Sony's wearable air conditioner is pretty cool - <AUTHOR> https://www.theverge.com/2020/7/22/21333837/sony-reon-pocket-hands-on-wearable-air-conditioner-japan <comment><USER2> It might be worth the author noting that the reason this works is that the area that it's placed at the base of the neck changes perceived thermal strain. it is an ancient trick that when one holds an ice cube there it makes you feel temporarily cooler. The brain gets false information as to the surface temperature and makes slightly different cooling decisions.

So your body can get to higher temperatures whilst you have a longer period of tolerance of it. There is some question as to the safety of this for people who might not be of athletic ability etc. It likely will allow increased, often significantly, blood pressure. In older people this could be dangerous if that is the case.

[https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10072-020-04349-x](https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10072-020-04349-x) [https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3017491/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3017491/) [https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5968886/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5968886/)

<comment><USER3> >So your body can get to higher temperatures whilst you have a longer period of tolerance of it. There is some question as to the safety of this for people who might not be of athletic ability etc. It likely will allow increased, often significantly, blood pressure.

Is it possible to use this effect to get the opposite result? that is, fooling the brain to perceive itself to be hotter than it is to overcharge the cooling mecanisms at the cost of an unpleasant feeling of heat?

<comment><USER4> Yes that's often given as a possible explanation for the popularity of hot drinks and hot spices in warmer climates.

[https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2012/07/11/156378713/co...](https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2012/07/11/156378713/cool- down-with-a-hot-drink-its-not-as-crazy-as-you-think)

</comment></comment></comment><comment> ani-ani For a heavy duty version of this, check out phase change material (PCM) vests. They are generally lined with pockets holding small PCM packs that maintain a near-constant temperature for 3-4 hours (then you have to swap the packs). There are several companies making these but here is one example: [https://www.texascoolvest.com/](https://www.texascoolvest.com/)

</comment><comment><USER5> The thermal camera picture in the article doesn't make sense.

If this is using the Peltier Effect the cold surface would be against the skin to cool you, and the hot surface would be pointing out towards the thermal camera which is the opposite of what it shows.

If we take that photo at face value, the device is actually heating the person and yet their skin is somehow cooler (which isn't actually something this device can do anyway, it makes you FEEL cooler, but doesn't actually cool you over a wider area, or worse actuall makes you even hotter as you will sweat less due to misleading signals).

<comment><USER6> The article doesn't show the original context for the photo, but I imagine it's an image of the body after using it, not while the cooler is attached.

<comment><USER7> Right, but then the question remains why is the lower back cooler in the picture as well. Is the blood flow through ones entire back flow through that area first?

Which of course made me think the correct placement for it would be somewhere with a lot of blood flow near the skin that could be cooled a couple degrees. I was thinking the inner thigh might be a good place, but the device isn't shaped correctly for that, given your just going to cool one side, and cook the other.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Doesn't mention either the power consumption or the amount of heat (in watts) removed from the skin.

At rest, the body produces about 100 Watts of heat. Pettier coolers aren't that efficient... from what I can tell, their energy consumption is roughly equal to the amount of heat they can remove in situations like this...

So in an order of magnitude calculation, to reject all the body's heat on a hot day would require about 100Watts... so about eight 18650 Lithium ion cells for an hour, so maybe about half a kilogram of cells.

Plus a fan and radiator assembly (roughly the size of a CPU fan and heatsink). Probably adding about another half a kilogram for a total of 1 kilogram.

EDIT: I think phase change material might be a cheaper and less noisy option... about a kilogram ice packs will also absorb about 100Wh of heat before reaching body temperature.

Now if you can get a miniaturized mechanical heat pump that has higher efficiency (day a coefficient of performance of 2-4) and you need to last for much longer than an hour, I think you can significantly beat the weight of an ice pack.... and, of course, water has a heat of vaporization of 627Wh/kg, beating both options, so simply sweating (and drinking water to replenish) is the most efficient option per kg... Evolution wins again! (Provided it's not too humid that you can no longer evaporate sweat, in which case you can die even while resting, naked, in the shade, healthy, young, and next to a fan... which can happen if the "wet bulb" temperature exceeds 35C or 95F ie 100% humidity at 95F or 50% humidity and 115F on a sustained basis.)

<comment><USER9> If you removed all 100W of body heat you'd likely be dead after a while! A wearable cooling device doesn't have to remove all the heat your body generates, it just needs to remove enough to make you feel cooler, in addition to the heat your body already sheds naturally.

<comment><USER8> Depends on how hot it is outside. If it's hot enough that your body can't reject enough heat naturally, then you'll die WITHOUT such a device. Also, if it's hot enough outside, your body can actually absorb heat from the environment.

Also, your metabolic rate is only 100 Watts if you're resting. Any kind of exertion would be higher.

If it's hot outside, your body sheds heat by sweat. Non-ideal if you like not being sweaty.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Pre-Covid, Adam Savage built a portable condensing/evap cooling system using an old Soviet flight suit. He teamed up with an engineer to make it happen. Fascinating design/build video. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z_Ti4GP0ntE](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z_Ti4GP0ntE)

</comment><comment><USER11> >I did find, generally, that the Reon Pocket improved matters somewhat, even on its lowest cooling setting. I was definitely still sweating by the time I got home, but the cooling sensation does make a difference while you're actually out there in the heat.

Sounds like the device is useless then? The impression I got is that it doesn't meaningfully reduce your overall body temperature, but makes one spot cooler which presumably distracts you from the heat. I've heard that peltier coolers aren't very efficient or powerful, so this isn't surprising. Can someone with who studied physics/engineering calculate what the effectiveness of this is, vs a block of ice that's about the same size? Given the high latent heat of water it might be worse than a block of ice..

<comment><USER12> Sounds like even for a cool unique product like this, Verge authors can't be bothered to do more original investigation than a leisurely walk to the supermarket allows for.

<comment><USER13> It's The Verge. They haven't been able to do meaningful journalism in years.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I wonder if it is so smart to reduce sweating / skin surface temperature when your body has difficulties cooling down. Seems like the same word of warning as for cold leg compress might be reasonable. Has someone done the math if this can really cool you down?

