving blanket advice as if it were equally applicable to every development effort in the history of the Universe.

The various drawbacks and benefits of different source control tools will matter differently to teams of different scales and processes. For some teams SVN may make sense, for some it may not be even remotely feasible. I've heard of teams that could not use git because of scaling issues (shocking as that may sound).

It's hard to take advice seriously that doesn't acknowledge these issues. It's no different than someone talking about web infrastructure and saying that the best solution is php/apache and mysql running on two separate servers. That may be a fine solution, but it's overkill for some scenarios and unsuitable for a lot of other scenarios. Sometimes you need a thousand servers, sometimes you only need a single 128mb ram VPS, sometimes you need scala or erlang, sometimes you don't need anything more than static html, sometimes you need a REST backend, sometimes you don't, sometimes you need nosql, sometimes you don't. What works for amazon.com may not be applicable to a personal vanity page or to twitter or google or paypal.

</comment><comment><USER13> I'm waiting for someone "popular" to realize how awesome Fossil is. Subv, Git, and Merc can all blow me.

<comment><USER14> What does fossil do that git or hg don't? I'd love to hear some real world examples.

<comment><USER15> It's a one file install. You can easily run it behind firewalls. It has built- in wiki and issue tracking. You can run it from a jailed host; it requires no access to apache config, it has its own server. You can give users accounts on it. You can run it in autosync mode, where everyone's changes are sync'd through a central repo, or you can use manual merge for disconnected use. It uses the battle-tested sqlite as its transactional local store. It is designed to optimize the author's preferred workflow, so if you agree with him in principle, you'll like its ui. Like, e.g., git, it uses SHAs for "artifact" tracking; the sqlite db can be rebuilt from the canonical artifacts. I haven't looked for any comparisons, but it's extremely efficient space- and bandwidth- wise. It's written in SQL, which is semantically efficient, so it's easy to understand how it works.</comment></comment></comment>


Secrets of PostgreSQL Performance (DjangoCon) - <AUTHOR> http://blip.tv/djangocon/secrets-of-postgresql-performance-5572403

<comment><USER2> I wish this wasn't a video. When someone gives a talk, rather than just posting the video, won't someone at least post the slides? Or better yet, a transcript?

<comment><USER3> Your wish is my command sir. I am hard of hearing so I try to transcribe talks. This one is more abbreviated than my last one.

Secrets of Postgres Performance

Measure Everything Before and After

Do not do Dumb Things

Cache Everything

Watch your query counts

Tuning Parameters

shared_buffers: set to 25% of available ram, move up/down 5% to find sweet spot

effective_cache_size: planning hint that tells PG how much RAM it can expect for OS disk cache

work_mem: per process amount of ORDER BY space

Other Parameters

wal_buffers: Set to 16MB and forget it

checkpoint_segments: Increase to at least 10

maintenance_work_mem: 50MB for every GB of RAM

synchronous_commit: turn off with data loss risks

Disks. Lots of disks.

Not all disks are created equal. Faster disks make a huge difference.

Configuration of disks matters a lot. RAID-5 is bad. RAID-1+0 is good.

Separate out the WAL onto its own disk. Can 4x write performance.

Worry about CPU _after_ your disk/RAID/filesystem configurations are more or less optimal.

Use pgbouncer to pool connections

Tablespaces

Consider putting archive or legacy data onto slower drives/volumes

Separate your data and indices onto different volumes if possible

This applies even on SANs

Best of both worlds with Rackspace and Cloud Connect

EBS volumes and Software RAID is best but scary on AWS.

Choice of filesystem matters. No journaled filesystems for your WAL, it is a journal.

Use XFS for maximum performance.

USE noatime!

Avoid queries in loops.

Count() is slow

<comment><USER4> Man you are awesome, thank you. I hate video for these kinds of things, it's like watching paint dry when I could have speed-read through a transcript in a tenth the time it takes to watch a video.

I don't know if I'm an edge case here, but if not there might be some kind of opportunity there.

<comment><USER3> That occurred to me earlier. There's a lot of people like us (I think) who really just want to accumulate as much "80/20" information as possible and don't want multi-media.

Call it, "The wiki for getting to the fucking point".

<comment><USER5> Tragically, gettothefuckingpoint.com is taken by a squatter. What a pity.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Slides available as PDF: [http://media.revsys.com/talks/djangocon/2011/secrets-of- post...](http://media.revsys.com/talks/djangocon/2011/secrets-of-postgresql- performance.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER7> I'm having a really hard time refraining from writing a really snarky "Switch to MySQL" type response, not because I think that MySQL outperforms PostgreSQL, but because there is always _somebody_ on every MySQL article discussion who does this. Ok, that's off my chest, sorry to rant.

I enjoyed this video, even though I'm not a PostgreSQL guy, as it has a lot of good generic info. The advice about XFS and noatime was right on the money, although I don't think he strongly stated enough why you don't want to run EBS volumes over software RAID-0. In my experience this is a really bad idea, because just one of those EBS volumes getting picking up a laggy await (happens pretty frequently with volumes I've seen in the wild) will drag down the performance of the entire array. Also I'm told that the old "RAID-5 is always bad" notion is considerably more nuanced nowadays, and that many of the earlier OLTP write performance problems with RAID-5 have been largely mitigated with modern RAID controllers.

<comment><USER8>
      " Also I'm told that the old "RAID-5 is always bad" notion is considerably more nuanced nowadays, and that many of the earlier OLTP write performance problems with RAID-5 have been largely mitigated with modern RAID controllers."

Not to be snarky, but do you have a source for that? RAID5 has a pretty big intrinsic write penalty.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> This gave me the idea to try <http://pgfouine.projects.postgresql.org> he mentioned on my logs, and I'm already finding a bunch of stuff to fix after a quick run.

</comment><comment><USER10> Anyone know of an available transcript?

<comment><USER3> Yes, see my response to emmett.</comment></comment>


Using the Google Authenticator App with Rails - Moocode Blog - <AUTHOR> https://moocode.com/posts/3-using-the-google-authenticator-app-with-rails <comment><USER2> Careful with that validates? function. Your OTP only changes every 30 seconds by default. At six digits, you're at non-trivial risk of just getting hit by exhaustive search in that interval. Additionally, since the == method on strings short circuits in Ruby, if they wanted to get really tricky they could possibly even get local network access and do a timing attack on you. (At 30 seconds a go and only 10^6 possibilities it would probably be easier to exhaustively search, though.)

</comment><comment><USER3> Using Google Charts to display the QR code? OK, the code uses HTTPS there, but still... I think it should generate the QR code locally.

<comment><USER4> The command line version outputs an ASCII/ANSI QR code directly in the terminal: [http://code.google.com/p/google- authenticator/source/browse/...](http://code.google.com/p/google- authenticator/source/browse/libpam/google-authenticator.c#144)</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Kibana, Grafana, Chatbots, SMS – How do you keep an eye on your product? - <AUTHOR> I've been playing with ELK (Elasticsearch, Logstash, Kibana) stacks for the past couple months and that has given me great insights into what my product is doing in a clustered state in real time. That coupled with a few monitoring scripts and I've finally gotten past feeling helpless. I have a few people saying I should check out Grafana, and I've seen several paid services in this areas too (logentries for example).
I also use chatbots to notify me when things are going wrong, or say when a customer signs up.
How do you keep track of your products, keep monitoring costs low, and know what's going on? <comment><USER2> I've gotten really into Slack recently.

I just log everything ye old fashioned way (text files) and then post anything important/noteworthy to a couple of Slack channels.

It's really easy to build custom integrations and Slack is running on all of our devices so as long as we are all subscribed to the relevant channels I can target _@channel_ in my integration and we know straight away if something bad is happening.

I've use the ELK stack on previous projects, it works really well and isn't that difficult to use (there are some great guides on Digital Ocean) and when I get the time I'm going to set it all up for my current project too.

The only thing is you have to host it somewhere, and it's more justifying the budget for that.

<comment><AUTHOR> I use slack for a lot of notifications too. We strapped a python chatbot on as an integration and gave the bot access to our product which made asking the bot what's happening really easy.

Chatops are catching on, and I'm intrigued. Thanks for the response!

<comment><USER3> Hey, feel free to checkout my library on GitHub. Its goal is to simplify interacting with Slack API (which is amazing IMO) and let users focus on simply writing their bot.

Its still very much in development, but figured this thread was relevant enough for me to post a link.

[https://github.com/GregHilston/Simple-Slack- Bot](https://github.com/GregHilston/Simple-Slack-Bot)

<comment><AUTHOR> Hah. I went to college with you. Small world. Will check out your library, I've been doing a lot of work with chatbots over the last year, focused on Slack. I've only really been working with Java solutions though, so a python library is a nice change of pace.

