Books and Music That Make You Dumb - <AUTHOR> http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2009/02/27/books-and-music-that-make-you-dumb/?mod=yhoofront

<comment><USER2> Hello, selection bias! There are books that make you dumber than not having reported reading any books at all? How about, there are books and music that correlate with being underprivileged, and being the likely product of a crappy school system?

<comment><USER3> Presumably, most of the effect is due to socioeconomic correlation and I'm sure Virgil understands that.

It's interesting how big the correlation is. I might have expected only a few percent WRT music.

I want to see the correlation between Ayn Rand books and number of friends.

<comment><USER4> I agree. This quote from him makes it explicit. "Of course there is the whole correlation is not causation thing, but, I mean, duh,"

<comment><USER5> The "but" seems to imply that he nonetheless thinks that intelligence is effecting taste. I don't know. I've been shocked by some relatively intelligent people with atrocious taste in things, but it wouldn't be a shocker if the idiots really did like "Lil Wayne" because they're idiots. I mean, jesus fucking christ:

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=owwSHg1fivM>

<comment><USER6> I read it in the opposite way: it's so obvious that this is just a correlation and not causation that he feels silly explicitly stating it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> The website seems to be down, are there any mirrors available? The article title seems to be linkbait, the interviewer explicitly mentions that correlation isn't causation

<comment><USER8> Mirrors

Music:[http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_j0_WBUT8_cw/R89cubH01_I/AAAAAAAAAD...](http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_j0_WBUT8_cw/R89cubH01_I/AAAAAAAAADg/uS2GmyCaH-o/s1600-h/musicthatmakesyoudumb)

Books:[http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_j0_WBUT8_cw/R89cgrH01-I/AAAAAAAAAD...](http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_j0_WBUT8_cw/R89cgrH01-I/AAAAAAAAADY/_aUS3tqara8/s1600-h/booksthatmakeyoudumb)</comment></comment>


Thousands of books being re-shelved in a two minute time-lapse [video] - <AUTHOR> https://www.dpreview.com/news/4686813680/watch-thousands-of-books-being-re-shelved-in-two-minute-time-lapse <comment><USER2> I was expecting some sort of automation, but still a beautiful reading room. I have always loved libraries and spent many hours in them growing up.

I have my own library problems, too many books not enough space.

</comment><comment><USER3> However. In the meantime the main issue was solved. The famed "Old Books Smell" is available in a bottle. You can spray it on your reading device.

</comment><comment><USER4> That was well done. Time lapse, yes, but time lapse focal length changes and from multiple perspectives. Some shots over the course of days.

</comment><comment><USER5> I was hoping robots would be involved.

</comment><comment><USER6> Just a normal video accelerated 1000x of guys putting books on the shelves of a public library (after it was closed for renovation and all books removed).

Expected much better given the title. That is terribly disappointing.</comment>


BakaBot - it lives in a small websocket based chatroom. Latest Chrome needed. - <AUTHOR> http://ideamonk.madetokill.com/bakabot/

<comment><AUTHOR> I have to admit, the amount of resources its hogging up!, I feel it needs some real design improvements. fork it here <http://github.com/ideamonk/BakaBot> some changes I made on live server yet to be merged back.

</comment><comment><USER2> Not much too see, but it is a nice demo of web sockets.

</comment><comment><USER3> lol.. this is funny..!</comment>


You won't find consciousness in the brain  - <AUTHOR> http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20527427.100-you-wont-find-consciousness-in-the-brain.html

<comment><USER2> Let me save you the trouble. This guy is a crackpot who doesn't have a clue what he's talking about. Though if you've ever been persuaded by an article extolling the virtues of homeopathy, you might be of the right mindset to enjoy this article.

<comment><USER3> _This guy is a crackpot who doesn't have a clue what he's talking about._

Serious? I don't know the person - and the article was so and so - but the credentials of the author are stated as:

 _'Ray Tallis trained as a doctor, ultimately becoming professor of geriatric medicine at the University of Manchester, UK, where he oversaw a major neuroscience project. He is a Fellow of the Academy of Medical Sciences and a writer on areas ranging from consciousness to medical ethics'_

This doesn't strike me as a crackpot!</comment></comment>


StackOverflow Research of 100k Developers Finds MongoDB Is Most Wanted Database - <AUTHOR> https://dev.to/mongodb/stack-overflow-research-of-100000-developers-finds-mongodb-is-the-most-wanted-database--m4h <comment><USER2> Holy press release Batman</comment>


IMAP Email Backup - <AUTHOR> https://smalldata.tech/blog/2020/04/07/imap-email-backup <comment><USER2> Recommend IMAPSync: [https://imapsync.lamiral.info/](https://imapsync.lamiral.info/)

Have used it at pretty massive scale and it handles a hell of a lot of different options.

<comment><USER3> This one... and I used it to migrate 20 years of email from a G Suite account to Gmail account.

[https://medium.com/@buro9/one-account-all-of- google-4d292906...](https://medium.com/@buro9/one-account-all-of- google-4d2929066951)

<comment><USER4> You freaked me out with the 20 years - I didn't think it'd been _quite_ that long. 2006 as "Google Apps for Your Domain", in case anyone else is wondering.

<comment><USER3> In my Gmail I have more than 20 years, all email I've sent and received since 1999. I've maintained a single source of emails and move it forward as I've changed provider.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Thunderbird is your desktop client that can archive, compress, and store all emails offline. I've even used Thunderbird for migrating all my email history, folders etc. between servers: simply add new account and drag and drop folders between accounts. Simple enough to be used by non technical people who do not want to:

>./imapgrab.py -d -v -f ~/firstname.lastname@example.com -s imap.mail.server -S -p 993 -u email@example.com -p password -m "_ALL_,-INBOX.Trash,-INBOX.Spam,-INBOX.Junk,-Trash,-Junk,-Spam"

<comment><USER6> Be careful using Thunderbird to move mail between IMAP4 servers, on Linux at least - I've had it lose messages on me, deleting them from the source before they're successfully written to the destination.

I was moving mail from a Gmail account to a Gandi account about a year ago, before the recent spurt of development activity on Thunderbird.

<comment><USER7> The only time I've ever lost mail was while trying to move a bunch of messages in Postbox (shares Thunderbird's backend). Wasn't even moving between servers-- this was just a folder-to-folder move.

Always copy, verify that the messages really are at the destination, then delete. I don't know why this isn't what Thunderbird does on its own when you move mail, but it isn't.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I use OfflineIMAP: [https://www.offlineimap.org/](https://www.offlineimap.org/)

<comment><USER9> I also use offlineIMAP, but I find that every few months it freezes and needs a kill -9 to exit. My current workaround is killing it once per week and letting my service manager restart it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I never was able to backup emails from gmail successfully ~ 10GB of mails right now. Everytime it fails somewhere in between because of reasons mentioned by various people elsewhere in this thread.

Every year I try and fail.

This year with the comments herein I again tried and get invalid credentials error with my Gmail.

1) Used mutt/getmail/python script ( password is correct verified it )

2) Even changed password and still same issue

3) I also tried to enable less secure apps to access email option in google settings. But keep getting the Authentication error. Can someone please point me to a good note on how to get Authentication error sorted ( maybe more to take care of ) ( I use ubuntu bionic , python 2.7.17, getmail 5.5 )

Error rahu@rahu:~/0del/_working/_backupEmail$ ./ss.sh IMAP Grab 0.1.4 \--- List option selected Connecting to IMAP server via SSL Logging into IMAP server Traceback (most recent call last): File "./imapgrab.py", line 444, in <module> imapgrab() File "./imapgrab.py", line 150, in imapgrab ig_list = IG_list_mailboxes(ig_options) File "./imapgrab.py", line 193, in IG_list_mailboxes ig_imap.login(ig_options.username,ig_options.password) File "/usr/lib/python2.7/imaplib.py", line 523, in login raise self.error(dat[-1]) imaplib.error: [AUTHENTICATIONFAILED] Invalid credentials (Failure)

<comment><USER11> Have you tried Google Takeout?

[https://takeout.google.com](https://takeout.google.com)

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> In the same vein the push towards not owning your data also comes with issues[0].

I get along well with a tool called offlineimap[1] though it's python2; you can even use it to sync imap backends[2]. I use it simply to populate a Maildir on my machines.

Sadly I have not found it to work with office365 (then again, what does other than outlook and thunderbird's proprietary subscription based extension?).

[0]: shameless plug: [https://blog.dijit.sh/importance-of-self-hosted- backups](https://blog.dijit.sh/importance-of-self-hosted-backups)

[1]: [http://www.offlineimap.org/doc/quick_start.html](http://www.offlineimap.org/doc/quick_start.html)

[2]: [http://www.offlineimap.org/doc/backups.html](http://www.offlineimap.org/doc/backups.html)

<comment> 404-universe Hmm, my school uses office365 for its email, and I've managed to successfully hook it up to offlineimap for my email. I think the only real "special" thing that I had to do was have it use my email address (i.e. firstname.lastname@example.com) as my username to authenticate with.

The relevant section of my .offlineimaprc (trimmed for brevity, edited for privacy):

      [Repository remote]
      type = IMAP
      remotehost = outlook.office365.com
      remoteuser = "firstname.lastname@example.com"
      remoteport = 993

<comment><USER12> I think the admin might have enabled some compatibility features for you, I get:

        ~ $ offlineimap
        OfflineIMAP 7.3.2
          Licensed under the GNU GPL v2 or any later version (with an OpenSSL exception)
        imaplib2 v2.101 (bundled), Python v2.7.18, OpenSSL 1.1.1g  21 Apr 2020
        Account sync work:
         *** Processing account work
         Establishing connection to outlook.office365.com:993 (work-remote)
        Enter password for user '<user>@massive.se':
         PLAIN authentication failed: AUTHENTICATE failed.
         LOGIN authentication failed: LOGIN failed.
         ERROR: All authentication types failed:
         PLAIN: AUTHENTICATE failed.
         LOGIN: LOGIN failed.
         *** Finished account 'work' in 0:11
        ERROR: Exceptions occurred during the run!
        ERROR: All authentication types failed:
         PLAIN: AUTHENTICATE failed.
         LOGIN: LOGIN failed.