<comment><USER2> If you see my other comment, you are right to question the wisdom of this. We all do it for temporary relief with ice etc. But hours at a time tricking the brain like this is likely to increase blood pressure.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> The device uses the "Peltier effect" to cool: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermoelectric_effect#Peltier_...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermoelectric_effect#Peltier_effect)

<comment><USER14> Yes, you can do cool stuff with it on the skin: Sophroneo: Fear not. A VR Horror Game with Thermal Feedback and Physiological Signal Loop ([https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/3334480.3381659?download=...](https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/3334480.3381659?download=true))

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Hmmm...

Peltiers are inefficient, but very small. They are pretty simple to use: one side is hot, the other side is cold (when powered). The Peltier, given a voltage, will try to set the thermal-difference of the hot-side and cold-side to a set value. (Lets say a 45 degree difference).

Finally, there's a wattage involved: the amount of heat that the Peltier can "pump". The Peltier's actual temperature is mostly based on the wattage (500-units of heat flowing out may result in an actual 10-degree difference, instead of its theoretical maximum 45-degrees... or whatever the device's limit is).

An actual air-conditioner with a compressor is more efficient. But a Peltier is a purely electric device (literally: the electrons flowing through the wires carries the heat itself and dumps it to the hot side). As such, the Peltier is small, but inefficient (Electrons moving through wires generate heat. So the more electrons you send (aka: current), the more waste-heat is generated). An actual air-compressor would do better in any circumstance where the additional size / weight is allowed.

\</comment><comment></comment><comment>--

As such, the only practical use of this "wearable air conditioner" are situations where a larger, more efficient, air conditioner is not available.

Even then: an ice-pack (ie: using a large refrigerator to cool down a thermal mass) would be far more efficient, and probably a cheaper, use of electricity.

I'm finding it difficult to think of a situation where ice-packs distributed from a proper compressor are unavailable. Water / Ice is a surprisingly good "cold storage" mechanism.

</comment><comment><USER17> I think, I can make a better version:

1\. Make person wear a thermal jacket

2\. Connect thermal jacket through a heat exchanger to a pack of ice, evap cooler, or a CO2 bottle.

And if cost, and weight is not an issues, one can go for a vapour compression system.

I worked on a dumb "smart mini vine cellar" once, and the company whose parts we were buying was also making this: [https://youtu.be/WbrytRV_LK8](https://youtu.be/WbrytRV_LK8)

<comment><USER18> Please design and produce this. I suffer from extreme hyperhidrosis. I would pay quite a lot of money to be able to keep my skin cool and dry day to day. The market for this is huge and underserved.

<comment><USER19> Just in case this is a useful suggestion: try checking out auto racing suppliers. There are undershirts with tubing networks for cool water. They're meant to go under the fire resistant suit you have to wear under more serious racing's safety rules. The rigs I've seen have a reservoir with an ice pack and the equivalent of an aquarium pump that you put in a mini cooler bolted behind the driver's seat. You could probably macgyver up something similar with a small hydration bladder style backpack that might give you a few hours of substantial cooling on the go.

<comment><USER18> This is awesome, thank you!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> # Plus sides

Interestingly, this averts the strong issues of evaporation-based air coolers as explained e.g. on [(67) Personal "air conditioners" aren't what they seem - YouTube]([https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2horH- IeurA](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2horH-IeurA)). TL;DW: this works even if air is pretty humid.

When used outdoors this also even averts the issue of only moving heat very near.

# Predictable minus sides of the T-shirt option

People with extremely short hair and static position indoor might probably notice a heat flux rising to the back of their head, in practice this may not be a problem.

On the contrary, what happens if long hair covers the device? Hair being an insulator, the device may lose a lot of its efficiency.

Also, resting on your back (e.g. napping) wearing this device would lose its efficiency.

Apart from those specific situations, this looks like a cool device!

</comment><comment><USER9> There have been some other attempts at the same kind of thing:

[https://sg.news.yahoo.com/device-hugs-neck-personal-air- cond...](https://sg.news.yahoo.com/device-hugs-neck-personal-air- conditioning-045043008.html)

[https://www.japantrendshop.com/usb-forehead-neck- cooler-p-29...](https://www.japantrendshop.com/usb-forehead-neck- cooler-p-2954.html)

[https://www.ebay.com/c/1708057939](https://www.ebay.com/c/1708057939)

[https://shinning.en.made-in- china.com/product/lCmxOdKYfhVi/C...](https://shinning.en.made-in- china.com/product/lCmxOdKYfhVi/China-Summer-Neck-Cooler-Soak-in-Water.html)

</comment><comment><USER9> I had a system like this more than 10 years ago, sold by Sharper Image, you can still find them on eBay:

[https://www.ebay.com/c/1708057939](https://www.ebay.com/c/1708057939)

It has metal plates that touch the sides of the neck and a Peltier heat exchanger with fan on the back. A pack of four C cells was worn on a belt at your waist or slung over your shoulder. It claimed to work by cooling the blood in the veins at the side of the neck, so your blood distributed the cooling throughout your body. When set to High it would cool you down about 5 to 10 degrees F (perceived air temperature, it wouldn't actually cool your body by that much or you'd be dead). The batteries would only last an hour or two at the high setting. At a lower setting they'd last much longer but the cooling effect was much less. It worked but I didn't use it often because it was uncomfortable to have cold metal plates touching the sides of the neck and the fan was noisy. After a years use it just stopped working.

Perhaps there is a major vein at the base of the neck to transport the coolness to other parts of the body? Or maybe the spinal columns fluid does the heat transfer?

There is indeed research showing that if you cool a persons wrist you can change their temperature perception, and it has been turned into a product:

[https://www.electronicsweekly.com/news/business/peltier- effe...](https://www.electronicsweekly.com/news/business/peltier-effect-beats- heat-2018-07/)

I don't think the principal is the same as this Sony device though. To change perception requires much less energy than that required to actually cool the body, and if they could do that on the wrist with a smaller device why build a bigger device that requires a special shirt to hold the device at the base of the neck?

For energy efficiency a personal air conditioner makes a lot of sense, why cool a whole building when you can just cool the people in it? Everyone can adjust their own temperature then also.

</comment><comment><USER21> I wonder if this could have a medical application. I'm thinking of those times when a cold, wet washcloth is placed on the forehead of people with fevers to cool them down somewhat. Then again, a wet washcloth is a lot cheaper $122.

<comment><USER22> The fastest way to bring temperature down in a medical setting is an ice bath, or injection of cold saline.

They also have cooling blankets, basically a human sized water cooled blanket connected to a compressor (for cooling the water).