Thanks for the link!

<comment><USER3> Oh hey man! Please do, feel free to use it in its current state, but the dev branch will be merged to Master shortly and break current compatibility.

Its a sweet simple library to make slack bots real simple!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Elastalert + Kibana + Slack is great if you use logstash/streamstash to aggregate logs internally. I also combine new relic and slack for incident management.

<comment><AUTHOR> Never heard of Elastalert, I'll have to check that out. By the name I'm guessing it's triggers off an elasticsearch server, which would cover infrastructure I already have - so that's nice.

Thanks for the suggestion!

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> For log aggregation I use Elasticsearch + Logstash + Kibana. For statistics I use Influxdb + Telegraf + Grafana. For service alerts I use Consul + Consul Alerts. Notifications get sent to Pager Duty and/or Slack from one of Kibana, Grafana, or Consul.

The Grafana graphs are especially fun to watch and Kibana has a nice logentries-esque plugin for searching and tailing logs.

It's quite the system to setup but once it's running everything else (i.e. the rest of your app) is much more manageable.

<comment><AUTHOR> I've been meaning to use grafana for more than homelab server monitoring.

I've always found it so satisfying to sit back after setting up these types of systems and to watch everything churn out metrics / logs. I'll check out the kibana plugin, I'm using that in production at the moment.

Thanks for the reply!

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> If you're a lone developer (or a small team of developers) isn't a lot better to use something like CloudWatch instead of messing with ELK?

<comment><USER5> For small apps I would use Monit to watch the server processes combined with CloudWatch to watch the servers themselves.

I would investigate the TICK stack (influxdb) before ELK. TICK is great for metrics that are not stored in log files. tail + awk should be enough for managing log files if you only have a few servers.

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm only working with logs across 8 servers with a lot of cross talk and ELK covered the logging side brilliantly, but falls over on metrics from what I have seen so far. I'll check out the TICK stack, that sounds like it may be a welcome replacement.

Thanks for the suggestion!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Zabbix(zabbix-slack-alertscript) & StatusCake + Slack</comment>


UX Lessons From Facebook's New iPhone App - <AUTHOR> http://nathanbarry.com/ux-lessons-from-facebook-ios/

<comment><AUTHOR> I find it really interesting to compare different iterations of the same application. We can learn a lot about what works from closely watching a design team like Facebook's who generally isn't afraid to introduce new design patterns to iOS.

This app is a huge improvement, but there is still quite a ways to go. I'm really curious how the reviews for the new version will be.

<comment><USER2> Is there any information on the actual technology changes they made? It would be nice to know what the code looks like behind the scenes.

<comment><AUTHOR> I haven't seen this yet, but I also haven't taken the time to work through all their posts about it. Someone else who is more dev focused (I tend to focus on design) may be better to answer that.</comment></comment></comment>


Federal Agencies Use Cellphone Location Data for Immigration Enforcement - <AUTHOR> https://www.wsj.com/articles/federal-agencies-use-cellphone-location-data-for-immigration-enforcement-11581078600 <comment><USER2> Excerpt at [http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/3814406/posts](http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/3814406/posts) .</comment>


Ask HN: Are there specific Cloud for Students? - <AUTHOR> Is there something really called cloud for students? DigitalOcean is focused on developers. Does it make sense to have Cloud for Student only? <comment><USER2> To what end? AWS and Azure both have offerings for students in the form of free credits, administered through a few distinct programs.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks @QuinnyPig. Not in terms of credits.

DigitalOcean focused on providing simplified interface and tutorials to get an individual developer started and adapt cloud.

Would this kind of interface be sufficient at student level?

Student may not be think in terms of volumes, ec2 vms, and ips and etc. All he/she needs is to program, launch which could be part of university project or part of hackathons.

I may be too generic here. Appreciate your and HN thoughts.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Does anyone like the bigger HN font? - <AUTHOR>

I noticed the font size on HN was changed a little bigger, I personally feel like it's harder to read. Why is that? <comment><USER2> Maybe you simply hit ctrl-+? I noticed no difference here.

Try ctrl-0 see if that restores it to the old size.

</comment><comment><USER3> Yeah, I don't like it. Definitely harder to read.</comment>


The Factory of Ideas: Working at Bell Labs [video] - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QFK6RG47bww <comment><USER3> I was a much later generation (late 90s), but the end of the video has kind of a funny discussion on motivation: When you arrive at Bell and have access to a collection of amazing resources and amazing people and very few constraints, it's fairly unimaginable that you would piss that opportunity away.

</comment><comment><USER4> The similarly named book "The Idea Factory" by Jon Gertner is a great read on the history of Bell Labs if you're interested in learning more.

</comment><comment><USER5> I didn't know Brian Kernighan was RaspberryPi fan:

[http://swag.raspberrypi.org/products/babbage- bear](http://swag.raspberrypi.org/products/babbage-bear)

Great interview, the next video should be awesome as well.

</comment><comment><USER6> I have a PhD and work at a top CS research lab. Been there for almost 7 years. I feel like a peon .. I have 3 people who tell me what to do. I have to work with people from every time zone and who don't speak proper English and have thick accents. I am not a native speaker btw. The old days of monopoly sponsored research are gone. The new reality sucks. Things aren't a whole lot better in academia from the people I have spoken to. Oh ... and I make low six figures in the US. It is better to just become a programmer.

<comment><USER7> > I make low six figures in the US

Even in the good old days, people at Bell Labs were paid decently, but less than if they had gone into industry to really try to make money.

> Been there for almost 7 years. I feel like a peon .. I have 3 people who > tell me what to do.

Well that part is different, in the old days they had more autonomy.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Wow, must have been awesome.

Found this cool timeline of programming languages: [http://cdn.knightlab.com/libs/timeline3/latest/embed/index.h...](http://cdn.knightlab.com/libs/timeline3/latest/embed/index.html?source=1KcZdsCI3G832QTfx3kCn8zcxi8jH2qFWttB- xuPjYTM&font=Default&lang=en&height=650)

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Open allocation at its best...

We need more of this to counter the MBA/Business closed allocation model.

<comment><USER9> I think the key came from this video in the first few minutes, when Kernighan talked about a Government Controlled Monopoly where Bell Labs got predictable fixed funding from ATT. I think this is the only way Open Allocation can work on such a scale.

<comment><USER10> Not really, companies like Apple/Microsoft are sitting on so much cash they can literally piss away billions on R&D and it would never threaten their viability (how much did Microsoft just write off on failed Nokia deal ?) - <USER2> it seems that modern corporate doesn't see this as valuable approach - I can only speculate why.

<comment><USER11> And Microsoft has been literally been pissing away billions on R&D for the last 10 years.

<comment><USER12> Bell Labs was massive. It had 11,000 people who were involved in pretty much every nukes and cranny ranging from cosmology to transistors to UNIX. Microsoft research probably comes closest to modern equivalent of Bell Labs and it has only 1000 people. So Bell Labs was like 10 MSR combined in to one!

It's really a pity we don't have anything like Bell Labs any more even though profits have grown by leaps and bound. As it is investors would be more than happy to shutdown something like MSR and constantly force the company to "justify" its existence.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bell_Labs#Origin_and_historica...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bell_Labs#Origin_and_historical_locations)

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

<comment><USER13> I don't know if it's an entirely fair comparison to go by body count. Things have gotten a lot more efficient since the Bell Labs days. Even Richard Hamming stated "when I first started working there was a woman who walked around handing out the coffee and donuts, now a machine does that and her job no longer exists."

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Some people claim that a basic income would lead to people doing nothing useful. Examples like these would seem to indicate otherwise.

<comment><USER15> I'm not certain that you can extrapolate the behaviors of highly-paid, highly educated engineers with the hypothetical behaviors of the typical person getting a subsistence allowance from the government.

<comment><USER16> Incentivize completion of higher education & collaborative research projects?

Basic income could have qualifications attached to avoid the fears of what opponents would claim to be lazy or "leaches" of resources.

Of course figuring out how to balance the stipulations of such qualifications for BI, affordable public education, and public research & development projects against claims of abuse akin to the prison labor [1][2] or bloat of tuition from the near endless supply of student loans will likely be an interesting problem to solve.

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

[2] [http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2008/07/what-do- prisoner...](http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2008/07/what-do-prisoners- make-victorias-secret)

<comment><USER14> If basic income has qualifications, it is no longer basic income. That's the _whole point_ of basic income.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Unicode Standard, Version 12.0 - <AUTHOR> http://blog.unicode.org/2019/03/announcing-unicode-standard-version-120.html <comment><USER2> Emojis are a plot to make English-speaking developers care about fixing their code to work with Unicode.

<comment><USER3> If only they hadn't tried to cut it down to 16 bits near the start, we could have avoided a _lot_ of the partial support that emojis expose.