        Traceback:
          File "/usr/lib/python2.7/site-packages/offlineimap/accounts.py", line 293, in syncrunner
            self.__sync()
          File "/usr/lib/python2.7/site-packages/offlineimap/accounts.py", line 369, in __sync
            remoterepos.getfolders()
          File "/usr/lib/python2.7/site-packages/offlineimap/repository/IMAP.py", line 452, in getfolders
            imapobj = self.imapserver.acquireconnection()
          File "/usr/lib/python2.7/site-packages/offlineimap/imapserver.py", line 586, in acquireconnection
            self.__authn_helper(imapobj)
          File "/usr/lib/python2.7/site-packages/offlineimap/imapserver.py", line 459, in __authn_helper
            "failed:\n\t%s"% msg, OfflineImapError.ERROR.REPO)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I wrote a small tool in go which allows you to delete email in bulk by sender. It uses the gmail api and conforms to rate limits. It's pretty neat! Slow, perhaps, the first time you run it since it fetches threads one at a time.

[https://github.com/poundifdef/gmail- deleter](https://github.com/poundifdef/gmail-deleter)

The next step would be to have it save and archive email threads. (Would this be useful to anyone?)

</comment><comment><USER14> Reminder: You likely don't need your email provider to store years and years of old emails. Download them locally, then remove them from the service provider.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third- party_doctrine](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third-party_doctrine)

Thanks to the third-party doctrine, messages stored on the provider can be disclosed to the government without a warrant. Your emails have contact history, location histories, attachments, plans, all sorts of stuff.

Don't leave it on the server, where it's available for the taking. Even a password breach will deliver the entirety of it to an attacker.

<comment><AUTHOR> Honestly, I'm a real proponent of keeping a clean digital life. I practice 0 inbox, aggressively delete old documents, photos on a regular basis. If I haven't touched anything in a few years, the chances that I'm going to need it later on down the line are slim and so off they go.

Important documents like tax info etc, are obviously kept for the minimum legal period but then again they don't take up all that much space.

I've been doing this for around 10 years now and so far I have not had any problems with missing old stuff, _touchwood_.

Long story short, just delete stuff you don't need altogether, makes backups a breeze and frees you from worrying about hackers exposing your musings from when you were a teenager :)

<comment><USER14> I have a 900GB FLAC music library, because cloud music services can disappear tracks down the memory hole from the middle of your playlists your now-dead loved ones made for you years ago[1], and also because they simply don't have a lot of the latest/newest interesting/underground music in their cloud catalogs.

Also:

        nostromo:~/Pictures$ du -sh LightroomMasters
        1.5T LightroomMasters
        nostromo:~/Pictures$ find LightroomMasters -type f | wc -l
          207655
        nostromo:~/Pictures$ ls -1d LightroomMasters/* | sort -n | head -1
        LightroomMasters/1997
        nostromo:~/Pictures$

I've been taking photographs of events in my life for a long time, and I look at them regularly, which brings me joy. Sometimes I send loved ones photos I took of them 3, 5, 10, 15 years ago that they've never seen, and it brings them joy as well.

There are different paths, and digital minimalism is only suitable for a subset of the population. Many of us derive immense value from having high fidelity records of our lives and the lives of those close to us.

Also, if you store your historical data for a long time, you can do super cool shit like this: [https://writings.stephenwolfram.com/2012/03/the-personal- ana...](https://writings.stephenwolfram.com/2012/03/the-personal-analytics-of- my-life/)

[1]: In case you can't tell, this happened to me.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I use DevonThink (Mac-only). In addition to continuous archiving of email, it indexes and stores attachments, files all my receipts, and keeps my PDFs and archived notes there. Very powerful and reliable search.

[https://www.devontechnologies.com/apps/devonthink](https://www.devontechnologies.com/apps/devonthink)

</comment><comment><USER16> I've been using a similar setup for a few years, and can totally vouch for it. Emails are probably one of the most important things to backup. Not sure what `imapgrab` adds, since fetching mails from imap is exactly what getmail is doing.

That being said, if you go on and set up getmail, I'm not sure what's the point to continue to use mutt through imap (the author mentions decrypting the archive before reading them, so I assume it's not their daily driver and they keep using direct imap connection otherwise). Imap is still useful if you want to read mails on your mobile.

For the encryption part, I found cryfs [1] to be very useful. It's a fuse based app that encrypts files on the fly as they are written to the pseudo fs and stores them in partioned small size encrypted files. Basically, it means you can use the pseudo fs as a regular directory, store your mail in it and read them from it, and then the special layout of the encrypted directory with its small files is especially rsync-friendly (outside of email system, if I store a big file where only a small part has changed, only the files related to these small changes will be uploaded).

An other advantage of going full local : you can use notmuch [2]. It's a mail indexer that allows fast and advanced search within mails. I have all my mails since 2013 locally, and it takes less than a second to make a full text search within them.

The last thing that I love is the ability to use maildrop [3]. It's regexp based filtering and can forward the mail to anything (mailbox or program), so it allows to have advanced filters that can do quite crazy things (my phone sends me mails when my battery is depleted or fully charged, and it triggers desktop notifications on my computer). Not to be abused, obviously. Don't allow anyone to shut down your computer by sending a email :)

[1] [https://github.com/cryfs/cryfs](https://github.com/cryfs/cryfs)

[2] [https://notmuchmail.org/](https://notmuchmail.org/)

[3] [https://www.courier-mta.org/maildrop/](https://www.courier- mta.org/maildrop/)

</comment><comment><USER17> First: I use neomutt + mbsync (formerly isync) + notmuch. The local searching was at first a nerd special interest project but has actually become very useful for searching, filtering and otherwise managing my mail.

Second: the button on the article to submit to HN seems to be somewhat... off? I wouldn't mind one that would submit in the first instance and then link to the HN thread on subsequent clicks but having a button that just loads a round into the chamber _for all users clicking on it_ seems like incitement to blogspam.

<comment><AUTHOR> The issue with local search is that you anyways end up doing search on the server when on mobile or when you are not on your home computer. But yes, definitely useful. I personally do 0 inbox so I hardly have anything to search, heh.

Regarding the submit to HN button: if the article has already been posted, HN will itself just link you to it rather than make a new submission. So it is a bit of an intelligent hack where it piggybacks on HN's own code, hope that assuages you :)

<comment><USER17> >it piggybacks on HN's own code, hope that assuages you :)

Haha, it does actually. That is very cunning!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Hello there,

I've maintained [https://github.com/rcarmo/imapbackup](https://github.com/rcarmo/imapbackup) since 2013 (and used early versions of it for years before that), so feel free to try it out and see if it fits your use case (mine was snapshotting existing IMAP mailboxes into mbox format, which was what we could use for migrating mailboxes across systems then, and also fit my personal use case for backups).

<comment><USER19> Thanks so much for crafting and maintaining imapbackup, Rui! It worked a treat in backing up tens of thousands of messages that Mail.app refused to archive properly.

The feature set is likely to appeal to many HN users:

* ZERO dependencies. (other than Python 2.5 or higher)

* Copies every single message from every single folder (or a subset of folders) in your IMAP server to your disk.

* Does incremental copying (i.e., tries very hard to not copy messages twice).

* Tries to do everything as safely as possible (only performs read operations on IMAP).

* Generates mbox formatted files that can be imported into Mail.app (just choose "Other" on the import dialog).

* Optionally compresses the result files on the fly (and can append to them).

* Is completely and utterly free (distributed under the MIT license).

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> If you're a gmail and a notmuch user, consider using lieer - [https://github.com/gauteh/lieer](https://github.com/gauteh/lieer). It uses the Gmail API to synchronize mail bidirectionally so that you can handle mail locally (except for muting threads).

If any Googler is reading this, why oh why is muting not part of the API?

</comment><comment><USER21> The tool I used to use for this years ago is isync/mbsync, which worked really well. Nowadays I just use rsync on Maildirs because I don't have any IMAP mail on servers where I don't have shell access, so I'm a bit out of date what the modern state of these tools is. Interesting to hear of a variety of other options in this thread that I'd not come across back then.

<comment><USER16> > Nowadays I just use rsync on Maildirs because I don't have any IMAP mail on > servers where I don't have shell access, so I'm a bit out of date what the > modern state of these tools is. Interesting to hear of another option I'd > not come across back then

If you use rsync through ssh, I would say that's a very good option, if anything because on your server, you only need ssh to be exposed to the internet rather than ssh + an imap server. Given how servers are constantly attacked, this is way safer.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> imapsync is my personal favorite approach to this problem.

In addition to imap -> filesystem backups it supports synchronizing mail in both directions. And both source and destination can be remote systems.

<comment><USER23> The imapsync page [https://imapsync.lamiral.info/](https://imapsync.lamiral.info/) states "imapsync is not suitable for maintaining a synchronization between two active imap accounts while the user is working on both sides. Use offlineimap (written by John Goerzen) or mbsync (written by Michael R. Elkins) for bidirectionnal (2 ways) synchronizations."

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Shout out to office365 for being a piece of crap when it comes to IMAP.

If you launch something like fetchmail or imapsync at it, it will close the connection in the middle of the sync because you're doing something nasty in his opinion.

Last time I switched jobs and had to download 18+ GB of emails it took me days to download them all off office 365, and I was to run it in a while true loop in screen. Luckily I didn't wait for the last day to start downloading my emails.

<comment><USER25> > Luckily I didn't wait for the last day to start downloading my emails.

And also luckily, your company didn't sue you or try to have you arrested for extracting 18+ GB of company property.

<comment><USER24> That is also 18+ gb of my life.

<comment><USER26> wait, you use work email for personal stuff??

<comment><USER24> No, but those years of work are part of my life.