Peltier tech is probably not very useful in this setting, since it's quite inefficient.

<comment><USER10> Cold saline really does work. And it's really, really uncomfortable.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Some get these for your next Burning Man?

I've been watching Kipp's cooling systems and have wanted to make an AC suit for some time :-)

[https://www.kippkitts.com/collections/cooling- systems](https://www.kippkitts.com/collections/cooling-systems)

</comment><comment><USER24> My grandfather was an indian (in Brazil) and he used to wet his ears for the same purpose. It was a century-old technique from his tribe. I've tried it once and it does work :)</comment>


Elon Musk Is Wrong. We Aren't Living in a Simulation - <AUTHOR> https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/we-dont-live-in-a-simulation?utm_content=buffera2008&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter.com&utm_campaign=buffer <comment><USER2> I agree with the author, but their refutation of Musk's argument takes the wrong tack.

Musk's argument = The time needed to create a simulation indistiguishable from reality << age of universe; The time needed for intelligent life to evolve << age of universe; ergo, an intelligent species emerged before homo sapiens somewhere in the (real) universe AND created a simulated universe indistiguishable from the real one.

The author tries to refute this logic by pointing out the flaws with simulated anything, but that doesn't refute the logic of Musk's reasoning. To Musk, the implementation details were long ago worked out.

Problem is, Musk never PROVED anything. His assertion rests upon two axioms.

The fact that we went from pong to COD in 40 years does not mean that in 40 (or 40 million) years hence we'll have a sim universe or even a sim galaxy - more likely, we'll have a really bloody COD BO 40000000.

The fact that Earth went from molten blob to pretty decent place to live in 4 billion years does not mean that 8 billion years ago some other molten blob became something Earth-like in 4 billion years, which by then had a sapient species creating alien Pong, COD, or Madden 50K: The Concussion Continues.</comment>


PowerToys: Windows system utilities to maximize productivity - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/Microsoft/PowerToys <comment><USER2> Related, have a look at the Sysinternals tools [1], particularly Process Explorer [2], a powerful "Task Manager" replacement.

Sysinternals used to be Mark Russinovich's external company that provided expert Windows debugging. His blog was impressive, and my little finger tells me he knew more about Windows internals than Microsoft did.

So Microsoft acquihired Sysinternals, and his tools continue to be supported :)

[1] [https://docs.microsoft.com/en- us/sysinternals/](https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/)

[2] [https://docs.microsoft.com/en- us/sysinternals/downloads/proc...](https://docs.microsoft.com/en- us/sysinternals/downloads/process-explorer)

<comment><USER3> I'd like to add [https://www.nirsoft.net/](https://www.nirsoft.net/) to the list. 100's of useful Windows utilities made (and still updated) by one guy.

<comment><USER4> Yes. Whenever you need to do something it's always good to check nirsoft and SysInternals. It may be there already

They really should ship Windows with Notepad++, SysInternals and NirSoft. It would make it a much nicer experience especially in machines where you can't install stuff due to regulation.

<comment><USER5> Vscode would be a good substitute as well.

<comment><USER6> VSCode is gigantic and complicated and only really useful to developers anyway. It does not really overlap with notepad. Notepad++ is almost simple enough to replace notepad. (Personally it's still too complex to replace notepad for me but I know it does for some people.)

<comment><USER7> VSCode is great for every day non-dev use.

<comment><USER8> notepad++ is far faster to load. A notepad replacement should load instantly. VS code does not.

<comment><USER9> My VS Code loads in like <2 seconds.

Maybe get a better computer? (not trying to be glib, seriously I wonder what are you running on). I run on a 2017 Mac Book Pro and it is very very fast for me.

Also, personal opinion: VS Code gets a big +1 from me due to it recently adding remote development capabilities (eg connect to host over SSH, do dev/compile stuff there).

<comment><USER10> >My VS Code loads in like <2 seconds.

Two seconds is eternity for _text editor_.

<comment><USER9> VS Code is more than a text editor. You're repeating a meme.

<comment><USER10> It is, but discussion was about replacing notepad, not some IDE.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Here are some utilities I love and use all-the-time on windows. Would love to hear about your tools in the replies.

* Everything: [https://www.voidtools.com/](https://www.voidtools.com/)

An awesome and terribly fast file finder. You can add a global Shortcut, like WIN+<something>. I use it all the time.

* Licecap: [https://www.cockos.com/licecap/](https://www.cockos.com/licecap/)

A gif recorder. Useful to spice up your bug reports!

* WinDirStat: [https://windirstat.net/](https://windirstat.net/)

Low on Diskspace? Find out, where it's gone!

* Bulk Rename Utility: [https://www.bulkrenameutility.co.uk](https://www.bulkrenameutility.co.uk)

It's a bit arcane, but it renames everything in every format you can think of with a bit of practice.

* Text Crawler: [https://www.filepuma.com/download/textcrawler_3.0.3-9304/](https://www.filepuma.com/download/textcrawler_3.0.3-9304/)

Grep everything in a directory. Use it for complex Regex searches on windows. Unfortunately new versions are limited by a trial.

* Greenshot: [https://getgreenshot.org/](https://getgreenshot.org/)

The better snipping tool.

* CurrPorts: [http://www.nirsoft.net/utils/cports.html](http://www.nirsoft.net/utils/cports.html)

The better TCPView

* Process Explorer: [https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/downloads/proc...](https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/downloads/process-explorer)

You know it already.

<comment><USER12> * WinDirStat -> WizTree . Same idea as WDS/Space Monger but uses Everything-style disk tree reading to be much faster scanning

* Licecap -> Gifcam . Similar functionality, slightly more modern UI

* Greenshot -> Jing . Mostly because I'm used to Jing and have it mapped to Ctrl + Print Screen

* Open Hardware Monitor . My Sandy Bridge laptop likes to go into Jet Engine mode and this gives me details as to what the hardware is doing. Combined with procexp and I have a clear view that svchost.exe has gotten away from itself again and its time for a reboot

<comment><USER13> Everyone is going to have their own WinDirStat suggestion, because theres about 50 million variants on the market, but WizTree is fastest.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> As someone coming from macOS, the one feature that I miss most on Windows is applications remembering their old positions when plugged into multiple displays. When I first saw this happen on macOS, I thought it was some magic. Now on Windows, I have to constantly drag each window back into its own display every time I plug in/out from displays.