<comment><USER4> Maybe all Asian scripts was not planned to be included back then?

Seems strange they would miscount so grossly otherwise.

<comment><USER3> It's all down to CJK. Originally they allocated 21k codepoints to CJK, and if that was accurate then 16 bits would pretty much fit things.

But we currently have 88k CJK characters assigned out of possibly more than 100k total.

I can't easily find anything about _how_ this went wrong and they got such a small number.

<comment><USER5> > we currently have 88k CJK characters assigned

If you also count the Unihan variations registered in Unicode's ideographic variation database by various Japanese outfits, encoded using the VS16 to VS255 characters after the codepoint they modify, there's another 8k or 9k unique characters assigned.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Every top comment is about Emoji… Law of triviality in action ;)

      Also in Version 12.0, the following Unicode Standard Annexes have notable modifications ⟨…⟩
      UAX #14, Unicode Linebreaking Algorithm
      UAX #29, Unicode Text Segmentation
      UAX #31, Unicode Identifier and Pattern Syntax
      UAX #38, Unicode Han Database (Unihan)
      UAX #45, U-Source Ideographs

<comment><USER6> It's not triviality.

How many people do you really think care about Elymaic script? Or about Nandinagari?

<comment><USER7> Presumably some people. Assigning code points is the Unicode consortium's job. That's what unicode _does_. Nobody should be upset that they keep doing it.

But you ignore the substance of the parent's post which is about the new elements of the Unicode _standard_ which are not confined to assigning code points. There is substance there to be analyzed - there is material there about how Unicode should be used in defining identifier syntaxes which is of high relevance to an HN audience (eg in defining your new serverless framework, what characters should you allow in function names? Unicode now has a better answer for you than '[a-zA-Z_0-9-]').

There are updates to Unicode security and idna support.

But no, sure, let's complain about emoji and obscure languages.

<comment><USER8> > _Assigning code points is the Unicode consortium's job. That's what unicode > does. Nobody should be upset that they keep doing it._

Why not?

Something being "somebody's job", and others being upset that that somebody keeps doing it, can be very logical. E.g.

1) if the job wastes resources, is deemed silly, is done badly, etc.

2) if the job is detrimental to those others

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> It is a shame that the majority of these won't been seen by common devices. Google has stopped work on their Noto fonts initiative, and modern versions of Android are stuck with pre Unicode 10.

Apple has been pretty good at adding Emoji on iOS, but macOS seems to be left behind.

As for Linux... Installing the Unifont gives coverage, but most distros don't seem to have a way to update base level fonts.

I'd love to be proved wrong about any of this. But is seems that the majority of systems don't care because their native scripts are already supported.

<comment><USER10> Emoji handling on Linux is so upsetting. It should not be this tricky.

<comment><USER11> I submit that it should: [http://baldi.me/blog/emoji-in- sql](http://baldi.me/blog/emoji-in-sql)

<comment><USER12> Hilarious.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Are the more fancy scripts supported by Unicode used by real people in production? By scholars? With special fonts? Or is it more like Unicode just wanting to support everything, even though the target audience is actually using something else?

Asking because I'm impressed by the aim of the whole Unicode project but having no real experience with it beyond the basics.

<comment><USER14> Mostly scholars. But even if nobody at all would be using it currently, the explicit goal of Unicode is to support all scripts. Unicode is meant to make all other text encodings obsolete so the world never has to think about text encodings again (which mostly worked so far). That goal can only be reached/maintained if every script anyone might plausibly want to use is contained in Unicode.

<comment><USER15> More specifically, scripts and glyphs that have documented and valid use cases. If you made up a script today, you would have to start using it first (and gain acceptance of it in some community) before it would be eligible for inclusion in the Unicode standard. A good example is the power symbol (⏻, Unicode 9.0). The proposal for it neatly documented that it was in wide use already — in manuals in particular.

Emoji are a slightly different beast though. Those seem to get included based on projected use cases.

<comment><USER16> They used to be included because the Japanese had them in their encoding systems, but the situation now is far more fuzzy. Which is odd for a standard.

<comment><USER8> > _but the situation now is far more fuzz_

It's basically: "text/social comment/chat apps are big, let's add more BS icons for our Facebook/Apple/Google/MS/etc chat apps"

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> FWIW, I've updated now the safeclib to 12.0.0 final from the previous 12.0.0-d1, and there were no changes in the case folding tables. And the changes from 11.0 are minimal, just 6 new entries. So it's just a minimal libc specific update, thanksfully.

For utf8-safe languages there would be 4 new scripts to add, but this affects only rust, java and cperl. All others are unicode unsafe.

</comment><comment><USER18> I would be more amazed to see Tengwar and more conlang scripts added finally.</comment>


Ask HN: Handwritten Letters? - <AUTHOR> Are there any startups sending handwritten letters to customers?
Something like welcome notes to new signups, or thank you notes to long-time customers or people who have referred other customers?
Something simple but personal, with handwritten envelopes and a notecard on good paper inside.
It seems like one of those "things that don't scale" I might be able to add to my routine that might be too labor-intensive for bigger businesses. My goal is to have Improvely stand out with a little surprise and make customers feel appreciated, which they are. Would it still be welcome in 2016? Or is it too over-the-top for an internet company to mail you something after signing up? <comment><USER2> I agree that hand written letters don't scale. I also agree that a hand written letter could elicit positive perceptions of the company.

I'd say the reason to do something that doesn't scale is that the rewards for doing it don't scale either. Sitting face to face with a user makes sense when it provides better feedback than A/B UI tests on the homepage. A phone call makes sense because when it opens a dialog that is difficult to approximate via bulk email.

My gut says that a hand written letter probably creates a higher threshold for bi-directional communication: the friction in the channel that makes a hand written letter standout makes it socially difficult for the customer to respond in a less "romantic" channel...I mean, an email response to a hand written letter feels a bit tacky...

...at least with someone I don't know well. Which leads me to think that a hand written letter might be the sort of non-scaling thing appropriate when a company is large and the relationship with the user is non-trivial.

Finally, I know that if I was thinking it was a good idea it would probably be because I'd rather write a letter than make a phone call or in person appearance. That's just my personality favoring something psychologically more comfortable than the risk of rejection.

Good luck.

</comment><comment><USER3> Since the effort to send an email, even a "personalized one" is rapidly approaching zero, sending a handwritten note is a very personal touch. If you want, you can send postcards if you place them inside an envelope. I would not do it for new customers, unless the note was a brief typed note with a signature. Try your best to find unusual stamps - nothing says boring like a postal mark meter. Above all - make your notes sincere. That means for new customers, something short like "Thank you" because they just joined and for longer customers, a more personal note - "Thank you for being our customer for 2 years and one of our most helpful beta feature testers. Your feedback on X... (this assumes this is the customer's actual relationship). Good luck!

</comment><comment><USER4> Not exactly the same, but Beanstalk (the SVN hosting service) mailed me a T-shirt with a thank you note after being a customer for a year. (They did ask for my shirt size via email first.) I thought it was a really nice gesture.</comment>


Interviews with developers who became managers - <AUTHOR> https://devtomanager.com/ <comment><USER2> The moment I saw this link, I clicked it. I'm pretty lost for advice at the moment, and hoped this would help. But it looks like it is just a collection of interviews with people who became managers about what they've learned?

One of the quotes on the page was:

"Moving from dev to manager is NOT A PROMOTION. It's a CAREER CHANGE."

This is what I'm having a problem with.

I look at my team, and the entire office is happier than I've seen it in 5 years. I'm watching people train, and actively grow under my management. It is incredibly rewarding, and much, much better than before I moved to my current position.

But I've also spent the last 9 weeks doing nothing but reading resumes, phone screens, and interviewing candidates. Staring at an excel spreadsheet mix of engineers I could out-code, great developers I can't afford, internal politics, and emailing recruiters all day, isn't what I went into engineering for. Being judged on my projected demeanor in meetings, ability to navigate politics, and clear bureaucratic hurdles for my team isn't itself enjoyable... its soul-sucking and stressful.

I wake up every morning and don't want to get out of bed. I've started setting aside a (very) small portion of time for coding, just because I miss it so much. Ever wake up and realize you are going to spend the first two hours of the day rescheduling meetings... again?

But most days, something will happen among the team, where, before I leave, I'll realize "That wouldn't have happened here before you rose up the ranks. You've made all of these people's lives better." and it'll bounce me back a bit.

Your website says that the transition to management is difficult and nuanced, but things like the above are what I need help with.

<comment><USER3> Believe it or not, _you_ and you alone can fix this. DELEGATE! Delegate enough to get back SOME of that coding time. Block off 2 hours a day as "Free Time" or "Creative Space" a la Michael Scott from _The Office_. People will respect that.