I mean: my colleagues and I faced countless issues, we had both problems and celebrations, and I want to be able to remember all of that in the future.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> I've used MailStore Home[1] for a few years and I really like it. It allows me to search across all of my mailboxes, even ones that have since been shutdown, for emails that I only remember a partial subject for.

[1]: [https://www.mailstore.com/en/products/mailstore- home/](https://www.mailstore.com/en/products/mailstore-home/)

</comment><comment><USER28> For gmail, gmvault is great:

[http://gmvault.org/](http://gmvault.org/)

</comment><comment><USER29> I was in a similar situation a few years ago and decided to build an app for that: [https://thehorcrux.com](https://thehorcrux.com)

My goal is to make it simple enough for my grandpa to use it. However, I'm still not there yet. Let me know what you guys think.

<comment><USER30> just a bit of website critique. your menu wraps on my 1920x1080 screen.

Contact wraps to the next line

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> Is there a way I can view such backups? Search in them? Something like offline read-only maildir viewer?

I made a separate thread here: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23425995](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23425995)

</comment><comment><USER32> For those using Protonmail: I did a little writeup on using offlineimap to keep a local backup.

[https://github.com/peterrus/protonmail-export- linux](https://github.com/peterrus/protonmail-export-linux)

</comment><comment><USER33> For me there's really no need to specifically backup my email. Instead, my IMAP client is configured to download all messages and attachments to local disk, and regular disk backups should take care of that.

</comment><comment><USER34> I use offlineimap to sync mail locally and then periodically backup the mail folders to an encrypted USB drive. Using Protonmail with ProtonBridge to pull it down.

</comment><comment><USER35> Its the reason that I still use POP. Full stop.

<comment><USER36> Same here. Happy POP user for decades. How do you deal with accessing mail from multiple devices and when away from your main machine tho?

<comment><USER35> I have my mailbox settings set to retain mail on the server for 30 days.

The fact that they are marked as unread from other machines is a pain, but not insuperable.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> I have a cronjob on my NAS that runs mbsync every night. Really simple and efficient.

</comment><comment><USER38> > python 2.7.x (does not work with python3)

Python 2 has a very, very long tail.

</comment><comment><USER39> fetchmail is the tool of the trade, and it does not need python.</comment>


Twitter May Be Profitable. No, Seriously - <AUTHOR> http://gigaom.com/2009/12/21/twitter-maybe-profitable-no-seriously/

<comment><USER2> Twitter cannot afford to be just profitable. The amount of money already invested on Twitter requires it to be out-of-the-charts wildly profitable. That's the key issue.

<comment><USER3> _The amount of money already invested on Twitter requires it to be out-of-the- charts wildly profitable._

How does Facebook compare in this regard?

<comment><USER4> Facebook needs revenue like the GDP of a small country to succeed.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> As the revenues are dependent on search deals with Microsoft and Google, predictions like this one from an expert such as Rand Fishkin would have serious implications if borne out:

 _This Real-Time Search Thing is Outta Here

Microsoft initially beat Google to the punch in announcing their integration with Twitter data in their SERPs. And in response, last Monday, Google released what is, in my opinion, an early test version of Twitter integration that's nowhere near ready for prime-time. Google has a history of jumping the gun to prevent other companies from stealing the press narrative, but in this case, I think it's seriously damaging (and nearly everyone, consumer or search enthusiast, agrees) their usability and relevance.

This is, in my estimation (and many others), the worst implementation of new results Google's ever implemented. I imagine the clickthrough and abandonment stats have their usability folks up in arms already..._

<http://www.seomoz.org/blog/8-predictions-for-seo-in-2010>

</comment><comment><USER6> Given all the speculation about "spending lavishly" on C-level executives and other such stuff, I wonder how much longer Twitter engineers can expect the soda to be free for? ;)

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1007750>

<comment><USER7> When I worked at the Twitter offices, the real free perk was expensive Belgian beer. The dynamic was this - the service would go down, the devs would work to bring it back up again, and then some grateful and wealthy Twitter user in the valley would send over some fancy beer as a thank you.

I often wondered if this was creating perverse incentives, but I sure liked that fancy beer.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> maybe != may be. No, seriously.

<comment><USER9> was going to crack that three spelling/grammatical mistakes/omissions in five words is pretty impressive :)

<comment><USER10> It took me a while to understand the title because of the mistakes.

Poor grammar makes you hard to understand.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I hope they don't splash out on "C-Level executives" frankly. Dick Costolo is pretty strong as COO material and I don't think Ev needs to go anywhere. This is like saying Google needed to add C-Level execs in 2002.

</comment><comment><USER5> link to the source: [http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601109&sid=a1jw...](http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601109&sid=a1jwVtGQmErk&pos=13)

</comment><comment><USER12> Twitter may be profitable (in some distant future or in some far-away universe)

<comment><USER12> all right, all right, kool-aid drinkers! ;-)

<comment><USER13> The article cites a few more facts than you do. Sure, maybe Google and MS pay less than 35 million combined, and maybe their operating costs are more than 25 million. If so, then they aren't profitable. But if those numbers are right, then they are profitable, plain and simple.

So the article is not just kool-aid drinking.

<comment><USER12> that's not like being _really_ profitable. In the future, twitter may be (two words) profitable. but I doubt it.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


How My Online Video Site Went From Being On Death Row To Financial Successful. - doc-film http://startupcrunch.org/how_my_online_video_site_went_from_being_on_death_row_to_financial_successful

<comment><AUTHOR> _"viewers simply did not miss what they had never seen"_

That's an important lesson for any site thinking about setting up a paywall.</comment>


Most Students Don't Know When News Is Fake, Stanford Study Finds - <AUTHOR> http://www.wsj.com/articles/most-students-dont-know-when-news-is-fake-stanford-study-finds-1479752576 <comment><USER2> Assume all news is fake, start from there.</comment>


The 30 skills every IT person should have  - <AUTHOR> http://www.infoworld.com/archives/emailPrint.jsp?R=printThis&A=/article/08/06/02/23FE-how-to-fire-IT-staff-skills-list_1.html

<comment><AUTHOR> What, not one word about hacking?

Exactly what is the definition of "IT"?

<comment><USER2> Closest it gets:

"10. Script. Everyone should be able to throw a script together to get quick results. That doesn't mean you're a programmer. Real programmers put in error messages, look for abnormal behavior, and document. You don't need to do that, but you should be able to put something together to remove lines, send e-mail, or copy files."

Wow, that's setting the bar pretty low. Whatever an IT Guy is, I don't think I'd want one who told me "Oh, I only script, I don't program"</comment></comment>


The Making of Quake Soundtrack; Carmack, McGee, Nine Inch Nails - <AUTHOR> https://www.nin.com/john-carmak-american-mcgee/ <comment><USER2> As influential and great as the NIN soundtrack for Quake was, I personally preferred Primus's "Pork Soda" as a quite literal drop-in replacement.

The original soundtrack was shipped as regular redbook cd audio: the game was installed to the hard drive and would happily play music from whatever disc was in the CDROM drive.

</comment><comment><USER3> This is really cool, but good lord, why does the NIN website need to format the ENTIRE TEXT IN CAPS? I get it for headings, but a long text post like this...

<comment><AUTHOR> Agreed. They wanted to include these texts as booklet, but there were some legal issues apparently. The print-ready files are available here (no CAPS): [https://cdn.shopify.com/s/files/1/2486/0276/files/QUAKE_essa...](https://cdn.shopify.com/s/files/1/2486/0276/files/QUAKE_essays_SEP15_FIN4_GRACoL_CL.pdf?v=1600226971)

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Seems like the text is removed now and the link just goes to NIN store homepage. Here's the archived link: [https://web.archive.org/web/20200916172127/https://www.nin.c...](https://web.archive.org/web/20200916172127/https://www.nin.com/john- carmak-american-mcgee/)</comment>


Seattle Needs an "Incubator" Culture - <AUTHOR> http://www.xconomy.com/seattle/2010/02/04/seattle-needs-an-incubator-culture/

<comment><USER2> Does Silicon Valley have the "incubator culture" that Seattle supposedly needs? If not, why does Seattle need it?</comment>


Has anyone actually succeeded by building an opensource project? And How? - <AUTHOR>

I've seen a lot of great open source projects. But most of them are from successful companies like Google/Facebook/Twitter/Dotcloud. And I've heard a lot about the open source business model, like doing commercial consultation and projects as the primary source of income. But I just don't know anyone who really made a fortune out of it. Am I seeing it in a wrong way or it's just not possible for open source authors to get rich? <comment><USER2> It's possible for open-source authors to get rich (Linus Torvalds made several million from VA Linux's IPO), but much like academics, the financial returns are usually an order of magnitude or so less than comparable levels of success in the business world. It makes sense that someone trying to get paid for their labor would make more money than someone who gives their labor away for free.

<comment><USER3> The interesting thing to me are the projects that try and make money after becoming popular. And they're popular because they started as oss.

Think Jenkins. It took off because it was foss. Now the creators are trying to create a way to make money off of it by selling Jenkins-aaS.

They gave away their labor, got popular because they gave it away. Now they're building a business around the free parts. If they had never given it away to begin with, would there have ever been a CloudBees?

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Matt Mullenweg did alright. Whoever wrote Bitcoin probably did ok too.

<comment><AUTHOR> Did Matt become rich before or after he started wordpress.com? Does OSS always have to end up as an sass to make profit?

Bitcoin should be another topic coz it created a whole realm, one of a kind.

<comment><USER5> _Does OSS always have to end up as an sass to make profit?_

Not always there are some technical oriented products where the originators set up shop as a consultancy and offer expertise in the technology. The Dojo Toolkit is a good example of such an arrangement. Where you can hire Site-Pen to develop web applications with the technology the founders created. It is probably a less lucrative model but it is another way that revenue is generated around the OSS model.