<comment><USER15> Window positions? I'd be happy if icons would stay in one place as i plug/unplug displays! To be honest MacOS and linux are the only current consumer OSs that have multi-display handled. And of them, only MacOS properly handles multi-display setups with differing DPIs.

<comment><USER16> What do you have to do to get linux to work properly with multiple displays? I just can't get the set up to work how I want on Arch.

<comment><USER17> Running 3 monitors here. Mixed DPI (laptop is 4K, both external displays are 1080P). Ubuntu with Gnome running on Wayland. A few of the applications I use still don't support Wayland scaling properly (meaning they need to stay on whichever monitor they were launched, lest their zoom level get messed up) but it's getting better and all of the built-in Gnome stuff works great.

This genuinely took zero configuration on my part, besides perhaps going into the Display control panel and changing the zoom level for the 4K display.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Now there's a blast from the past.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_PowerToys#Windows_95](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_PowerToys#Windows_95)

<comment><USER19> Command Prompt Here was a mandatory install, forgot all about it!

<comment><USER20> It's a simple enough registry edit that I've memorised it and apply it to all the machines (including VMs) I work with.

        HKCU\*\shell\Command Prompt Here\command = %WINDIR%\system32\cmd.exe

<comment><USER21> On modern Windows it's built in, you just hold ctrl+shift (actually I think just shift will do) as you right click.

<comment><USER22> I think you can also click on the address bar in Explorer, and type "cmd" or "powershell". Even "bash" if you install WSL.

<comment> frosted-flakes With Alt+D to focus the address bar, this is super convenient. I use it all the time.

<comment><USER23> Command Prompt Here is also directly in the File menu of Windows 10's File Explorer's ribbon. Alt+F,R is the shortcut.

(File Explorer's ribbon follows your Win+X setting that if you have PowerShell your default, that shows up instead of classic Command Prompt.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> I mainly use WSL within Windows but here's a bunch of general Windows tools I use: [https://nickjanetakis.com/blog/the-tools-i- use](https://nickjanetakis.com/blog/the-tools-i-use)

The productivity focused short version is:

DexPot[0] for creating hotkey driven virtual desktops (similar to how i3 launches and switches between them)

Ditto[1] for multiple clipboards (searchable and has multiple paste types, much better than what comes with Windows 10)

Keypirinha[2] for launching apps and folders with fuzzing searching (IMO much better than what comes with Windows 10)

AutoHotKey[3] for remapping global hotkeys and filling in gaps for specific things you want to do

wsltty[4] for a low input latency rock solid terminal (best paired with tmux for tabs / splits and buffer searches)

There's in depth blog posts and videos on how all of these work in the link at the start of this comment. I've been using Windows as a primary dev environment for ~20 years and the last half of that has been using it for Linux based development (initially with VMs but now with WSL and Docker).

[0]: [https://www.dexpot.de/?lang=en](https://www.dexpot.de/?lang=en)

[1]: [http://ditto-cp.sourceforge.net/](http://ditto-cp.sourceforge.net/)

[2]: [http://keypirinha.com/](http://keypirinha.com/)

[3]: [https://www.autohotkey.com/](https://www.autohotkey.com/)

[4]: [https://github.com/mintty/wsltty](https://github.com/mintty/wsltty)

</comment><comment><USER25> Thanks for sharing; I particularly like the looks of FancyZones - it'll really save me time arranging my Terminal windows etc, and also assist setting up standard layouts of working.

<comment><USER26> FancyZones looks like a godsend for those with ultrawide monitors. Not being able to effectively divide up the space was always a drawback compared with just having two normal sized monitors, this could solve that issue.

<comment><USER27> I agree. I do have an ultrawide monitor and a secondary monitor and it seems that FancyZones doesn't (yet?) have support for multiple monitors. It looks nice and is useful but I'll be sticking to GridMove for window management for the time being.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Hooray, competition in window management :-) [https://losttech.software/stack.html](https://losttech.software/stack.html)

<comment><USER29> I hadn't seen Stack before. Have you used it & would you recommend?

<comment><USER28> I'd be biased: I wrote it :)

The PowerToys tool lacks many things, including multiple monitor support, tabs, etc

<comment><USER30> I'd give it a try if I still developed on Windows. I find it amazing no one has made a good tiling window manager for Windows yet. On Linux I use i3 and love it. Back in the day I used that auto-hotkey script that did window tiling. It was okay, but kinda buggy.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> Also recommended: Everything [1], a stupid fast file search engine for Windows. The initial index build takes less than a second for 100k files (no idea how it does that). Much better than what Windows provides natively.

[1] [https://www.voidtools.com/](https://www.voidtools.com/)

</comment><comment><USER32> A tool I couldn't live without is ZTreeWin:

* [https://www.ztree.com/html/ztreewin.htm](https://www.ztree.com/html/ztreewin.htm)

If anyone ever used xtree gold back in the day - it's the exact same thing, but works with modern windows. Because it's all keyboard based and no mouse, all file operations can be done quickly via muscle memory.

Also another vote for everything mentioned below. Fastest file search there is. Even if I know where something is, it's still quicker and easier to use Everything to find it.

</comment><comment><USER33> This is the most useful intern project I've ever seen. At least the batch rename tool is an intern project, not sure about the other ones.

</comment><comment><USER34> Hah! When I saw this I thought the title was missing a (1995) on it. I remember installing the power tools as soon as they were released. I used every single one of those tools on a regular basis.

I'm glad they've revived the idea and allowed their developers to publish this repo. I hope they keep adding to it (even though I don't use Windows anymore...)

<comment><USER20> _I 'm glad they've revived the idea and allowed their developers to publish this repo._

I was disappointed to find out that this is _not_ the original PowerToys, which offered far more functionality. This appears to be something else, using the same name.

<comment><USER30> Yea, I thought it was going to be the source code to the original power tools.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> Can't beleive this is from the same company that puts Candy Crush Saga and other junkware on Windows 10 "Pro" installs - and then limited the ability to have a default profile that picks up their removal with new profiles. The hoopjumping to clean up the Win 10 "Pro" mess is silly.

What enterprise is asking for all this junkware to be installed - it makes absolutely no sense for this to be on domain networks. I keep on reading that Microsoft listens "closely" to their customers - and am like - really?

<comment><USER36> >Can't beleive this is from the same company that

I can. Have you looked at it? Its a 22.2 MB shortcut help screen and some window tiling helper, 22.2 MB of total fluff. Its a direct opposite of what a Power user would want. Original 205 KB PowerToys/Tweak UI were meant for advanced users wanting an easier access to hidden features.