At my prior place of employment in which I grew the team from 0 to 25 in 3 years, I eventually delegated all the stuff I did not like and empowered my team to own it. It sounds like you can do something very similar with the culture you have there.

An example: At first I loved phone screens and getting to know candidates. I refined and built that process from scratch. Once that process was up and running, it was no longer the best use of my time to be hammering the phones and scheduling screens. There was a better use of my time and someone else that REALLY enjoyed that aspect of team building stepped up. I was able to move myself to the end of the recruiting funnel which freed up 70-80% of my time allocated to that function. The opportunity cost was simply too high for the company having me screening people.

You can certainly find a way to do that as well.

If you feel like chatting more on this, my email is in my profile. Good luck and don't burn out! Your work should be just as fulfilling as your team members work.

<comment><USER4> How can he delegate hiring?

<comment><USER5> Make it a team effort. Distribute resume reviews & interviews.

<comment><USER6> Disagree with this, this is why the industry is filled with junior engineers doing ineffective algorithm whiteboard interviews. Hiring is too important to leave to engineers who don't want to do it. Generally they will do a bad job because it's just an annoying thing getting in the way of their work.

Hiring is broken because engineers think it's just another problem you can apply typical engineering solution. Same kind of thinking that causes the terrible customer service in Google products like random algorithm locking out accounts.

<comment><USER7> I did a fair chunk of interviews when I was just a dev. I loved it, and I took it very seriously in terms of vetting programming skill and practices. I also felt good offloading that burden from a good manager.

It was win-win for our team. YMMV

<comment><USER8> What were your success rates compared to other teams who depended more on the manager for hiring? How often did your company fire people for poor performance?

Sorry, didn't mean these to come off so pointed, just super curious is all, not trying a gotcha or anything.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Here is a collection of related advice I put together useful for managers of software developers: [https://github.com/pdfernhout/High-Performance- Organizations...](https://github.com/pdfernhout/High-Performance- Organizations-Reading-List)

It includes, among other things, a link to the Khan Academy Engineering Management Reading List.

See especially the first book on the list about a need for "slack" (free time, not the software) called "Slack: Getting Past Burnout, Busywork, and the Myth of Total Efficiency" by Tom DeMarco". The summary: "There is a tradeoff between efficiency (meeting previous well-defined needs with minimal effort) versus effectiveness (meeting newly emerging needs with flexibility and responsiveness through organizational learning). If you optimize only for efficiency in meeting previous needs from past opportunities, you will by necessity eliminate your organizations's capacity to respond effectively to future needs from newly emerging opportunities. This ability to learn and grow as an organization requires "slack" time. Middle management has a vital role to play in organizational adaptability -- but only if they are not over- scheduled."

Tom DeMarco also previously co-wrote "Peopleware: Productive Projects and Team", another excellent book on software management.

Another informative and funny book in that area is by Michael Lopp: "Managing Humans: Biting and Humorous Tales of a Software Engineering Manager"

Bottom line: you have essentially switched to a new field even if computers are still involved so you need time for self-education and practice and failures and recoveries. As in, ultimately, years to get really good at this new profession the same way it took years and thousands of mistakes to get good at software development as a programmer... (Although mistakes with people are often more personally painful than mistakes that just the compiler yells at you about.)

Something else to be aware of (may not apply to you) is that many of the best software developers have some degree of Asperger's -- but people with Asperger's often have issues dealing with human relationships unless they consciously learn various skills for dealing with people that many other non- Aspies just seem to have intuitively. And even when they get good at those skills (sometimes better than non-Aspies because they make understanding all that a focus or obsession), an Aspie using the logical primary CPU part of your brain all day to do what many other people do essentially with an emotion co-processor can leave one feeling drained at the end of the day. So "promotion" from software developer to manager may often be a step backwards in career satisfaction for top developers. Anyway, that is just another complexity on top of all the other issues a new manager of any sort has to deal with. But as you point out, being a manager has its own satisfaction in helping others grow, so if you can get enough positive feedback from seeing your own leverage increase that way, the benefits of transitioning to becoming a manager may eventually outweigh the costs (especially once the people and organizational skills needed to excel become more routinized).

<comment><USER10> I appreciate the thought RE the "Asperger", but in the interest of aligning with reality: Asperger no longer exists as a diagnosis (it's all on an autism spectrum now) and saying that many of "the best" software developers "have some degree of" a psychiatric diagnosis is... Well I'm not sure exactly what to call it. Premature springs to mind.

<comment><USER9> Something by Jeff Atwood on this: [https://blog.codinghorror.com/software- developers-and-asperg...](https://blog.codinghorror.com/software-developers- and-aspergers-syndrome/) "Software Developers and Asperger's Syndrome: When I read Wesner Moise's post on Asperger's Syndrome, I wasn't surprised. Many of the best software developers I've known share some of the traits associated with Asperger's Syndrome: ..."

Jeff also links to this 2001 Wired article on the topic: [https://www.wired.com/2001/12/aspergers/](https://www.wired.com/2001/12/aspergers/) "Autism -- and its milder cousin Asperger's syndrome -- is surging among the children of Silicon Valley. Are math-and-tech genes to blame?"

See also: "The Real Problems With Psychiatry: A psychotherapist contends that the DSM, psychiatry's "bible" that defines all mental illness, is not scientific but a product of unscrupulous politics and bureaucracy." [https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2013/05/the- real-...](https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2013/05/the-real- problems-with-psychiatry/275371/)

And from there: "One of the overlooked ways is that diagnoses can change people's lives for the better. Asperger's Syndrome is probably the most successful psychiatric disorder ever in this respect. It created a community. It gave people whose primary symptom was isolation a way to belong and provided resources to those who were diagnosed. It can also have bad effects. A depression diagnosis gives people an identity formed around having a disease that we know doesn't exist, and how that can divert resources from where they might be needed. Imagine how much less depression there would be if people weren't worried about tuition, health care, and retirement. Those are all things that aren't provided by Prozac."

Also, in general, there has been pushback about removing Asperger's from the DSM. As above, it was a "successful" diagnosis in that it helped a lot of people feel less alone and find better ways to cope with a situation once they had a name for it -- see especially the multiple books now on Asperger's and relationships which can be extremely helpful for people with it and their partners (e.g. "Love, Sex and Long-Term Relationships: What People with Asperger Syndrome Really Really Want" by Sarah Hendrickx).

But, moreso, it is not clear that Asperger's is completely the same as "high- functioning autism" in some ways. This is controversial, but just one example: [https://www.spectrumnews.org/news/brain-curvature- distinguis...](https://www.spectrumnews.org/news/brain-curvature- distinguishes-asperger-syndrome-from-autism/) "A region of the brain that controls language is more extensively curved in children with autism than in those with Asperger syndrome, according to a study in the Journal of Child Neurology. The findings offer preliminary biological evidence that Asperger syndrome, a disorder on the autism spectrum, is distinct from high-functioning autism, researchers say."

I wrote "many of the best software developers have some degree of Asperger's...". Someone can have a little of something to some benefits in some area like programming (below the level where a formal diagnosis of Asperger's might be made other than noting tendencies) -- whereas a lot of something might cause profound difficulties in life overall and fit all the diagnostic criterion for a formal diagnosis. There may also be some sweet spot for success given programming in practice especially in a corporate setting does involve dealing with other people to some extent. Labels tend to be binary -- whereas personality trends are more shades of grey (or shades of colors). In various books on Asperger's (e.g. Asperger's on the Job) there are examples of people with Asperger's who excelled in their jobs because of Asperger's and then got promoted to management where they crashed and burned again because of Asperger's (well, usually undiagnosed Asperger's where people were unaware of the particular challenges they would face and did not know how to handle the transition including just asking to go back to their previous role).

I had qualified my comment as "many of the best...". For contrast, here is a Quora article arguing most programmers in general do not have Asperger's though. Part of the reason is explained here: [https://www.quora.com/Is-it- true-that-most-programmers-have-...](https://www.quora.com/Is-it-true-that- most-programmers-have-mild-Aspergers-syndrome) "While in a way aspergers's gives a good aptitude for something methodical and logic based like programming. The deadlines/stress of company life and 'real world' work does not provide a good environment for somebody with Asperger's Syndrome."

So, in the right environment and role, a programmer with Asperger's might excel beyond those without it. In other situations (including for some, a promotion to management), a programmer with Asperger's may fail hard and someone with less technical ability or less ability to focus intensely on one task but a better intuitive people-sense and better multi-tasking ability may do much better.

<comment><USER11> > Something by Jeff Atwood

This is a great example of Dunning-Kruger.

<comment><USER9> Jeff Atwood's was the top match in DuckDuckGo for "asperger's and programming". But sure, he can be controversial.