As for the OP's question about success, I am pretty sure the founders of Pentaho are doing pretty well. Maybe not Google well, but I would assume that they are fairly wealthy individuals now. Granted they have played down their OSS roots on their site, but they still do offer the community edition.</comment></comment></comment>


Animals Spy a New Enemy: Drones - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/20/science/animals-spy-a-new-enemy-drones.html?action=click&contentCollection=science&region=rank&module=package&version=highlights&contentPlacement=1&pgtype=sectionfront&_r=0 <comment><USER2> Just as far as birds go, perhaps putting protective rings around the propellers such as this one[1] might reduce or prevent propeller injuries to the animals.

As far as damage to drones from attacking animals... I have less sympathy :)

The noise might be the most annoying aspect of a drone. Animals tend to have very keen hearing and one of these bad boys hovering in the vicinity is going to be like a super loud and obnoxious leaf blower to a dog, coyote, deer, bear, etc.

But, it's likely that animals will adapt, as the writer pointed out, similarly to how predators and herd animals in Africa have gotten accustomed to eco- tourists in open buses, snapping pictures and shooting videos and chattering excitedly for reasons no animal can discern. Those crazy humans. As long as they don't try to steal my females....

1\. [http://technabob.com/blog/2013/12/08/swann-quad-starship- qua...](http://technabob.com/blog/2013/12/08/swann-quad-starship-quadcopter/)

</comment><comment><USER3> Eventually animals will adapt and tune them out, likely to occur with the ones which tend to assemble in large groups. The very large animals may not even notice or ever be concerned. The danger them becomes poachers who use them to scout areas out or worse arm their drones

<comment><USER4> You've never met a horse.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Once again, legislation is playing catch-up to technology...

I'm looking forward to seeing more research done in this area. Obviously, drones give us incredible opportunities, but we need to do a cost/benefit calculation before we know what regulation would be sensible. And if we don't know the cost/risk factor, we can't do that, can we?</comment>


Four Levels of Idea Theft - <AUTHOR> http://prog21.dadgum.com/126.html

<comment><USER2> Not to be pedantic, but this was too generic. It reads like a cliche.

If the author provided specific real-world examples (nod to DHH v. Curebits) it might help to lend some depth.

To be perfectly blunt, we all wrote this shit like this in 7th grade, but no one else thought to post it here.</comment>


How I taught a homeless man to build an app in a week - <AUTHOR> http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2436371/Homeless-man-builds-app-month-code-training.html

<comment><AUTHOR> Latest update:

[http://www.slate.com/blogs/business_insider/2013/09/26/video...](http://www.slate.com/blogs/business_insider/2013/09/26/video_leo_the_homeless_coder_speaks.html)

Maybe this is real...

Maybe this is just some perverted marketing for Nitrous.IO whom I have never heard of until now...

Maybe this is just what happens when you're homeless...

Kids pay you to fight on video (Bum Fights), resellers pay you to queue up for phones (iPhone launch) and others believe they can take any homeless person and mold them in their own image (Trading Places).</comment>


Ask YC: How do you enable users to use their own domains with your application? - <AUTHOR>

For example, wordpress.com, blogger.com allow you to use your own domains with their application. This proceed as,
1. You create a blog at whatever.blogspot.com
2. You point a CNAME from your domain  say mycname.mysite.com to ghs.google.com
3. The dns changes propgate and you can access your blog at mycname.mysite.com
So what can I do to enable users to use their own domains, with my application, which will be on a subdomain on mysite?
[Edit: Layout] <comment><USER2> Can't you use a wildcard? I think you can. Just announce *.youdomain.com -> your.IP. Then, you can just use a custom rewrite rule to transform subdomain.domain.tld into www.domain.tld/sub/subdomain or something similar. From there, you're home free to do everything in your preferred language and framework.

</comment><comment><USER3> Tell users to CNAME their domain to your own and then render pages based on the incoming HTTP "Host" header?

I feel like you've answered the bulk of your question. Are you looking for something more specific?

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks a ton. I wanted to confirm "then render pages based on the incoming HTTP "Host" header" part. A few questions for you,

1\. So if DNS CNAME cname.theirsite.com is pointed to myserver.mysite.com, the Http requests will come to myserver.com.mysite.com, with Http['host'] as cname.theirsite.com.

2\. Where can I read more about how DNS in general and CNAMES in particlular work?

<comment><USER3> 1\. Yes. cname.theirsite.com resolves to myserver.com.mysite.com which in turn resolves to an IP address. Browsers will send requests to your server at that IP along with cname.theirsite.com in "Host" header.

2\. I'm not totally sure. I would start with wikipedia: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domain_Name_System>

Users will likely ask for help, so you'll probably want to familiarize yourself with the UIs for major DNS providers, especially GoDaddy.

Another gotcha is that CNAMEs can be a little funky for root domains. So something.com will be harder (or impossible) for people to CNAME than foo.something.com depending on their provider. I've been told that CNAMEing the root domain means that all records (like MX) get automatically aliased as well, but I haven't found that to be uniformly true. My guess is that it depends on the DNS software.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Not sure that this is going to help anyone, but since we're on the topic of DNS stuff, I thought I'd throw this out there for anyone who wants control of their domains without having to run a DNS server:

I've been immensely happy with EveryDNS ( <http://everydns.net> ) since I started using it. It's a free, web-based DNS service. You just point your nameservers at their site and you can then manage all of your domains with their interface -- no need to screw around with nameservers anymore.

I now have nearly 500 records for almost 100 domains on there. While the web interface is pretty janky, I can only remember the service itself going down once over the past year.

<comment><USER5> The only problem with EveryDNS is lack of API or way of making large-scale changes.

<comment><USER6> I use something similar, dnsmadeeasy.com. API, fail-over, redundancy, crappy UI. I can't ask for more from a DNS host!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Whichever way you do it, you'll need to hook into your domain's master DNS servers. Maybe your DNS server operator has an API (or you need to find one who does), or you run your own DNS server and do it yourself. Operating DNS servers isn't rocket science, and reloading/refreshing the name database is generally a pretty well-supported feature.

If you're letting users point their subdomain at their own IP address or server, you'll probably want to set a relatively low TTL - most dynamic DNS services use 15 minutes - although you should be aware that this will increase the load on your DNS server. If it's just a matter of creating subdomains that point at _your_ servers and dispatching on virtual hosts, you can safely use more usual TTL values.</comment>


Embodied energy of digital technology - <AUTHOR> https://www.lowtechmagazine.com/2009/06/embodied-energy-of-digital-technology.html <comment><USER2> The "source" is just a list of almost 200 publications, with no indication of which numbers come from where. So it's effectively unsourced. That means it's either bullshit, terrible reporting, or both, and there's no reason to believe this over i-have-an-agenda.org.

I've got karma to burn, so bring it. But it really is time that reporters get their bloody act together. Without the research this is as worthless as an opinion piece, and it's not going to convince anybody who needs convincing.

<comment><USER3> The fun part is seeing those ranges for silicon after having spent the last several weeks researching ways to decrease the energy costs of producing "solar grade" (one nine less than monocrystalline wafer) silicon from silica. There's a paper showing 1.6kg of 6-nines silicon from rice hull ash in 6hours in a 50kw arc reactor (300kwh) ([https://pubs.rsc.org/en/content/articlelanding/2015/gc/c5gc0...](https://pubs.rsc.org/en/content/articlelanding/2015/gc/c5gc00622h#!divAbstract))

<comment><USER4> > _Furthermore, burning rice hulls to produce electricity and RHA, generates > more energy than required for the overall process._

I don't have access to the paper, but assuming I'm reading that correctly, the notion of burning rice hulls to power the process and thereby source their ash is a fantastic efficiency.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The list is somewhat biased:

        Iron (from iron ore)
        [...]
        Steel (from iron)
        Paper (from standing timber)

Is the energy for digging up the ore or felling that tree + transport + machinery for production included? Steel should probably also include the numbers for iron.

The list would benefit from a common baseline. Without that these are just random numbers.

<comment><USER6> I'd prefer it said:

Steel (from the things Steel is typically made from in 2019 - 80% iron ore, 50% process X, 20% recycled)

That gets tricky, because many industrial processes use large amounts of energy, but only because that energy is effectively 'free' as waste heat from other processes.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> The original article is also interesting: [https://www.lowtechmagazine.com/2009/06/embodied-energy- of-d...](https://www.lowtechmagazine.com/2009/06/embodied-energy-of-digital- technology.html)

"The 180 watt laptop

While these reports are in themselves reason for concern, they hugely underestimate the energy use of electronic equipment. To start with, electricity consumption does not equal energy consumption. In the US, utility stations have an average efficiency of about 35 percent. If a laptop is said to consume 60 watt-hours of electricity, it consumes almost three times as much energy (around 180 watt-hour, or 648 kilojoules).

So, let's start by multiplying all figures by 3 and we get a more realistic image of the energy consumption of our electronic equipment. Another thing that is too easily forgotten, is the energy use of the infrastructure that supports many technologies; most notably the mobile phone network and the internet (which consists of server farms, routers, switches, optical equipment and the like)."

<comment><USER6> Gas turbine powerplants are easily in the 60% + efficiency band... Coal at 30% is dying out in most of the western world.

Granted every fossil fueled device ever has quoted efficiency with the Lower Heating Value, whereas the HHV is the fairest measure. The difference consists of if you should extract energy from the humidity in the exhaust, and the clear answer is yes.

<comment><USER8> AFAIR "easily" is a stretch -- there are highly efficient combined-cycle gas- turbine plants, and I think some of those actually get above 50% efficiency.

For most thermal generation, however, it's Carnot-cycle limits which get you down, and that's governed by hot vs. cold side efficiency.

Coal actually has some of the _higher_ efficiencies, in some cases, exceeding 45%, though whether that's through high temps or combined cycle I'm not sure. (I'm not defending coal, just noting efficiency numbers I've encountered.)

Update: Wikipedia's language is "possibly 62%" efficiency, FWIW: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Combined_cycle_power_plant](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Combined_cycle_power_plant)

<comment><USER6> You're right - only the best ones achieve 60+% efficiency.