<comment><USER37> Eh, those are times when chat clients weigh 400Mb and come with their own browser.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> I always loved PowerToy calculator.</comment>


Belgian professor in cryptography hacked - <AUTHOR> http://www.standaard.be/cnt/dmf20140201_011

<comment><USER2> A near-perfect copy of Slashdot was supposedly served to infect "targets" with malware. Since Slashdot isn't the center of the IT world any more, the logical conclusion must be this: Who of us (reading this) is currently being served his HN by GCHQ?

We're here at the heart of what should (and does) bug many IT people over here in Europe: If you work in IT for a company that does something of interest to GCHQ and the NSA, then you and your access credentials are one of those 'targets' they keep speaking about.

<comment> vezzy-fnord HN isn't the center of the IT world, either.

<comment><USER3> Well, maybe not, but USG does keep on eye on the goings on here. E.g. [http://web.nvd.nist.gov/view/vuln/detail?vulnId](http://web.nvd.nist.gov/view/vuln/detail?vulnId)

<comment><USER4> Your link is indeed broken but some google fu led me to find these entries proving your point :

[http://web.nvd.nist.gov/view/vuln/detail?vulnId=CVE-2013-017...](http://web.nvd.nist.gov/view/vuln/detail?vulnId=CVE-2013-0175)

[http://web.nvd.nist.gov/view/vuln/detail?vulnId=CVE-2013-209...](http://web.nvd.nist.gov/view/vuln/detail?vulnId=CVE-2013-2094)

[http://web.nvd.nist.gov/view/vuln/detail?vulnId=CVE-2012-492...](http://web.nvd.nist.gov/view/vuln/detail?vulnId=CVE-2012-4929)

They cite HN among a plethora of other references, though.

<comment><USER5> Yes but this is NIST (formerly ANSI), and these are essentially credits. Heck even I am in credits at NIST somewhere, it's quite a leap from being mentioned to being tracked by government.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I guess if you think that you're a potential target, you should be doing your computing like rms: [http://stallman.org/stallman- computing.html](http://stallman.org/stallman-computing.html)

<comment><USER2> Anybody who works in infrastructure for a big European ISP is a target. That's a lot of people who are currently living relatively normal lives.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Here's a much better english summary:

[http://www.standaard.be/cnt/dmf20140201_011](http://www.standaard.be/cnt/dmf20140201_011)

<comment><USER8> thanks. First sentence of second paragraph had my mind in shambles trying to parse it.

"There isn't a card with an electronic chip available, or it has some sort of security technology that UCL professor Jean-Jacques Quisquater (67) was involved in developing."

I haven't a clue what that means.

[edit] wait, your link just ends up at the same article for me.

<comment><USER7> A mod changed the link, earlier it was just a several sentence gigaom "article" linking to a Google translation of [http://www.standaard.be/cnt/dmf20140131_049](http://www.standaard.be/cnt/dmf20140131_049).

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks to the mod for the link change. Only found the standaard translation and thought the gigaom was at least some form of a summary and better than a google translated document.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> _His computer was infected after clicking a (bogus) LinkedIn invitation of a non-existent employee of the European patent office._

Just goes to show how effective phishing attacks are. If a professor of cryptography does not check SSL certificates, far less people do so than we think.

<comment><USER10> Social engineering has very little to do with cryptography; being expert on one does not give effective protection against the other (or vice versa).

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> ISTM that a strict adherence to Kerckhoffs's principle on the part of the professor and his colleagues would reduce the value of this hack to run-of- the-mill NSA/GCHQ creepiness. That is, they're not going to learn any secret keys to CA roots by reading his email. Since they're creepy evil bastards, however, there doesn't _have_ to be a point to it.

</comment><comment><USER12> That example just shows, how easy it is to be scamed. No matter how smart and how much of an expert you are, you still may be vulnerable from an totally unsuspected angle. Don't ridicule someone who "deserved" it because of his "stupidity" or "naivety", because you may be the next laughing-stock.

</comment><comment><USER13> Quisquater was involved in the development AES. Are the NSA trying to find ways to crack it?

<comment><USER14> That is incorrect. Quisquater was not involved in _any_ of the AES candidates, let alone the winner.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Besides the GCHQ aspect, doesn't seem terribly different from other less catchy news stories: "Immunologist gets the flu", "Physical therapist fractures shin", etc.

<comment><USER16> You make it sound like it happened by chance. However, it's more like "Special Forces kill top terrorist in Absurdistan" (as in, went an extra mile, tailored operation, high-value target).

edit: speling</comment></comment>


Zlib-ng: a performance-oriented fork of zlib - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/Dead2/zlib-ng <comment><USER3> One thing to be aware of, these replacement zlib libraries are not always "drop in" safe as some software such as nginx pre-allocate the zlib state buffers by hard coding in the original zlib structure sizes (the original zlib makes guarantees about memory usage that technically makes this behavior somewhat OK). Depending on how well the software is designed, the forked zlib versions may result in buffer overflows or other crashing. (nginx is fine - <USER2> spams your log file with errors and re-allocates).

</comment><comment><USER4> I'll be watching this with some interest. A couple years ago I tried using some of the x86_64 assembly versions of inflate_fast() and longest_match() but found them to be subtly buggy -- they'd both sometimes do reads outside of the allocated memory and could crash if that happened to land at the end of a mmap'ed segment. I emailed all of the relevant authors, but nobody seemed to be maintaining that stuff any more. Honestly, just having a zlib with a _bug tracker_ is a huge improvement.

I am sad to see that a lot of the zlib-ng seem to be around code style updates, which will make it hard for things to travel back and forth between the codebases. I guess one branch or another will eventually have to "win", which is sad.

Also, is zlib-ng going to commit to keeping the same zlib license? Some of the zlib improvements floating around on the net have snuck in more restrictive licensing. It would be fantastic if zlib-ng could hold the line on license creep.

<comment><USER5> According to the linked page, "Just remember that any code you submit must be your own and it must be zlib licensed."

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> _The zlib code has to make numerous workarounds for old compilers that do not understand ANSI-C or to accommodate systems with limitations such as operating in a 16-bit environment._

This is true for many older open source libraries. I wonder:

\- Are old platforms still tested as time passes? Is it really worth it maintaining extra cruft for old systems even if it is unknown whether it still works? Are there projects running CI for OS/2 Warp, MS-DOS, or A/UX?