Here is the second top match from 2008: [https://www.computerworld.com/article/2536193/it- management-...](https://www.computerworld.com/article/2536193/it-management- asperger-s-and-it-dark-secret-or-open-secret.html)

From there:

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

Asperger's and IT: Dark secret or open secret? Asperger's Syndrome has been a part of IT for as long as there's been IT. So why aren't we doing better by the Aspies among us?

... He loved the tech parts of being a system administrator, and he was good at them. But the interpersonal interactions that went along with the position -- the hearty backslaps from random users, the impromptu meetings -- were literally unbearable for Ryno. "I can make your systems efficient and lower your downtime," he says. "I cannot make your users happy."

... While careful to protect his clients' confidentiality, Becker confirms that he sees many adults and children of adults who work for the region's tech powerhouses -- Microsoft Corp. and The Boeing Co. -- and the hundreds of smaller companies that orbit around them.

Some of the Aspies he counsels are at the very top of their tech game: software and aerospace engineers, computer scientists, Ph.Ds. But for every research fellow with Asperger's, he says, there are a legion of fellow Aspies having a much tougher time in the middle or low ranks of the industry.

"The spectrum of success is much broader than one would expect," agrees Roger Meyer, the Portland, Ore.-based author of The Asperger Syndrome Employment Workbook who runs one of the oldest peer-led adult Asperger's groups in the country. "Adults who have grown sophisticated at masking and adaptive behaviors can either bubble along at the bottom of the market or do very well at the top."

It's that "bubbling along at the bottom" that has Becker, Meyer and other Aspie specialists concerned. Employees with Asperger's might do well for years in data entry or working in a job like insurance claims, where knowledge of ephemera is a prized work skill, only to flounder when they're promoted to a position that requires a higher degree of social interaction."

</comment><comment>

</comment><comment><USER12> Early in my career I worked at a large company where the average dev age was late 30s. Quite a few of these people had taken a stab at management and returned to development. Basically I was told this much - don't do it unless you're done with coding and desire to rise up the company ranks.

9 years ago I did such a bang-up job as the lead on a medium size product that I was offered a promotion to management. The first thing I asked was "can I still code?". No. I got my CS degree because I like doing that. Turned it down and accepted a promotion to a principal dev instead. Still, I was rather miserable in that environment. A year later I rebooted my career from .NET enterprise dev -> Rails consultant for early stage start-ups, best thing I ever did in my 20 years as a dev.

You're hired by your company to perform a job for a certain comp package. You're not there for charity. If you're not happy change things up. Your reports will carry on without you, and if things are that bad in your absence, will also carry on to hopefully higher planes.

<comment><AUTHOR> > don't do it unless you're done with coding

Kind of, yes. I guess it depends on the workplace. Some companies still allow managers to code for a certain percentage of their time, while some don't.

But you're right - transitioning to management usually involves letting go of code.

<comment><USER12> Yeah, I should definitely qualify that statement to larger orgs. Every company I've been in with < 100 people tech management usually coded, and typically in places < 20 people the CTO would be the most prolific coder.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I have a good friend that went from Google Software Reliability Engineer (SRE) to manager of an SRE team, but for him it's less of a problem because he's always focused on helping others (and to hear him, he gets a good amount of time to help steer juniors towards solutions and around problems).

I believe he does make sure to set aside a good amount of time every week to code on whatever side project is his current fancy (usually Perl 6 related). I don't think he would handle it nearly as well if he didn't have that to fall back on. So it sounds like maybe you've stumbled on something that might help (designated time for side projects). The question is whether the rest of the job is (or will become) gratifying _enough_ to hit a good equilibrium.

I assume you're being paid a salary at the position you're at. An important facet of salaried positions I've drawn upon is that unless outlined clearly otherwise in a contract, I'm judged on what I _deliver_. If that means to keep my sanity I take an hour out of the work day to read HN, or code a side project, or any other thing, so be it. That's a requirement for me keeping my sanity at the job I'm at, and if I'm not delivering, then I'll be judged on that by my superiors. My suggestion is to do whatever it takes to make the job palatable to you. If that means putting less than 100% in, then put less than 100% in. I assume they would rather have you at 80% indefinitely than 100% for another 3-6 months before you burn out. It sure sounds like your co-workers would.

<comment><USER2> This is exactly where I am at. You summarized it perfectly. I'm happy to hear there are other people who are in my position, that devote time to code as well.

I'm trying to find a way to make that remaining 80% more gratifying. And I'm nervous about committing to it permanently until it is. Similarly, I am hesitant to give up on the opportunity, or go back to IC / team lead status (with the career limitations that implies (how real a threat is ageism?)) if it might still be possible to make management more gratifying, given what an opportunity it represents.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Can't recommend enough "The One Minute Manager" by Kenneth H. Blanchard.

Clean read. Easy to understand principles. From what I remember and learnt: Limit meetings, define responsibilities, trust your people, focus on what has been done, going to be done, and the obstacles. And, you are here to help not to micromanage.

</comment><comment><USER15> I just became a manager of my team and was introduced to the [https://www.manager-tools.com/podcasts](https://www.manager- tools.com/podcasts)

Single best resource I have used for management. It taught me how to manage, even after getting my MBA and serving as president of a Toastmasters club.

I attended the Manager Tools conference and did a conference debrief of it:

[http://redgreenrepeat.com/2019/03/08/conference-debrief- mana...](http://redgreenrepeat.com/2019/03/08/conference-debrief-manager- tools/)

If you have any questions, please ask!

</comment><comment><USER16> A lot of interviews about the motivation being some variant of teamwork or changing the world.

Not many people admitting the financial motivation.

<comment><AUTHOR> A lot of companies these days have parallel tracks for ICs and managers, so I'm not sure that the financial motivation holds at such places.

<comment><USER17> agreed. Being an IC with less stress and getting similar compensation while enjoying the architectural work seems more lucrative

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Interesting content. I'm at the IC vs. manager crossroads and this was some well timed perspective.

FYI: You have a `margin-top: 1rem;` value in your `.navbar-custom` class causing text to be visible above the header when you scroll.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you! Fixed. :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> So many times i have seen coders "promoted" to managing roles. It actually seems to be normal practice to do this because: the coder is intelligent, the coder knows whats going on technically, plus the idea that general experience is somehow related to management skill.

However the truth is if your not regularly training as a manager and consciously applying well known good management techniques then your probably not doing so well... as a manager.

As a coder you train a lot! then as a manager you should also train => proactively get training please!!

However management is a soft-skill, and coding is a hard -skill. Mistakes in management are not seen clearly to actually matter too much. Mistakes in coding clearly matter. When bad management techniques are applied (such as frequently requesting changes, imposing bad deadlines, not actually planning ....) then the outcome: bad or wrong code, missing deadlines will be seen as an issue with the coder and not the management. How many coders are being turned over before....

an anecdote:

When the emperor napoleon marched back to Paris after his 5 month sprint through the Russian winter, he was able to return as Emperor and remain as Emperor without too much trouble when considering the scale of the disaster, he was then able to then raise another Army and start a new series of campaigns.

:) [https://www.edwardtufte.com/tufte/posters](https://www.edwardtufte.com/tufte/posters)

</comment><comment><USER20> Highest recommendation for The Manager's Path: [https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/the-managers- path/97814...](https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/the-managers- path/9781491973882/)

Also excellent but require some translation to a tech setting: Becoming a Manager (Hill) and Managing (Mintzberg)

</comment><comment><USER17> For me, the most challenging part was doing performance evaluations among different engineers where some was doing really amazing stuff but they weren't good at selling while others weren't doing anything impressive but selling it very smartly. Being manager, doing code reviews, going through ticket managers and other tools you can see this who is what and how much but you can barely influence 360 reviews.

On another occasion, it really got out of hands, when I was working on totally independent team and my people working on so many different teams. Being the guys, you gotta know ins/outs of all these projects going on while not loosing track of yours

</comment><comment><USER21> The Problem with this Kind of interview is that a lot of These Manager types won't do interviews About their Jobs. So you will only get interviews with ~20% of them who are probably neither at the top nor at the Bottom of the Manager sphere.

</comment><comment><USER22> "A good developer can't a good manager, similarly a good manager can't be a good developer" combination of both is a rare case

</comment><comment><USER23> > FIND YOU CAREER PATH

shouldn't that be your*?

</comment><comment><USER24> IT'S TOO LATE FOR ME! SAVE YOURSELVES!

</comment><comment><USER25> Why do we need managers? Seems to me like anachronism from authoritative past. I can't recall a single manager that wasn't getting in the way of doing things in my past working experience (top engineering companies everybody wanted to get into); more often they were just enforcers of shady things that companies kept in the dark. Ramping up education, practicing virtues, supporting transparent exchange of information, and people can self-organize without any managers. Having managers just keeps everybody weak, uninformed, ignorant and lazy. Anyone remotely competent doesn't want to be managed.