For example, [1] achieved 63.08% efficiency at the whole-site level (ie. including inefficiencies in startup, testing, etc. over a year)

[1]: [http://interfaxenergy.com/article/30230/chubu-electric- plant...](http://interfaxenergy.com/article/30230/chubu-electric-plant-has- worlds-most-efficient-ccgt)

<comment><USER8> Thanks.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I'm going to have to cut down on my titanium addiction. OTOH, my nephew's grandchildren will be fighting over that double-walled coffee mug long after I die.

<comment><USER10> Gather the good stuff while energy is still cheap!

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Recycle your aluminum, people!

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> This paper also adds information on absolute energy usage and per kilogram produced.

[http://web.mit.edu/ebm/www/Publications/energy_required.pdf](http://web.mit.edu/ebm/www/Publications/energy_required.pdf)

<comment><USER12> I've found this paper tantalizing.

[https://www.researchgate.net/publication/222566309_Electrowi...](https://www.researchgate.net/publication/222566309_Electrowinning_of_iron_from_sulphate_solutions)

""High purity iron was produced, with a current yield of 85% and a power consumption of 4.25 kWh/kg iron.""

If you run numbers you get energy costs of about $400-$500/ton.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Would be nice to contrast this with the energy necessary to produce 1 kilogram of various foodstuffs.

<comment><USER8> [https://www.treehugger.com/green-food/energy-required-to- pro...](https://www.treehugger.com/green-food/energy-required-to-produce-a- pound-of-food.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Is electronic grade silicon created by chemical vapor deposition? I thought czochralski process.

<comment><USER15> It's both, I believe. Highly purified polysilicon is created using the Siemens CVD process. This is then broken up and used as feedstock for a CZ crystal puller.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> For those seeking sources for embodied energy, ICE seem to be among the more rigorous and accepted sources (I've encountered them before).

Wikiedia cites similar values referencing ICE.

[http://www.circularecology.com/embodied-energy-and-carbon- fo...](http://www.circularecology.com/embodied-energy-and-carbon-footprint- database.html)

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

</comment><comment> quixoticelixer- Does the value from wood come from processing it or does it include the energy the tree used to make it?

<comment><USER16> It says "From standing timber", so I'd say that's the energy used in processing, whatever that is defined as.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> I understand we put aluminum recycling plants near rivers (like the Columbia) where energy costs is cheap.

<comment><USER18> Or the other way around. In USSR, at least, few power plants were built closer to aluminum ore deposits.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Is measuring in kilograms a good way to think about this? How many kilograms of chips does my phone have?

<comment><USER8> It normalises the metric across all levels of production. Scale according to use.

A 5" iPhone weighs 138g. Much of that is probably battery, display, and case, so chips are on the order of 10% or less of the total. I'd estimate at <10g.

The core processor is the A10 Fusion SoC, 125mm^2, probably a few mm thick. Silicon has a density of 2.3290 g/cm^3. That adds up to about 20-30g, depending on thickness, though I'm not sure of the density or thickness of a silicon wafer. I suspect actual mass is less.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Numbers are not sourced and, in at least some cases, suspiciously high. Virgin aluminum is more like 14 kWh/kg, not 63.

[https://www.iea.org/tcep/industry/aluminium/](https://www.iea.org/tcep/industry/aluminium/)

<comment><USER21> The OP-linked page points to a source URL at the bottom (An MIT 'Environmentally Benign Manufacturing' bibliography).

[http://web.mit.edu/ebm/www/publications.htm](http://web.mit.edu/ebm/www/publications.htm)

After that URL it points back to a Low-Tech page called 'The monster footprint of digital technology'

[https://www.lowtechmagazine.com/2009/06/embodied-energy- of-d...](https://www.lowtechmagazine.com/2009/06/embodied-energy-of-digital- technology.html')

For a summary graphic, see figure 2 in this cited PDF (Gutowski et.al)

[http://web.mit.edu/ebm/www/Publications/energy_required.pdf](http://web.mit.edu/ebm/www/Publications/energy_required.pdf)

<comment><USER20> I did refer to figure 4 in that PDF. It shows aluminum around 16 kWh/kg for smelting. According to the accompanying pie chart, electricity used in smelting accounts for 75% of the energy used in aluminum production while bauxite mining, alumina refining, primary casting, and anode production account for another 25%. Starting from 16 kWh for smelting that would put the full energy intensity at 21 kWh per kg of aluminum.

<comment><USER21> Yeah, I misread the Figure numbering in that paper, it should have been '2' (which has a big black '4' next to it).

On the whole, and prima facie, that graphic delivers much the same message, and rings true. Can't expect the L-T author to do -all- the work.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> What about fuels like petrol? :)

</comment><comment><USER23> A plot here would go a long way.

<comment><USER8> Comparable: [http://www.epa.vic.gov.au/agc/resources/img/research/r_emmis...](http://www.epa.vic.gov.au/agc/resources/img/research/r_emmissions_image2.gif)</comment></comment>


Ask HN: How do you market your API? - <AUTHOR> I'm a solo founder and just soft launched an API which provides essential data that powers my main business, Reviewshake. The API is available on Mashape, which will hopefully draw some interest, but I was hoping to learn how people on HN typically market their APIs?<p>I've done my best to make the documentation as straight forward as possible, and have made some posts on Quora and other places where people who might find use of my API might hang around. Besides this, can you share any best practices? Thank you! <comment><USER2> [https://www.slideshare.net/BillConradDoerrfeld/api- marketing...](https://www.slideshare.net/BillConradDoerrfeld/api-marketing- first-comes-usability-then-discoverability/) Slide 24 to be precise.

<comment><AUTHOR> Wow that's awesome, thank you!</comment></comment>


IPv4 is depleted: Final five blocks allocated to registries - <AUTHOR> http://mailman.nanog.org/pipermail/nanog/2011-February/032107.html

<comment><USER2> I asked this question on a similar article that gained no traction here recently: what do I, as a regular user of the internet, hosting no domains, and with no real responsibility for any website technicals, need to do about this? (Or what can I do about this?)

Do I need to request something from my ISP? Lobby them to see if _they_ take it seriously? Or do I have little choice but to hang around, feeling smug because I've heard of IPv6 before this week, but waiting for someone else to ensure I transition?

<comment><AUTHOR> > Do I need to request something from my ISP? Lobby them to see if they take > it seriously?

Yes, but it's less crucial for you. Ask for a timeline for IPv6, if you'd like, but don't expect much.

You can also set up IPv6 for yourself or your home network via a tunnel (which is a pretty fun exercise), and get access to the IPv6-enabled Internet. All recent operating systems have very good support for it -- even Windows 7 will hear RA and autoconfigure itself.

Start here: <http://www.ipsidixit.net/2010/02/24/228/>

You can get a tunnel here: <http://tunnelbroker.net/main.php>

Other people use this, but I prefer HE: <http://www.sixxs.net/>

<comment><USER3> Or if you don't have static routable v4 address but have at least dynamically allocated v4 routable address you can use 6to4.

I use this to configure my Debian-based router to change used v6 addresses to match DHCP-allocated v4: <https://gist.github.com/806333> (bit of an ugly hack)

<comment><USER4> I strongly recommend this or 6RD. It's a very straightforward and easy way of getting into IPv6 before ISPs start offering IPv6, as comcast did recently ( <http://www.comcast6.net/> ).

<comment><USER5> From the Comcast link:

 _Each user has been delegated a /64 block of approximately 18,446,744,073,709,551,616 (18 quintillion) unique IPv6 addresses._

This seems like a ridiculous number of addresses, until you realize that this basically allows for 18 quintillion users, each with 18 quintillion addresses, before we exhaust the IPv6 space.

<comment><USER6> I think /64 was the guideline for the smallest divisible network an ISP should hand out. It basically allows for a household or organization to grow indefinitely while assigning anything that can hook up to the network a real IP address, with little restrictions on topology and/or address allocation layout. No need to reuse the addresses either, just give the new device a new one.

EDIT: I forgot to add that it also allows network devices to use their 64-bit link layer (ethernet/MAC) address as a host identifier.

<comment><USER3> Actually, /64 _is_ the smallest indivisible network. You can divide that further, but then you lose this network/host identifier split and IPv6 features that require that (stateless autoconfiguration, privacy extensions...). So in case of normal network, ISP handing out /64 restricts topology of you network in that you can have only one network (with normal end-user devices).

Using smaller networks than /64 is certainly possible, but it's not something you want to do on end-user network and it's best left only for things like point-to-point connections and intra-datacenter networks.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Best tweet of the morning: "I came here to kick ass and assign IPv4 addresses. And I'm all out of IPv4 addresses."

<comment><USER8> Source: [https://twitter.com/#!/secretsquirrel/status/325967820137472...](https://twitter.com/#!/secretsquirrel/status/32596782013747200)

<comment><USER7> Thanks, someone retweeted it and I didn't have the link handy.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> IPv4 is only "depleted" in a very technical sense. The last free /8 was allocated to a regional authority. This does not mean no IPv4 addresses are available.

The regional authorities (RIRs), the guys who actually allocate the addresses to user organizations, still have many, many blocks to allocate. The first RIR isn't expected to run out of ipv4 space until October.

That's when the shit really hits the fan -- requests for IPv4 space start to be rejected, ISPs start deploying NAT or 6RD, network administrators start jumping from windows etc.

<comment><AUTHOR> APNIC is expected to run out sooner than October. October is on the high end of predictions, with some predicting as early as May based on burn rate. Two different sources:

<http://www.potaroo.net/tools/ipv4/rir.jpg> (probability distribution per- month)

<http://www.tndh.net/~tony/ietf/IPv4-rir-pools.jpg>

The entire point of this exercise is to raise awareness. The IPv4 reserves are depleted, and the five regions are now chewing on the crumbs. Granted, this isn't shit hitting the fan -- however, preparations for shit hitting the fan must be on everybody's radar right _now_.