\- How many users of old or obscure platforms are there still around? Are they even updating such libraries?

\- What platforms do we need to get rid of to get rid of autoconf/automake/configure and use e.g. CMake instead?

<comment><USER7> > What platforms do we need to get rid of to get rid of > autoconf/automake/configure and use e.g. CMake instead?

Why would you want that? Autotools is the devil we know. CMake has its own problems and from a statistical sample of one project implementing both, I came to the conclusion that CMake is more frustrating than Autotools when you need to do something unusual.

<comment><USER8> Exactly. autotools is exceptionally well designed for dealing with more exotic use cases like cross compiling. When designing a cross-compiling linux distribution([http://exherbo.org/docs/multiarch.txt](http://exherbo.org/docs/multiarch.txt)) we discovered that autotools is by far the easiest to deal with when it comes to arbitrary host & build targets, compilers, etc. I would be even bolder and say that:

Those who do not understand autotools are doomed to reinvent it, poorly.

<comment><USER9> I use CMake to cross-compile firmware for my home automation hardware. It doesn't seem too bad, just a single file shared across all projects that defines the compiler binaries and settings. I like it much better than autotools.

<comment><USER10> Do you have an example online somewhere? This might be useful to have as a reference in the future.

<comment><USER4> [http://www.vtk.org/Wiki/CMake_Cross_Compiling](http://www.vtk.org/Wiki/CMake_Cross_Compiling)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> It seems like this would be more compelling if accompanied by some benchmarks showing how much better the performance is than the original zlib's.

<comment><USER12> Edit:

Results with zlib-ng and a newer version of the Cloudflare changes:

[https://www.snellman.net/blog/archive/2015-06-05-updated- zli...](https://www.snellman.net/blog/archive/2015-06-05-updated-zlib- benchmarks/)

Original:

Here are some benchmarks of the Intel and Cloudflare forks that this project is based on:

[https://www.snellman.net/blog/archive/2014-08-04-comparison-...](https://www.snellman.net/blog/archive/2014-08-04-comparison- of-intel-and-cloudflare-zlib-patches.html)

The speedups are not insignificant. (I'll see about updating the post to include results for zlib-ng).

<comment><USER13> As I mentioned in another comment, the minigzip used is very suboptimal due to reading and decompressing only 1 byte per inflate() call. Please retest with --zlib-compat or the fix that was merged today.

<comment><USER12> Sure thing, updated.

I'm not in the habit of including compression level 6 in the results, since the application I care about defaults to 5 :) And I wanted a good spread of different compression levels in the results.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> For decompression miniz is already faster than zlib and with a more permissive license [https://code.google.com/p/miniz/](https://code.google.com/p/miniz/)

And my post where I put times and code: [http://fizz.buzz/posts/anything-you- zcat-i-zcat-faster-under...](http://fizz.buzz/posts/anything-you-zcat-i-zcat- faster-under-certain-conditions.html)

<comment><USER15> Though it looks like there's been no updates since late 2013. I wonder if it makes sense for someone to step in and import it to Github

<comment><USER16> miniz is already on GitHub: [http://richg42.blogspot.com/2015/05/the-great- github-migrati...](http://richg42.blogspot.com/2015/05/the-great-github- migration.html)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> If you want more performance out of zlib, step one is recompile.

I've seen flabbergasting speedup out of basic CPU-bound utilities simply by recompiling the source code for a fifteen-year-old binary using a modern compiler.

Which also brings up the point that if you want to benchmark zlib-ng, compile zlib with the same compiler.

</comment><comment><USER18> Intel optimized zlib: [http://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/intelligent- systems/i...](http://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/intelligent- systems/intel-technology/zlib-compression-whitepaper.html)

Github:[https://github.com/jtkukunas/zlib](https://github.com/jtkukunas/zlib)

</comment><comment><USER19> This makes me wonder what a good strategy would be for deprecating old architectures. Remove support for them in new versions and backport bugfixes to the last version supporting the old architectures indefinitely?

<comment><USER20> It's a more difficult issue with something like OpenSSL as new features are added. Zlib is done though, there is zero interest in sdding deflate64 or a different algorithm, they could just put a version on ice, keep it around for distribution and make a more clean 2.0

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> How to pronounce the "-ng"? "zetlibng" like "bang" without the "a" is kind of hard to produce for my mouth.

<comment><USER22> You spell it out. It's an acronym for "next generation".

<comment><USER21> Ah that's what it stands for. Alright.</comment></comment></comment>


Wake up: News doesn't work - <AUTHOR> http://scripting.com/2016/07/10/1368.html <comment><USER2> What does the headline, "News doesn't work", have to do with the actual topic: Facebook's Trending Stories sucks (whether it's human-curated or completely by algorithm). Or is this supposed to be a meta-joke about how news headlines often don't deliver (which I would agree with)?

edit: to be fair, Winer seems to be arguing that tech companies can't solve the news problem, so newsmakers (or those affiliated with civic improvement) need to wake up:

> _We don 't have anything remotely like the answer to how news works in the > age of the Internet. We're running around in circles, confused, ineffective, > and all the while we need a good news system. Evidence: the way we're making > political decisions. Also: we're going in reverse on race equity._

I guess I just see this as a very, _very_ hard problem. Winer lambasts the media for living too much on the adage, "if it bleeds, it leads":

> _Get informed. You can 't. All you get is sensation. Feelings. Pushes in > this primal direction or another. Fear dominates. The people who do what we > call news know how this works and they make fear. And that's a rush and it > feels good, but what about when you really just want to know what's > happening?_

But what's fear-mongering to one person is often vital information to another. The current police-involved-shootings controversy being the prime example. And news and tech companies face a similar problem -- they often have to create deliverables that users didn't know they needed/wanted.

</comment><comment><USER3> Jesus Christ. Get it together, man. There's no need to be so shrill. "we need to get moving whether the tech industry is ready or not". Wtf does this even mean? Like the tech industry needs to be ready for you to do better news story picking. Just go and do it, it doesn't need an industry wide shift in order for you to do it. Bizarre. Some things don't need a movement.

For me, the WSJ covers my news needs adequately. I switched from the NYT but they're both somewhat equivalent in terms of news I'm interested in.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Is this even a Technology issue or just the journalist business model resetting to a point where their voice could reach anyone that can read and competition was fierce. To me it seems like we have reverted back to the yellow press.