<comment><USER26> A good manager makes a bad team good, and a good team outstanding. A good manager is an enabler. A good manager makes individual programmers better, makes the team work better together, makes the work itself better. A good manager can have an incredibly positive effect on a group. Seen it myself.

Sure, sometimes a group has relatively simple tasks and doesn't have enough incompetents, prima donnas, social disaster zones or or straight up sociopaths to _need_ a good manager, but given that a good manager can massively improve the output of a team, make everyone happier and make a company more profitable, it seems silly not to have a good manager.

In the interests of no passive-aggressive nonsense, I simply don't believe that you've never encountered a situation where a good manager can make things better, or never encountered a situation where somebody _was_ managing things and in doing so making a positive difference. The odds against it seem astronomical; especially in a 750 personnel sized company.

<comment><USER25> I've heard a lot about good managers, but never experienced one. It was always some form of manipulation, cutting the corners, forcing agenda even on solutions that were both wildly profitable as well as technically excellent "to make their mark", finding scapegoats to blame, in order to propel manager's ego and standing within company; the game was purely about power, hacking perception of their seniors about their qualities in order to progress. People that didn't play tended to find themselves packaged for layoffs, regardless of how much company benefited from them in the past.

So from my experience: Good manager is like UFO - I've heard of it, but never seen one. Unless you consider top management that just makes itself invisible and leaves kids on the playground doing whatever they are inspired to. That would be probably closest to what I could take as good management.

<comment><USER27> This is my main problem with engineers that become managers. Programming does tend to create ego problems. You want that as your manager? Not really a good move. My best manager had no idea how to code, but he knew how to communicate, lend an ear and really listen, and make sure everyone was happy. But somehow he did it with a firm hand. Every one knew the line to not cross was mostly about lying. You have to be truthful that's what he can see through.

<comment><USER26> Apropos of this, some of my junior engineers now repeat back to me "code without ego" every time they have a code review or make a mistake. They take pride in not allowing their ego to get in the way. All it took was me demonstrating egoless working and loudly advocating that we all leave our ego at home.

I soothe my ego on the anonymous internet. In the workplace, it goes in the fucking box and every other thing I say is a variation on "I don't understand". Working life is _so_ much easier without ego games. So much more pleasant.

I hypothesise that programmers with excessive ego have been sadly let down by managers and team leads in their formative years :(</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


An exoskeleton to make you feel older - <AUTHOR> http://www.theverge.com/2016/1/8/10736840/genworth-aging-suit-exoskeleton-feeling-old-ces-2016 <comment><USER2> Does it have a button to reverse the functionality and create a younger, stronger you?

<comment><USER3> That certainly would be helpful as you could then use it to aid people with those conditions. I don't know why they didn't show off that functionality.</comment></comment>


Load Testing our Heroku app - <AUTHOR> http://flux88.com/blog/load-testing-our-heroku-app/

<comment><USER2> It is a very basic set of tests, but it does give you a rough idea on what may be possible to do with a dyno or two.

</comment><comment><USER3> Did something similar recently, and adding dynos didn't help. Then I realized I was limited by my own bandwidth; both my co-founder and I could hammer heroku from our homes and still see the same maximum throughput individually.

Our main take-away was that their caching layer was really effing fast.

</comment><comment><USER4> Heroku's dynos scale just fine. As long as you got the money you can keep adding dynos. However Heroku's database services do not scale as easily. I recommend using Amazon's RDS instead. RDS is F'n amazing. You can scale the db up or down and take snapshots without any downtime.</comment>


A Sokoban levels design programming contest - <AUTHOR> http://sokoban-gild.com

<comment><USER2> I'm curious about the backstory to this contest. Who is running it and why?

Group of puzzle enthusiasts banding together to push the envelope? Tech startup wanting to off-load design work for a future game?

<comment><USER3> It's a puzzle enthusiast named Gil, from the looks of it. There's a tradition of running these for fun.

<comment><USER2> That's awesome.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I'm not planning on entering the contest, but for curiosity's sake i'm curious what algorithms might be core to implementing Sokoban? +/-'s Just for my knowledge, I'm also curious how all these puzzle apps get their levels designed. Is someone hand designing them? Are they procedurally generated and if so how can you prove that their is a solution/it's a fun puzzle?

</comment><comment><USER5> No pictures?

<comment><USER6> I presume this gives the submitters a chance to improve their submissions without the other competitors appropriating ideas.</comment></comment>


FBI can obtain a warrant if you run Tor [pdf] - <AUTHOR> http://www.supremecourt.gov/orders/courtorders/frcr16_mj80.pdf <comment><USER2> We need an accurate, neutral title for this. Suggestions?

Edit: or if it's a dupe, as some comments suggest, please reply with a link to the earlier thread.

<comment><USER3> Maybe this thread (not really a dupe): [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11594597](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11594597)

<comment><USER2> Ah, that must be the thread people have in mind. Thanks!

That's a dupe by HN's standards: it's a major discussion of the same story.

<comment><USER3> > That's a dupe by HN's standards: it's a major discussion of the same story.

Ohh, good to know.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I don't think the contents in the link back up the claim in the title, it seems to say that _if you 've been suspected of a crime_ __and __you run Tor then the fact that you 've used Tor increases the scope of the warrant in limited ways. The warrant is served because of the crime you've been suspected of, not because of the use of Tor.

That's it. It's not saying that just using Tor is enough to be served a warrant. There's really nothing that crazy about any of it.

<comment><USER5> What are the criteria required to satisfy suspicion?

"I could smell weed, so I arrested this driver's personal belongings including several thousand dollars in cash".

<comment><USER6> That's a well established area of American criminal law that's not confined to this matter and way too big to discuss in a Hacker News comment.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Title seems to bury the lede if I'm not reading this wrong. The rules would seem to provide warrants to remotely break into computers in unknown jurisdictions ("location has been concealed through technological means") in order to seize data. As in US FBI breaking into computers in other countries.

And look at (b)(6)(B) -- tell me that doesn't say the warrant would be to break into the _victims '_ computers. 18 U.S.C. 1030 is the CFAA.

</comment><comment><USER8> This was posted a few days ago. I recall that what it _actually_ says is that you can get a warrant to break into the machine even if it can't be proven that the machine is in the jurisdiction of the court giving the warrant, because it is hard to do so when TOR is in use. You still need a valid warrant, it just can come from a different state then where you reside.

<comment><USER9> Yeah I remember that post. One thing I didn't ask that I meant to. Does anyone know what kind of implications this would have if a warrant is granted for a machine that turns out to reside outside of the USA?

Extreme over the top example scenaria: An employee of a foreign government installs Tor on their work machine, does some things meriting an FBI warrant under this decision. The FBI finds a way to access this machine, and in the process accidentally discovers classified information belonging to the foreign government and that government finds the data breach came from the FBI.

I may be mistaking, but the decision sounds like an awful lot of trouble preparing to happen with regards to foreign relations.

<comment><USER8> IANAL, but I would think that if you are hiding your identity you lose any rights that come with that.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Do these new rules expand the claimed foreign jurisdiction of US federal courts or not?

The amended rules provide new authorities for issuing warrants when "the district where the media or information is located has been concealed through technological means". In other words, the new rules seem to expand the authority of federal courts when there is a question of _which_ district court has jurisdiction. But what do these new rules mean for cases in which the location of the information is clearly outside of the jurisdiction of _any_ US federal district court, or when there is a question of whether it might be?

Apparently the rules were previously amended to remove the definition of "district court" [0], making this question still more subtle. Note also that the rules explicitly expand the jurisdiction of US federal courts without regard to sovereign geography in cases of terrorism, but not otherwise. (I am reminded why I decided not to pursue a legal career.)

0\. See the note pertaining to Rule 1(b) of the 2002 amendment, at [https://www.law.cornell.edu/rules/frcrmp/rule_1](https://www.law.cornell.edu/rules/frcrmp/rule_1)

</comment><comment><USER11> There was a case centered around the fact that the defendant maintained a TOR router and occasional exit point in the city I live in a few years ago.

I didn't follow it obsessively but general gist I walked away with was that the authorities were using TOR as an excuse to go after people who had gotten their attention for other reasons, perhaps so simple as annoying people who are simply friends with people in power. And then subject them to a shockingly large range of intrusive police activity (including extended surveillance, pre-dawn raids using specially trained heavily armed police forces), and drawn out prosecution for a litany of minor or petty violations they happened to discover in the process.

At the end of the trial it came out that they never did really try to prosecute any of the TOR related "offenses" and judges were apparently happy to leave TOR usage in some sort of legal grey area.