Huge changes to infrastructure, which honestly should have been completed years ago, do not happen overnight. That's why this is news.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Now it's up to the registries. From a nearby thread on NANOG, the forecasted exhaustion dates of the individual registries: <http://www.tndh.net/~tony/ietf/IPv4-rir-pools.jpg>

<comment><USER10> It's time to invade Africa and take all their precious IP addresses!

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Anyone know how the transition in China is going? My employer sells networking products there, and all Chinese customers require IPv6 support. It would be interesting to know if it's rolled out to consumers yet.

</comment><comment><USER12> I always thought that when we ran out of IP4, that some of the companies holding on to Class A blocks would release parts of those for use. I'm not a master of how blocks are assigned or if addressing wise it would be feasible but really, does Ford fully use its Class A block? Prudential Insurance? Eli Lilly? GE?

<comment><AUTHOR> They could be playing the long view and realizing how much that address space is worth. If I were in charge of IT at those companies, I'd renumber out of the block and start thinking about selling the space, once it gets tight.

I've noticed that the perceived view in the netops community -- backed up by mailing list messages today, even -- is that such an IPv4 broker market is an inevitability no matter what the RIRs do. There are policies about it, but some regions (i.e., APNIC) have a model that encourages reselling space without their involvement.

<comment><USER13> Many people don't realize how non-trivial renumbering a network is. I transitioned the resnet at a public university from a /19 to a new /18, and it took several months of planning to pull off.

90% of the space was assigned via DHCP, but that remaining 10% which was statically assigned was a lot of work. Imagine tracking down every device assigned an IP address, scattered across a college campus.

Our routing configuration was trivial (single super-net, single site, &c), compacting an enterprise /8 would be an insane amount of work.

The long view isn't making a quick buck off v4, it's moving to v6 as quickly as possible.

<comment><USER14> OTOH, legacy /8s may contain whole /16s that have never been used and thus can be sold off without renumbering.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> An IPv4 address space walks into a bar. He says to the bartender, "A strong CIDR please. I'm exhausted."

</comment><comment><USER16> Enough with the fear mongering headlines already. Yes, IANA allocated the last 5 /8's to the regional registries. IPv4 is not going anywhere anytime soon.

<comment><USER17> People have been beating the same "IPv4's time is running out" drum since the late 90's apparently

<comment><AUTHOR> It isn't running out. It _is_ out.

I edited out _over_ and replaced it with _depleted_ to satisfy the concern about the headline, but I didn't even like doing that. The cavalier attitude that "nothing is really wrong, keep doing what we're doing" has been an extensive contributor to the problematic situation we're in right now.

People have been beating the drum, as you say, because this day was foreseen more than a decade ago. IPv6 has been in use for far longer than a decade. It was anticipated that we'd be most of the way through the transition by now, but we're not, partially due to "nothing's wrong" attitudes.

Edit: By _it_ in the first sentence, I meant IPv4's time (and was responding to the parent's usage of _time running out_ ). I don't mean IPv4 addresses have been exhausted, as I'm quite aware they're not. However, IPv4 has reached the end of its usefulness, is the underlying root of my meaning.

<comment><USER18> > "It isn't running out. It is out."

I think that's an unfair assessment.

When every ipv4 address is actually _used_ , it'll have run out. We're a long long way away from that scenario though.

Vast ranges are "allocated" but "unused".

<comment><USER19> That's actually something I've been having a hard time finding: What percentage of IPv4 addresses are currently in use.

<comment><USER18> Probably wouldn't take too long to check what % are pingable, which would give you a lower bound.

<comment><USER20> I'm willing to bet it would ;)

<comment><USER18> By my calculations, you'd only need to spin up 50 or so amazon instances, and they could cover the entire IP space in a day doing 1k pings/second each.

That's pretty doable.

<comment><USER21> These guys have been mapping the IPv4 space via ping over time (since 2003) and have an interactive browsable map that also shows blocks marked for localhost/private networks/multicast, etc and which registrars control which regions. It is pretty neat. Most recent data is Nov 2010. Since then the 11 /8 blocks that show as free have been allocated.

<http://www.isi.edu/ant/address/>

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> <http://xkcd.com/195/> IPv4 space, 2006

</comment><comment><USER23> Let me get some popcorn.

Any ideas of what will happen next? How far are we until some home users with outdated ISPs be blocked from the internet?

<comment><USER24> Nothing happens _immediately_ \--- the regional authorities still have some free space left, although some are planning to get more stingy. (The discussion here --- <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPv4_address_exhaustion> \--- is at least a starting point for the curious. FWIW, the first that's likely to really run out is APNIC, for the Asia/Pacific region, within the next three to six months; the RIRs for Europe and North America expect to run out in maybe a year or so, and those for Africa and Latin America expect a couple of years' left of run room.)

Once congestion hits (a few months to a year), I think ISPs natting ipv4 clients, or demanding a premium price from anyone who wants a routable address, is likely to happen somewhat more quickly than ipv6 to the home. But that's based on no inside information...

<comment><USER25> What I don't understand is what happens to website hosting? Will the cost of a Linode go up? Will they be able to get IP addresses for new customers?

<comment><USER26> That's a question probably best asked directly to Linode (esp. if you are a paying customer).

As a basis for making up your own mind: Linode has, at the moment, nine /20's allocated. At 80% utilisation, that means roughly 30'000 IPv4 addresses.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Get used to 192.168.x.x y'all.

<comment><USER28> Pfft. 10.x.x.x for me.

<http://www.faqs.org/rfcs/rfc1918.html>

         10.0.0.0        -   10.255.255.255  (10/8 prefix)
         172.16.0.0      -   172.31.255.255  (172.16/12 prefix)
         192.168.0.0     -   192.168.255.255 (192.168/16 prefix)

<comment><USER27> Yeah, take your pick. It was kind of a joke but the reality is already starting to make itself known. It used to be that every cable modem and many DSLs got public addresses even if they weren't static. It's getting more and more rare.

IPv4 won't die overnight, or even any time soon but there is likely to be an uncomfortable transition period where it becomes difficult for people like me who like to have static publics to get them cheaply, or at all.

<comment><USER5> I did a traceroute from my cable modem a few years ago, and found that my traffic went from my internal network to my public-facing IPv4 address (assigned to my router), then through several 10.x hops before finally hitting the public internet again. Quite a sane use of resources, I thought.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> I wonder how long it will take until there is a market for IP addresses. I suspect once such a market is in place IPv6 will not see widespread adoption, since most IPv4 addresses are not really used.

<comment><USER14> The market is here: <https://www.arin.net/resources/transfer_listing/index.html>

<comment><USER30> do you know if goldman sachs or some other financial entity has created an investment vehicle that I can use to speculate in the market with?

<comment><USER14> I suspect you're joking, but the old timers _really_ don't like IP speculation. It took them years to agree on the current pseudo-market because they had to figure out how to keep out speculators.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> I can't wait till everybody has an IPv6 modem/router. No more of this NAT hole punching or long polling crap for pushing notifications.

<comment><USER28> Each person is supposed to get assigned a /64 from their ISP, which will be then assigned to any downstream devices.

<comment><USER32> Then you get your bill from your isp, $5 extra per device.

<comment><USER33> I can seriously see this happening.

<comment><USER34> I don't.

In the past you paid for the extra's because the ISP had to do extra work for it.

But if the ISP sets everything up so all users have enough from the start. Like a /48. You won't have to bother them.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> I heard Egypt isn't using theirs.

(edit: i can feel the down-voting coming)

</comment><comment><USER36> There's still the complete 240.0.0.0/4 range left (class E), but unfortunately it's probably too late to make use of them now.

</comment><comment><USER37> I suspect some workaround for IPv4 depletion will be created so ISPs wont have to upgrade to IPv6.

<comment><USER38> NAT?

<comment><USER39> Most likely. My understanding is that some ISP's are already giving customers RFC 1918 private addresses and NAT'ing them out to the Internet.

<comment><USER34> As far as I know only for mobile.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> A lot of the mobile telcos are going to be using DS-Lite or NAT64. What does this mean? Well, NAT64 relies on modifying dns entries. So, take this as a reminder to NEVER EVER hardcode pubic-facing ip addresses if possible!

<comment><USER41> Always remember to shave your pubic-facing IP addresses.

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> Panic! At the RIR</comment>


Your Indie game dev team will fail - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@Slayemin/your-indie-game-dev-team-will-fail-108d4b663e7e <comment><USER2> all of these are great points, and i think the narrative introduced in the beginning is like the 80% of what happens to games. but the other 19% is when serious developers get together, and still burn out and fail because the game they are working on, even with a thorough game design doc, are just....boring or have bad controls or maybe theyre competing with an already successful title that does something super similar. there are so many variables.

the number one thing i would definitely highlight is...don't find volunteers located halfway across the world. or anywhere really. volunteers working for free WILL ghost you. game or not. get money, pay people, and then youll be considered seriously by people you'd actually want to work with.

</comment><comment><USER3> This is so true, so many very good game idea that will never see the light because of the loss of motivation, that's append to me one time and I learned that you should never get involved in projects that are too big

</comment><comment><USER4> Yes, but this is also a good experience. I read these points and get very nostalgic.</comment>


Google's second hand patents - <AUTHOR> http://daringfireball.net/linked/2011/09/08/google-patents

<comment><USER2> Everyone has principles and everyone views them differently. But, this guy is an asshole. All he does is complain. That's all.

<comment><USER3> Complain and being negative about everything that is not Apple. It's amazing how he can do it as a full time job.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Gruber, before the Motorla acquisition:

"I never said it wasn't OK for "Google to try and buy the same patents to not be sued." Apple, Google, Microsoft, Oracle — they're all playing the game. If Google had won the Nortel patents, and used those patents to secure licensing agreements for other patents (from, say, Microsoft and Apple) — that's how the patent game is played. What I'm complaining about isn't Google playing the game, but rather their insistent whining about their competitors only after they lost the game."