<comment><USER4> Its both. Now news is mostly consumed online, and everyone is competing for eyeballs. I think technology exacerbates the problem - earlier a newspaper could have a bunch of eyeball grabbing headlines, AND real, informative, boring content in the later pages (or a mix). Now only the eyeball grabbing content gets shared and seen.

It is driven by the same competition, but with article-level tracking rather than newspaper sales, the problem got worse. I don't know how to fix it either, but I agree with the author that its a huge problem. News and entertainment are basically the same thing now.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I was hoping he was going somewhere much more interesting: how can I reliably detect whether the news I am reading is truthful?

We all have to make that assessment every day if we are at all mindful as news consumers. And we do so in part by examining the source of the news, the same story as presented in other media, and ultimately in how the event is recorded in the history books.

Being able to do this (including transcending the language barrier -- many unique perspectives on current events exist only in certain languages) would greatly improve our ability to evaluate the news. And as we have all learned, the news is what drives us to constructive or destructive action, even to the point of waging war, throughout history.

</comment><comment><USER6> Is it really news that news is not informative? To get informed, read a book. To get the latest gossip, read the news. By definition news cannot be proportional, because proportional reporting of almost any story is 99% history and 1% current events.

<comment><USER7> This is huge, and if you're interested in an issue, these days it's often not all that difficult. The conceit that you can "get informed" by just reading current news is just plain false, and probably has been for as long as there have been newspapers.

These days, we have Wikipedia and the websites of trade journals and magazines of many stripes, and lots of good bloggers, where you can go for backgrounders on a lot of topics which are relevant to public policy. There's often bias, but it's easy to read past that -- read a couple of essays from various viewpoints, read a few other essays by the same authors to get a sense of their level of hysteria, and hey presto, you've got a deeper understanding.

Of course, you do have to put in the time, and you won't be able to do it for every trending topic, but you can do a hell of a lot better than all the news sites put together.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> The only question this post raises for myself is: why is this in MY news feed? its not interesting, its not news. I gave up facebook in 2009 and I don't care at all for the Zukerman empire.

<comment><USER9> Seriously. I also quit Facebook many years ago, and—based on regular posts here—the extent to which apparently intelligent people confound Facebook with "the world" is troubling.

edit: Yes, I'm confounding HN with "the world" in some sense.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Have to be honest, I expected an article about the issues facing newspapers and media outlets, not trending news on Facebook.

Something about how hard it is to monetise news, or an article about the ever increasing issues of inaccuracy and politicial bias.

That said, it's depressing how Facebook's trending news list is basically the equivalent to those 'related' articles you see at the bottom of some news sites. The ones which have a ton of low quality blogspam without any real substance behind the headline.

</comment><comment><USER11> He has previously written about his belief that tech more or less owns news distribution[0], which seems to be important background for his views in this piece.

[0] [http://scripting.com/2016/07/02/1343.html](http://scripting.com/2016/07/02/1343.html)

</comment><comment><USER12> What other sites do people here browse for more curated news? Like HackerNews but for non-tech/other topics.</comment>


Want to get rich? Don't pay off your student loans - <AUTHOR> http://money.cnn.com/2014/12/11/investing/dont-pay-off-your-student-loans/index.html?sr=QZshare <comment><USER2> Or you know, you can pay off your loans, never borrow again, and live a free life that allows you to move whenever you want to wherever you want for as long as you want without caring. Sure, you can keep those debts and ignore them while making good money. What happens if things go sour and you can't make minimum payment anymore?

Pay off your debts, and avoid being in someone else's pocket for as long as you can.

<comment><USER3> > What happens if things go sour and you can't make minimum payment anymore?

Keep paying using the money you've saved from investing. I mean, if you have no will power, aren't organized, can't save because you have a gambling problem, etc., paying off your student loans sooner might make sense.

<comment><USER4> So the stock market has a little correction, and he loses his job in the resulting recession (a la 2008). The debt doesn't go down, the minimum payments remain the same, and now he has no income and half of the investment amount he once did. He has to take what was his "emergency fund" and use it to pay debt.

Debt is an awful burden to carry around for years. It limits potential decisions. When things go wrong in life, and they do, the timing is never great. Do "future you" a favor and ditch debt when you can.

Source: life experience

<comment><USER5> Or file for banruptcy.

<comment><USER6> Student loans can't be gotten rid of through bankruptcy.

<comment><USER7> Contrary to popular belief, while it is difficult, it is possible in certain situations to have student loans forgiven, canceled, or discharged.

[https://studentaid.ed.gov/repay-loans/forgiveness- cancellati...](https://studentaid.ed.gov/repay-loans/forgiveness- cancellation#discharge-in)

<comment><USER8> Thanks for the link.

It still seems true. Simple bankruptcy does not wipe out your student loan debt. You need to go above and beyond bankruptcy and win a court case against your creditors in court _after_ you've declared yourself bankrupt.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> One thing I don't understand why not more american students geo-arbitrage. There are plenty of countries in Europe where university education is much cheaper, or even free. OK, maybe the top-top US universities might be a tad better than elsewhere, but the difference is at best small, especially at undergraduate level. All universities use similar textbooks, especially in introductory courses. Moreover the single biggest factor in how much you learn at university is how much effort you put in. Want to learn more? Party less ...

That way you can graduate debt-free, and have international experience and network, and might even have picked up a new language.

If you absolutely have to have a brand-name degree from an American university, get a masters. Much quicker and easier to get in.

<comment><USER10> > There are plenty of countries in Europe where university education is much > cheaper, or even free

It's generally only for citizens or, at best, EU residents. The same universities charge a lot more if you're not European. Though not as much as American universities, of course.

<comment><USER11> Universities in Germany are free for everyone, besides the semester fee which is negligible. [http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/worldviews/wp/2014/10/29...](http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/worldviews/wp/2014/10/29/7-countries- where-americans-can-study-at-universities-in-english-for-free-or-almost-free/)

<comment><USER12> Perhaps, but then you're stuck having to learn German. The old joke being: What do you call someone who speaks two languages? Bilingual.

What do you call someone who speaks three languages? Trilingual.

What do you call someone who speaks one language? American.