So it's not just the Americans and the FBI that get up disingenuous shenanigans when it comes to TOR.

</comment><comment><USER12> Looks like it mostly targets onion sites/eepsites to me, but it's really broadly worded. Damn.

</comment><comment><USER6> Can someone give context for this document? Why is the Supreme Court proposing amendments to the federal criminal code?

</comment><comment><USER13> I wish they'd go after the users of shell companies just as aggressively as Tor. But this 1% has super PACs.

</comment><comment><USER14> off topic: Can everyone stop spelling "Tor" with all caps? [https://www.torproject.org/docs/faq#WhyCalledTor](https://www.torproject.org/docs/faq#WhyCalledTor)

<comment><USER13> Whoops, thanks, edited. I guess they're like Nato but not yet awol. [http://english.stackexchange.com/questions/51924/proper- capi...](http://english.stackexchange.com/questions/51924/proper- capitalization-of-commonly-used-acronyms)

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Well this is it folks, to be honest I don't really blame em'</comment>


Drones can be used to plant 100000 trees in a day GIF - <AUTHOR> https://gfycat.com/whichdistantgoldenretriever <comment><USER2> Animals like squirrels, cattle or deer would render a planting scheme like this useless by simply trampling, digging up or eating the saplings.

Source - friend who attempted to begin re-foresting land purchased in Utah with native trees.</comment>


Sydney schoolboys take down Martin Shkreli, the 'most hated man in the world' - <AUTHOR> http://www.smh.com.au/technology/sci-tech/sydney-schoolboys-take-down-martin-shkreli-the-most-hated-man-in-the-world-20161125-gsxcu5 <comment><USER2> Wasn't it part of Shkreli's plan, to raise prices in order to encourage more research into cheaper/better medicines?

<comment><AUTHOR> Magic 8 ball says: "Not likely"</comment></comment>


The Mind of an Octopus - <AUTHOR> https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-mind-of-an-octopus/ <comment><USER2> What's fascinating is how little we can study octopuses at the moment with even the current technologies we have. Truly fascinating read. Thanks!</comment>


Do you need to know math for doing great science? - <AUTHOR> http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/the-curious-wavefunction/do-you-need-to-know-math-for-doing-great-science/ <comment><USER2> I stopped reading as soon as the article said Einstein's strength was his physical intuition and not his mathematical prowess. Try explaining tensor calculus to someone that doesn't have proper understanding of Riemanian geometry. Einstein was indeed a very good mathematician and not just a physicist with "great physical intuition".

<comment><USER3> Einstein was an exceptionally strong mathematician. He mastered integral and differential calculus by age 15, and gained ample knowledge in more advanced topics (topology, geometry, etc.) in the following years. Note that this was much more impressive back then than it is today. That being said, he did also command impressive intuition and observational skills.

By the way, the _exact same_ can be said for Feynman, with the exception that Feynman was a stronger mathematician yet.

<comment><USER4> why do you say this was more impressive back then than it is today? I thought all the areas you mentioned were well-understood. if anything I'd think this kind of math is more daunting today because it just takes 1 click to get to a wall of text on wikipedia in impenetrable notation. I'd think back then any kid who picked up a text could just read it without potentially diving into 100 years of abstract math.

<comment><USER3> A normal school curriculum back then did not go so far as to teach calculus. When Einstein taught himself vector calculus, he used the textbook written by the guy who invented it because it was the _only_ textbook. Then he personally wrote to the guy to clear up his misconceptions.

Today, you can learn this material in open university courses, and if you have a question, consult a plethora of freely available resources on the internet.

Accessibility of information matters.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> My take (working scientist):

\- You need to know _some_ math to do great science. How much math depends very much on your field, and what you're looking into (even within my field, 'great science' can range from things that only need long division to things that need serious calculus or simulation chops).

\- Knowing math does _not_ mean you can do great science. The mathematically inclined occasionally fall susceptible to the stack fallacy, and assume that once the math is known, everything else falls into place. Some of the worst science I've seen in my field stems from that assumption.

</comment><comment><USER6> In the sciences, mathematics serves as nothing less than a convenient notation for expressing (and manipulating) certain principles: it is an invaluable tool, both for analysis and exposition.

That being said, in my opinion, _great_ science is largely about insight, and this does not necessarily depend on maths. For example, consider the contributions Faraday made to our understanding of electromagnetism. Although he never mastered maths, he broke the ground for many that followed him, most notably Maxwell. With Maxwell, you have almost the opposite situation, as he was a highly skilled mathematician: his insights were largely borne of mathematical abstraction.

So I think the best answer to the question is sometimes. Faraday's insights were not (directly) dependent on advanced knowledge of mathematics, but Maxwell's were. We needed the genius of both these men, but mathematics was only required of the second.

What should we do, then? Definitely require hard science majors to learn mathematics, even more so then currently. Encourage mathematicians to think about science problems, and vice-versa. But let us not make the mistake of closing the scientific doors on the so-called 'mathematically illiterate.' For all we know, they carry the solutions to some of our most difficult problems.

 _Edit: changed 'where' to 'were'_

<comment><USER7> > But let us not make the mistake of closing the scientific doors on the so- > called 'mathematically illiterate.'

Fair enough, but it can lead to a very serious problem -- how do we compare the results of different studies? Day-to-day experimental results can be collected with only a little math, but any theories that might be shaped on the basis of those results, that might end up defining new fields, usually have a mathematical form that summarizes the experimental work and creates new principles and paradigms. Those theories that last the longest and have the largest effect on science, tend to be more mathematical than anecdotal.

> Faraday's insights were not (directly) dependent on advanced knowledge of > mathematics, but Maxwell's were. We needed the genius of both these men, but > mathematics was only required of the second.

This example supports the role of mathematics in science. Faraday _described_ some results that arose in laboratory experiments, then Maxwell _explained_ those results using mathematics. Faraday's results were fascinating, but Maxwell's results were portable and later served as a foundation for relativity -- which was also very mathematical.

<comment><USER8> > _Faraday described some results that arose in laboratory experiments, then > Maxwell explained those results using mathematics._

The issue is with expecting a single person to be able to do both; people with incredible insight who are also great at mathematics are inherently rare. If you require the latter you're going to miss out on much of the world's stock of the former. I think the future of science rests on the coordination of both.

<comment><USER7> I agree completely, but by 1915, Einstein had reshaped himself into exactly the multidisciplinary person required to write the general theory.

The real tragedy in science are those with only physical intuition and little mathematical foundation, like Nicola Tesla, who wasted much time on notions that flatly contradicted the mathematical underpinnings of physical theory.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Note the author taught biology. I think we would all agree that there are a variety of sciences, some of which rely heavily on advanced maths (particle physics) while in others (biology) it's really optional and there is plenty that can be done without a deep understanding of numbers theory.

My undergrad (UBC) used math (calc 101) as a weeding-out course. They needed 50% of students to fail. When computerized teaching was tested and pass rates went up, it was a problem. So they eliminated the computer-aided option (early 90s, probably different now). Math was a weapon for dissuading students. It worked. I probably would have given up had I not completed calc in a highschool with a teacher who actually cared.

</comment><comment><USER10> "but even the greatest theoretical physicists of the twentieth century including Einstein, Fermi, Feynman and Bohr were really known for their physical intuition than for formidable mathematical prowess"

Nonsense. Feynman, for example, was famous for his ability to formulate and to solve mathematical problems in hours that his colleagues had spent months working on.

How is this in Scientific American?

Not worth reading.

</comment><comment><USER11> I would say that the answer is trivially yes. You need to know math to do great science.

Why?

Science is all about reproducibility. Without a strong grasp of statistics, you do not know whether you've actually discovered an effect, or whether you just got (un)lucky with your data. And far from being a theoretical problem, numerous scientific disciplines, especially those in biology and medicine, are currently dealing with a "reproducibility crisis", as they find that prominent results don't recur when replication experiments are run.

Far from there being too much math in science, I think there's currently too _little_ math. If researchers knew more about the limits of the statistical tests they were using, rather than focusing on the magic p=0.05 level, we'd have much higher quality science, with a much higher level of confidence that the results being reported were real results, rather than statistical abberations.

<comment><USER12> > Science is all about reproducibility

Can this really be said in all fairness? What of the flashes of brilliance, the striking insights into understanding seemingly inexplicable phenomena? The discovery of the structure of benzene, the creation of the periodic table comes to mind.

<comment><USER13> Reproducibility of results, not reproducibility of thought process on different (even though similar) ground.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> There are two versions of "being good at mathematics". 1\. You are good in solving mathematical problems like solving complex equations using various techniques. In this case you are working inside mathematics. 2\. You are good at modeling systems using mathematics. Using mathematics as a language and create a mapping between the system you are researching and mathematical concepts.

I think the article point is that you can do good science if you have the second skill.