<http://daringfireball.net/2011/08/more_on_google_and_patents>

And again:

"But what exactly does Google need to defend against, if not actual patents Android actually violates?"

<http://daringfireball.net/2011/08/google_patently_absurd>

Summary: But now that Google has patents to "play the game", it's no longer OK to sue Apple for "actual patents it actually violates". Why? Because the patents aren't first hand. Google is - quite obviously - evil.

The thing is, Gruber does this all the time, more so when it's Google he's talking about. His shape-shifting argument game is almost always played by linking to pieces whose central tenets are at odds with his own posts, cherry- picking some seemingly damning argument, and then adding a snide comment on top.

Go back and trace his arguments regarding Android from beginning to see this in action.

Gruber comes up with analytical, insightful stuff on a regular basis, probably more so than other tech commentators, but you also have to endure dross like this.

"Lyons has always been an ass, but when did he get so bitter?"

<http://daringfireball.net/2011/08/balls></comment>


Programming Websites in pure SQL: AppSQL Tutorial - <AUTHOR> http://nhybrid.com/2013/01/05/appsql-3-0-tutorial/

<comment><AUTHOR> I'd like to get a feeling of the IT community's reaction to AppSQL's approach, as the SQLRad.com interpreter technology is being built as we speak.

The next step is launching the free AppSQL Designer tool after which will come the SQLRad.com PaaS itself. AppSQL 4.0 will include native SQL support for CSS and HTML5.</comment>


Is Diet-Induced Alzheimer's Disease Type 3 Diabetes? - <AUTHOR> http://sage.buckinstitute.org/food-for-thought/ <comment><USER2> It's really important to not forget the genetic factors at play in Alzheimer's. Between 65-80% of all Alzheimer's patients have at least one genetic version of the ApoE4 allele, a genotype found in around 25% of the population [1]. ApoE is made in astrocytes and is involved in cholesterol transport to neurons and in repairing damage done to neurons that occurs with normal aging. That isn't to say there isn't a dietary link or that critical lifestyle factors don't interact with these genetics, however! Insulin resistance leads to inflammation (which has been shown to accelerate brain aging) and may be one way in which type 2 diabetes is linked with Alzheimer's. I think calling Alzheimer's disease "type 3 diabetes" may be a somewhat dramatic oversimplification and a bit misleading, though, since the mechanism would be a bit more general (in this case).

[1]: [http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21787325](http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21787325)

</comment><comment><USER3> Is diet-induced (or even diet-associated) Alzheimer's Disease a proven phenomenon in the first place? The article seems to be pretty speculative on the whole thing, and I'm under the impression that the research on lifestyle risk factors is quite inconclusive (e.g. risk factors show up in ecological studies but produce no significant difference in controlled intervention trials).

<comment><USER4> There is evidence of the neuroprotective effects of a ketogenic diet (low carb, moderate protein, very high fat) [1][2]. The original formulation of the ketogenic diet was for epilepsy, after all [3].

The dogma for decades has been that the brain needs glucose to function. A highly simplified and inaccurate explanation of Alzheimer's is that the brain has diminished capacity to use glucose.

Luckily, the body has an alternate fuel source: ketones. The problem is most people never enter ketosis, where the body is depleted of glycogen and resorts to converting fat to ketone bodies.

[1]: [http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2367001/](http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2367001/)

[2]: [http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3826507/](http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3826507/)

[3]: [http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4133288/](http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4133288/)

<comment><USER5> Blindly encouraging a ketogenic diet can actually be damaging. While the average person _slightly_ benefits from a high-fat, low-carb diet, a small group of people (who have the APOE4 allele) are _unable to properly digest fat_ and thus are _greatly_ harmed by it.

Similarly, light alcohol consumption seems to slightly benefit the majority of people. But, for those with APOE4, it causes significant harm. So, tonic for one group is toxic to another.

It is far better if Alzheimer's treatment is prescribed on a case-by-case basis, based on genetic, environmental, and familial factors. This maximizes the outcomes for all, and not just the average.

<comment><USER6> Isn't this a little like saying that blindly encouraging the consumption of healthful tree nuts is damaging to people who are allergic to tree nuts?

True, that is, but not at all interesting?

<comment><USER5> The effects of tree nut allergies are acute and visible, but the effects of APOE genotype are chronic and insidious. Further, genetic testing is readily available and cheap ($99), so that the cost of determining whether someone should have a low-fat or high-fat diet is far outweighed by the benefits of:

a) lowered risk of alzheimer's b) lowered risk of calcified deposits c) lowered risk of stroke

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I'm willing to consider that Alzheimer's Disease may be affected by diet, but this article seems awfully slim on real data and in one instance seems to diverge from actual experimental results.

They claim that Type-2 diabetes and AD are "exacerbated by high fat diets", but the link with regards to the diabetes study specifies diet-induced obesity, not "high fat" diet. Dietary fat has much less effect on blood glucose levels than carbohydrates, so insulin's role is markedly decreased.

<comment><USER8> A steak causes the release of as much insulin as pure sugar.

Also, [http://nutritionfacts.org/video/lipotoxicity-how- saturated-f...](http://nutritionfacts.org/video/lipotoxicity-how-saturated- fat-raises-blood-sugar/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Anyone have a mirror? Link seems down.

</comment><comment><USER10> [Linked Page seems to be down]

I once read tha claim that wheat causes Alzheimer's.

The idea that Alzheimer is Type 3 diabetes it not new. I also remember a paper which claimed that nasal applied insulin improves Alzheimer symptoms.

Assuming that Alzheimer could be a type of diabetes and taken into account a connection between Diabetes I and Celiac disease, the idea that Wheat consumption could trigger Alzheimer is not absurd.</comment>


Study: Breakthrough blood test detects positive Covid-19 result in 20 minutes - <AUTHOR> https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2020/07/200717101037.htm <comment><USER2> PR article that does not show accuracy, sensitivity or specificity, does not have link to actual article in journal ("ACS Sensors", which is very far from where you'd publish if you had decent biological results).

So basically, just ignore this.</comment>


Ask HN: Is NSA tapping into Hacker News? - <AUTHOR>

<comment><USER2> Upvote for good joke.

</comment><comment><USER3> on the off chance this wasn't a joke it should be pointed out there would be an associated gag order so they, like everyone else, wouldn't be allowed to say. And if it was being done without a court order then HN probably wouldn't be aware of it and again, couldn't say.

</comment><comment><USER4> Isn't that like asking if the NSA is tapping into Newspapers...

</comment><comment><USER5> Yes.</comment>


Clocks Change Tomorrow [1918] [pdf] - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/packages/html/mobile/daylight-savings-1918.pdf <comment><USER2> There's a long history of railroad involvement in time changes, e.g., the "Day of two Noons". Adjustments for railroads are why we have time zones, and why Date.toLocaleString has weird minute and second offsets for pre-1800 dates:

[http://curtisautery.appspot.com/5779342353235968](http://curtisautery.appspot.com/5779342353235968)

<comment><USER3> The alternative would be for everyone to use something like UTC, which means that while their relationship to the sun changes depending on location, the actual value is the same everywhere. I find this especially useful when scheduling online meetings with participants from many countries.

<comment><USER4> Yes, that's a cool way to do it and somewhat natural if you're a server person; but perhaps mentally challenging for a lot of people.

Remember Swatch Internet Time[1]?

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

<comment><USER5> I wish this would catch on again. Swatch Internet Time was a pre-Twitter invention, and the live global connection to one another was weaker than it is now. I'd love to see it supported as a timestamp in forum software, Twitter clients, etc.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> The Director General McAdoo mentioned in the OP was the head of a US governmental agency that had taken control and ownership of the US railroad network. According to the Wikipedia article [1] "it was possibly the largest American experiment with nationalization," and it was reversed after WW I.

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

<comment><USER7> Passenger rail was never reversed.

<comment><USER8> Uh, Amtrak wasn't founded until 1970. It was reversed, and then reversed again.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> So basically time stood still for an hour instead of, as nowadays, repeating the third hour of the day. I wonder if this was really the case or if it was just an "easier" way to explain it to the average Joe.

<comment><USER10> An old pendulum clock can be easily set forward, but you must not push the arms counter clockwise. The method I've used requires waiting for the ding- dongs at each hour and half hour when you turn it forwards, so just stopping the clock for 1 hour is certainly easier than setting it forward 23 hours.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Benjamin Franklin's Essay on Daylight Saving Time:

 _Every morning, as soon as the sun rises, let all the bells in every church be set ringing; and if that is not sufficient?, let cannon be fired in every street, to wake the sluggards effectually, and make them open their eyes to see their true interest._

[http://www.webexhibits.org/daylightsaving/franklin3.html](http://www.webexhibits.org/daylightsaving/franklin3.html)

<comment><USER12> Just to be clear, that essay is not about daylight savings time. It's a humorous essay about people sleeping late.

<comment><USER11> I know it wasn't. That's called "editorial license" and you see it every single day on HN when users creatively edit headlines.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> What blows my mind is the collective amount of "news" articles we get twice a year, every year for DST

The American public (and world public for that matter) is obviously 100% apathetic.

If you really want this to change then you have to goad politicians and tell them how the USA is stuck in the 20th century and going backwards. But good luck with them caring about that either.

<comment><USER14> I prefer that we keep "DST" all year long. Its more pleasant leaving work while its still daylight. And I suspect that many US citizens think the same.

<comment><USER15> How about we keep standard time all year long, and you just leave work an hour earlier?

<comment><USER16> If you can write a law that will enforce that my boss lets me do that, sure.

(The real issue is that the legally-regulated opening hours for e.g. banks are too late in the day)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Please, just split the difference and be done with it.</comment>


Gaming's most fiendish anti-piracy tricks - <AUTHOR> http://www.gamesradar.com/f/gamings-most-fiendish-anti-piracy-tricks/a-2010022516730628047 <comment><AUTHOR> Heard of one game manufacturer that willfully distributed a version of their game on torrent. The torrented version of the game came bundled with a live webcam virus. They then made a website to stream the pirates on webcam. Ouch.