<comment><USER15> I would add some nuance, to make the list look more like:

1A) Ability to _create_ new mathematical ways of talking about your systems. This means things like inventing new notations, conventions, or combinations of mathematical methods from disparate mathematical disciplines.

1B) Ability to _recognize_ when a mathematical finding applies to your system. You may not be able to come up with it on your own, but you know it when you see it.

2) Ability to implement conventional methods quickly to your problem, even a complex one.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> I find it troubling that students are put off by the notion that knowing mathematics is required to do X. Mathematics needs a PR campaign (and maybe better teachers?).

I've noticed that a large number of our students are scarred of taking any courses that could possibly be related to math.

<comment><USER17> Both. I'm worried that the way education is being conducted is increasingly turning people off of math, science, and literature. These are all wonderful and highly useful subjects of study and even recreation, but the school systems have turned then into drudgery, and have been using them for aversion therapy for years. It's a wonder society functions at all.

<comment><USER18> >I'm worried that the way education is being conducted is increasingly turning people off of math, science, and literature.

I disagree. Looking globally (and to some extent historically) I don't see evidence that more successful education systems were taught in more engaging ways by insightful teachers. I do see cultural differences, I see modern children believing they are there to be entertained and not to simply learn and do as they are told.

Blaming the teachers and the schools is easy. Blaming the parents and the society that we have created is more honest though _imo_.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Is great science done anymore? It seems like there were prolific scientists making incredible advances directly impacting the standard of living of humans for a period, and now we're coasting and making small incremental changes. I'm sure some folks here have examples of amazing things being done in science now, but I don't seem to be noticing the discoveries impacting the same way that seemed to be happening in 1900-2000 era. We're moving into another dark age. Kidding about that last part, and I actually do love science.

It just seems like before people were making amazing discoveries and now it's like "let's make facebook work better and get everyone addicted to smartphones and track 'em so we can sell stuff. Starbucks and iPhones. Donald Trump."

In terms of the article, I don't see how knowing math could be anything but helpful for doing great science. Maybe one doesn't have to be an expert, but to pretend it couldn't be helpful seems silly. Maybe I don't need to know how to spell words to do great science either, but conveying ideas in a clear manner is so important. Hence math.

<comment><USER20> I don't agree...

"The more important fundamental laws and facts of physical science have all been discovered, and these are now so firmly established that the possibility of their ever being supplanted in consequence of new discoveries is exceedingly remote... Our future discoveries must be looked for in the sixth place of decimals." Albert A. Michelson, speech given in 1894 at the dedication of Ryerson Physics Lab, University of Chicago.

<comment><USER21> Death years of these guys: Maxwell (1879), Darwin (1882), Newton (1727), Mendeleev (1907). So it seems he was right. We have been just applying the science of the giants for the past 122 years.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> In general: there's an appreciation for basic logic that is necessary.

In Curious Wavefunction's field, chemistry (which is something I am, uh, somewhat familiar with), graph theory could _probably_ be useful, but useful graph theoretic construction for retrosynthetic analysis seems to be persistently elusive since at least E. J. Corey's era.

But sometimes just being able to do math is important. Today I got into a minor dispute with someone who is running a sequencing/diagnostics startup. Their sequencing technique is, reported as of late 2015, getting an 8% error rate for an 8x coverage sequence. Asked him what the error would have been for a 1x coverage, and he couldn't answer. I would think that if you're going to be using sequencing to do diagnostics, being able to rapidly figure out things like this is important.

<comment><USER23> The article makes this claim:

> "Most top chemists and biomedical researchers have little use for > mathematics per se, except in terms of using statistical software or basic > calculus. "

Now I never ended up working in the field, but I remember my organic chemistry Msc. being fairly math heavy. Solving the Schroedinger equation for a complex molecule or refining a stochastic simulation model involved a bit more than basic calculus. The whole course was more math than lab work.

Was this article written by someone who never took an advanced science class, or by a mathematician to whom all the math used in natural sciences is trite and simple?

<comment><USER22> I think Curious Wavefunction was a practicing chemist. Nobody really solves schroedinger equations (actually you can't really solve it for anything besides hydrogen) and first-pass "gut" understanding of kinetics is usually good enough to get most things done. As for kinetics: in practice, just do it five times at five temperatures to find the best yield where it goes fast and doesn't degrade.

This would be for organic synthesis.

Biochemists use kinetics more, one time my boss yelled at her grad students for using 1 uL pipettes because they have poor resolution for kinetic studies, but even so they're not necessary for many studies (for example, for my biochemistry pretty much everything was pushed to the saturating rate and we had linear kinetics).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Quote: "The other thing to keep in mind is that an over-reliance on math can also seriously hinder progress in certain fields and even lead to great financial and personal losses. Finance is a great example; the highly sophisticated models developed by physicists on Wall Street caused more harm than good."

This is very misleading -- it tries to hold mathematics responsible for what in fact was a mixture of superficial mathematical reasoning and an inability to grasp that the mathematical models had little to do with reality. It was an example of using mathematics to conceal rather than reveal.

If the mathematical model doesn't accurately model reality, don't blame the math, blame the mathematician.

</comment><comment><USER24> As I see mathematics as somewhat like the act of traversing, exploring, and constructing a hypergraph built fundamentally of pointers where the cliques and common paths are named simply for economical reasons for quick addressing, it clearly can increase the probability of doing great science no matter what field you are.

I'd still say that you can still do great science although you do not know the formal language of mathematics, but the probability of getting to the position of doing the science today is harder because we have more aggressive naked alpha monkeys protecting their turfs from those they see less worthy of joining the adventure.

</comment><comment><USER25> You don't necessarily need great math to do productive science, but even if you are working in a "soft" field like psychology, strong math is a strong asset, such as in the field of causal learning, where it was found that mathematical models of associative learning doesn't sufficiently account for rats learning (can you do that without math?), or in behavioral variability.

Otherwise you're going to be stuck plugging in numbers into a model you don't understand.

Also, I think strong intuition is much harder to develop than a strong math foundation. I don't know if you can hard work your way into strong intuition.

</comment><comment><USER26> Mathematics is a fundamental tool to convey your imaginations to others in a way they can test it for approval or disapproval. IMO if you take away mathematics from Science, the only thing left are novel ideas (which you can also find in sci-fi novels).

Of course a person can have deep imaginations and solutions to the great science problems, but if she can't express the ideas then how to prove them right or wrong??

<comment><USER27> > IMO if you take away mathematics from Science, the only thing left are novel > ideas (which you can also find in sci-fi novels).

Math is an important part of nearly all scientific fields, but to say that there is nothing left but ideas when the math is taken away is too broad. There are many fields of science that traditionally have been developed without a lot of need for math, like for example biology and earth sciences. These days mathematics is a large part of these fields too, but in some subfields, like in ecology, many researchers use little math even today.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> Interesting question. Spontaneously I would say that it depends on the field. Best researchers seem to me the ones that are not only good in math.

</comment><comment><USER29> Site seems to be down. Cached version: [http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:8cobPmg...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:8cobPmgMV- MJ:blogs.scientificamerican.com/the-curious-wavefunction/do-you-need-to-know- math-for-doing-great-science/)

</comment><comment><USER30> This is an interesting, though quite old example of the importance of math: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hardy%E2%80%93Weinberg_princip...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hardy%E2%80%93Weinberg_principle#History)

</comment><comment><USER31> No, you don't need!

But if you want to publish in a respectful magazine and you don't know how to formalize (in maths) your accomplishment, you will not get accept.

</comment><comment><USER32> Yes.

<comment><USER33> Faraday?

<comment><USER32> I suppose, only if there is no Maxwell yet :)</comment></comment></comment>


Impresso v.2 Is on Product Hunt - <AUTHOR> https://www.producthunt.com/posts/impresso <comment><AUTHOR> Impresso v.2 is redeveloped from scratch. For the past year, we really worked hard to make the new version more flexible & powerful yet easy to use. We appreciate your support by posting your comments, feedback & questions.</comment>


Top state mover: Kansas rebounds from tax-cutting disaster - <AUTHOR> https://www.cnbc.com/2019/07/09/top-state-mover-kansas-rebounds-from-tax-cutting-disaster.html <comment><USER2> Will this experiment change any minds about taxation? I still see "Laffer Curve" type arguments to justify always cutting taxes. I suspect not: that sort of thing has become almost a religious doctrine, one that is evidence- resistant.

</comment><comment><USER3> Good start, now expand Medicaid.</comment>


Forrester Research Analyst Disputes F-commerce Potential - <AUTHOR> http://ecommercejunkie.com/2011/04/07/forrester-research-analyst-disputes-f-commerce-potential/

<comment><USER2> My buzzword at work this week is going to be F-commerce.</comment>