<comment><USER2> So you didn't find a story of a legit game manifacturer commiting multiple felonies just to embarass those darn pirates a little .. implausible?

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Neutering game play is a particularly bad way to punish pirates -- they're likely to tell all their friends that the "game sucks" and leave bad reviews on the web. Bad reviews don't deter the "try before you buy" pirate crowd near as much as they deter legitimate purchasers.

<comment><USER4> One thing you'd think they'd learn: DRM schemes like this punish legit customers more often than pirates.

Most of these can be fixed with a JPG scan.

The ones that modify the game can be fixed with a drm crack... With the side benefit that the cracked games are guaranteed to never mess up, where the real game did mess up for legit players sometimes.

The 'secret code' ones can all be solved easier with a keygen/lookup than actually doing the work... And of course, only pirates will even know there's a keygen/lookup program out there. And if they lose it, they just re-download it, unlike the physical media.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I wonder if any game companies have secretly released their own pirate version, complete with money making dodgy-ware, to try and get some money back.

<comment> loup-vaillant _Back?_ That's assuming the pirate would have otherwise bough the game. This is only partially true. Without piracy, most pirates would play fewer games.

And by the way, it appears some did: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2738447></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Offering conference attendance packages to employees - <AUTHOR>

The company I work for is considering offering once per year conference attendance as a perk and we're trying to come up with some ballpark estimates for how much this might cost. We're not sure exactly how much of the event and associated costs we should cover though. I'm hoping some of you can point out some industry norms.
Those of you who have attended a tech conference on your company, how much of the overall cost did they cover?
Tickets? Travel? Hotel? Food & discretionary? Other? <comment><USER2> My employer covered the full cost of the tickets to the PHPUK conference this year (non-early bird). It was expected that I cover transport and accommodation.</comment>


IBM 7030 Stretch - <AUTHOR> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_7030_Stretch <comment><USER3> Famously the first (only?) computer that was repaired with an oil change:

"Of course, Stretch came originally with an oil-cooled core memory system.

Jack Worlton of the Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory (LASL) recalls a problem experienced during the acceptance test phase, when there was a transient memory error in the cores. The engineers worked for days to remedy the error but were unable to figure out what was going wrong. They finally hit upon the problem. As Worlton explains it, there was a piece of solder loose in the oil bath, and because the oil was constantly in circulation the solder would move and attach itself onto a core and cause an error. Then it would move and lodge onto a different core and cause an error there.

It was the only error I know of that was corrected in a machine by giving it an oil change, Worlton quips."

from : [http://www.chilton- computing.org.uk/acl/literature/reports/p...](http://www.chilton- computing.org.uk/acl/literature/reports/p018.htm)

</comment><comment><USER4> My wife's parents met while working on system software for Stretch. From the stories they've told it sounds like it was quite a beast even by the standards of its day. IIRC, the I/O processor was incapable of running independently, so programmers had to add special instructions in the middle of their own code to give it cycles. Ick.

<comment><USER5> That's a cooperative synchronous bus, something quite common at the time. It's a bit like a 'yield' instruction in a cooperative multitasking environment.

<comment><USER4> It's a bit more than that. There's usually quite a bit of flexibility in when to yield, and the consequences might not be that bad. These instructions had to be issued in a very timely way, lest the whole system would come crashing down. Was it unique in that regard? Perhaps not, though "common" is a bit misleading when the computing landscape at the time was so small and fragmented. The difference is that other architectures might have shared one or two misfeatures with Stretch out of unfortunate necessity, but the Stretch designers seemed determined to collect the entire set and then expand on it. I'd guess that, like some projects I've been on, it was a case of one powerful or well connected group of people pushing as much complexity as possible onto another. So it's probably related to the "project management failure" sub- thread.

<comment><USER6> Requiring periodic yields in user code strikes me as indicating a dedication to simplicity. It was no great burden to add a few instructions to a program, and it apparently saved them from needing to implement a forced, transparent context switch mechanism.

<comment><USER4> I think you're misunderstanding what we're talking about. This wasn't in user code; it was in the OS ("MCP") itself. It wasn't a few instructions that could be placed at convenient points in the control flow; it was _every N instructions_ when I/O was active. Among other difficulties, that meant accounting for that had to be part of even minor code changes. The people actually doing it certainly didn't think it was simple or "no great burden" as you suggest. Simple would have been an I/O unit that could run independently of the main CPU, as in practically every machine designed since - <USER2> the 360 which was designed by the same person. Even he apparently recanted that decision.

So yeah, it's "a bit" like yield, but only in the sense that a Cessna and an F-22 are "a bit" alike. I've done low-level work on multiple RISC processors that had all sorts of exposed-pipeline and delegated-to-software functionality (e.g. TLB handling on MIPS) in the name of simplicity, and I've even enjoyed it somewhat, but I'm still glad I never had to work on anything as "raw" as Stretch.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7>
      Weight: 70,000 pounds (35 short tons; 32 t)
      Power: 100 kW[1] @ 110 V

Incredible!

<comment><USER8> Consider an esp32 is probably faster in low power mode

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Speaking of bad-ass computers, the 7030 was surpassed in speed in 1964 by the CDC-6600, designed by Seymour Cray.

It had incredibly cool-looking DUAL circular displays and a minimalist console keyboard built into the table...

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CDC_6600#/media/File:CDC_6600....](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CDC_6600#/media/File:CDC_6600.jc.jpg)

<comment><USER6> I programmed one of those in Wirth Pascal, as a freshman at Oregon State University in 1979. Then they retired it, installing a Honeywell running Multics. Then, they replaced that with a Vax 750. It was a step down in awesomeness each time.

The most popular parts of the 6600, as souvenirs, were the smoked-glass cabinet doors.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I was just reading "A History of Pi" which mentions this computer and its successor:

"π was computed to 250,000 decimal places on an IBM 7030 at the Commissariat à l'Energie Atomique in Paris in February 1966, and a year later, in February 1967, a CDC 6600 was programmed by J. Gilloud and J. Filliatre, at the same institution, to yield 500,000 decimal places. The program was again based on Störmer's formula (2) and the Shanks-Wrench method for checking the digits; the running time was 28 hours and 10 minutes (of which 1 hour and 35 minutes were used for conversion), and an additional 16 hours and 35 minutes were needed for the check. These quarter- and half-million digit values of π were published in reports of the Commissariat à l'Energie Atomique in Paris."

</comment><comment><USER11> The creation of this machine is referenced in a book that's often cited here - _The Mythical Man-Month_ \- just finished reading it today. It's quite insightful for a book that's draws upon experiences from software projects as far back as the 1950s.

</comment><comment><USER12> STRETCH also makes an appearance in one of the classic Alfred Bester (the writer, not the telepath) short stories: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Something_Up_There_Likes_Me](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Something_Up_There_Likes_Me)

Well worth a read if you can find it -- the Wikipedia summary is rather spoiler-y and doesn't capture the charm of the story. Mr. Bester worked in broadcast television at the time he wrote it and there is some amusing commentary about ad trends of the day.

</comment><comment><USER13> "PC World magazine named Stretch one of the biggest project management failures in IT history." It would be interesting to know more about this. The Wikipedia article doesn't really go into any detail and neither does the source article.

For example, there's a comment about having to lower the clock speeds but it doesn't say why this decision had to be made.

<comment><USER14> The germanium transistors used in Stretch simply weren't fast enough to meet the paper spec. The architecture couldn't do much to work around this.

Cray at CDC used the newer and faster silicon transistors in the 6600. So did IBM's later System/360.

In fact Cray _funded the development_ of the fast silicon transistors at Fairchild with a $500k contract.

[https://www.computerhistory.org/siliconengine/silicon- transi...](https://www.computerhistory.org/siliconengine/silicon-transistor- exceeds-germanium-speed/)

IBM made the classic corporate mistake - sales over-promised and then told engineering to build something that couldn't be built. So Stretch became an involuntary R&D project instead of a commercial product.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Stretch and the 6600 both had popcount instructions that x86 finally got in SSSE3, only ten years ago.

This is sometimes interpreted as indicating NSA interest in the machine.

</comment><comment><USER15> Oh neat, it was 64bit!

I wonder if anyone has made an emulator for it yet?

<comment><USER16> It seems wasteful to me since it only had 2MB of RAM. It does say that instructions could be 32 or 64 bits long, but I would guess having 16 or 32 bit instructions would let you pack more instructions into memory.

<comment><USER5> That's not 'only' that's absolutely mind warping huge for the time when it was made. The physical dimensions of that memory were such that you could see the individual bits as tiny little ferrite cores.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> The next chapter from where I am in IBM's Early Computers is on the Strech project meaning that I could be wealth of information if I read faster.</comment>


Nightshade: Near Protocol Sharding Design [pdf] - I-like-food https://nearprotocol.com/downloads/Nightshade.pdf <comment><AUTHOR> I'm the first author of the paper, happy to answer any questions

</comment><comment><USER2> off topic: Regarding Figure 8: "a graph with 10 nodes, each having 4 neighbors and no two shards requiring more than 2 hops for cross-shard communication". This can be achieved with only 3 neighbors (Petersen graph) [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Petersen_graph](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Petersen_graph)

More about this here: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Table_of_the_largest_known_gra...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Table_of_the_largest_known_graphs_of_a_given_diameter_and_maximal_degree)

</comment><comment><USER3> I've learned a lot from Alex just by working through these diagrams with him. Brilliant thinking that I hope will remove some of the current barriers in blockchain.

</comment><comment> I-like-food FYI: found a pretty neat paper describes a new sharding design for proof-of- stake blockchains

I think the company that's building it just announced or opened up a beta program too

</comment><comment><USER4> Nightshade specifics start on page 21 (section 3). The first bit is just an intro on sharding.

</comment><comment><USER5> The fishermans' drawing is a nice touch

<comment><USER6> I agree.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Handling the speed and validation trade off</comment>