<comment><USER9> From a career point-of-view, the ability to speak foreign languages, and a proven track record of navigating foreign cultures is a plus.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> The psychological benefit of paying off my student loans early was immense. While mathematically illogical and not in my best interest, I sleep better at night knowing that if I wanted to drop everything I was doing and do something else, I wouldn't have to worry about loans hanging over my head.

<comment><USER14> Definitely agree - it would have been tough for me to quit my stable job on the east coast and come out to SF (to earn much, much more) had I not eliminated my debt. The freedom can help you earn more as it allows you to take opportunities that might otherwise not be available to you.

I wrote a blog post on this, actually: [http://colinschimmelfing.com/blog/why- im-irrational-about-re...](http://colinschimmelfing.com/blog/why-im- irrational-about-repaying-debt-and-why-its-actually-rational/)

<comment><USER15> Completely agree with your last point that being in debt keeps you from properly exploiting opportunities. I'm working on paying off my debt as quick as possible too.

btw great job on Clever...very interesting.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> What a great article on survivorship bias!

I guess the articles from graduate investors from 2008 didn't seem to make it past the editor.

</comment><comment><USER17> The issue is he is telling this story from 2009-today in a frothy market. Yes, historically markets have gone up 9.2% on average over the last 50 years in a balanced portfolio but what happens if he invests from 2003-2008. It's a little different story. It's hard to use long term data for a short term notion.

Going forward, we are in a different environment where 9% might not be the annual return. Interest rates are almost nothing and not going back to late 70's level in the foreseeable future.

<comment><USER18> I couldn't agree more. Has an investors returns been 10% or more since 2000? No, 2007, no?

This guy basically got lucky by having spare income to invest at the bottoms of a stock market. Hardly advice I would give anyone now, where investing now is closer to buying at the top of the market at 2007 than at the bottom of 2009.

Better advice, pay off your debt with the highest interest rates first, have an emergency fund, invest any extra income you have.

<comment><USER19> I'm sure some investors lost during that time and others made well over 10% during the same time periods.

I've always invested and paid minimums to student loans and mortgage. I also locked in student loans and mortgage at very low rates, plus the effective interest rate is lowered by the tax advantage.

I've been investing in low fee index funds, because I'm not a stock broker, since 2002 and I have averaged about 14% growth year over year. That is much higher than I expected, but even at a modest 6 or 7% annual growth I would still be well ahead of paying off my student loans and mortgage. I never carry a balance on higher interest forms of debt such as credit cards.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> _One important concept that I came across was Opportunity Cost -- the notion of quantifying what you give up when you chose one option over another. I asked myself: Why am I rushing to pay off loans with 3% to 6% interest rates when the S &P has historically returned 11%? _

This isn't quite the most sage advice. The opportunity cost of student loans is actually the interest that compounds over long periods of time. Making high student loan payments (as a large percent of your income) early on, and taking advantage of the maximum deductible portion of student loan interest can be smart. ([http://www.irs.gov/taxtopics/tc456.html](http://www.irs.gov/taxtopics/tc456.html)) But again, depends on how you "play" in the S&P.

<comment><USER21> What nonsense. The interest paid from the S&P is compounded as well if you reinvest.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> I just paid off the remainder of my loan today in one lump sum ($40K), enough was enough.

Taking into account the fixed 6.5% interest rate the government backed lender was happily reeling in, and my skeptism that the stock market can continue to rise against printing press backed economies, I thought, screw it, let's just get it over with.

Not sure what things are like outside the States, but within the easy-money- for-18-year-old-kids market, it's a serious racket -- I had little awareness at that age of what I was getting into, and only later did I realize that, hmmm, the bachelor's in literature and master's in psychology...were pretty much completely useless given my profession: computer programmer o_O

</comment><comment><USER23> What I enjoyed most was this recent ad by bank of america which says "student loans are a fact of life". So instead of object to these ridiculously high tuition fees, we should just accept debt as a fact of life.

<comment><USER24> 70%+ of Americans accept "a mortgage" as a fact of life, and don't stress out. Its either pay $600 to some guy to rent a house, or buy a house but pay a $600 mortgage. Overall this is not a terrible strategy, and mortgages are good for a lot of people...

Some high % of Americans think the same thing about a new car every 3-5 years. This is a little more insane as people could build a lot more wealth if they drive a car 10 years, and use the extra money to invest in wealth building.

So in a perverse sort of way, I see where this ad is coming from. My guess is with a house, you have a physical object. You can (usually) unload it and pay the loan back. The car is losing value fast, but you are in a similar boat. I guess student loans are an investment in your brain and not a thing, so people hate them more?

<comment><USER4> Getting a Masters of French History degree, with $100,000 in student debt, is what people object to. Nothing against French History, but paying $100,000 on a credit card to learn it is not "investment in your brain". Investment implies the potential for a profitable return.

<comment><USER25> Actually, "people" don't object to spending money on education and scholarship that is not directly profitable to the student; you do.

<comment><USER4> I have no problem with you spending your money on whatever you want. But there is a dangerous belief that education = investment for all cases. Way too many students leave college with $50,000+ in debt for "Community Service" degree, and it becomes a burden they carry with them for a decade that restricts them from travel, living comfortably, or taking calculated but smart risks such as starting their own business.

Let's at least be honest here. There should be a relationship between size of the debt you are allowed to accumulate, and the annual salary of the related profession. I think there often is not.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> While the advice that you should pursue financial opportunities with higher yields (10% stock returns over 6% student debt interest rates), it is certainly not that simple.

10% RoR is extremely optimistic, especially given that we are already in an optimistic, overpriced bull market that will not last (there are always corrections).

In addition, this 10% is on the S&P, so you'd have to assume that you only put money into an S&P fund and not any individual stocks, bonds or secondary securities. Those funds have management fees, so that too eats away at your yield.

But perhaps what is most important, is that plenty of people did quite poorly this year (the average return it appears was around 4.5% this year) so his assumptions are heavily weighted on speculation, volatility, and unproven performance.

<comment><USER27> I can't agree more with this comment. 10% return is insane to expect in the current market, especially since there is no actual safe haven that will get you any reliable return above inflation.

The fact that the author was overpaying because "he didn't like debt" tells me a lot about his financial expertise to start. That aside, of course go with the higher return stuff, contribute to your 401K for your company at the max instead of pushing it toward student loans, but the rest of the logic is somewhat baffling given any sort of perspective on the market.

I keep going back to the "Turkey that doesn't know tomorrow is Thanksgiving" analogy on this. Must be bliss to have such a short memory.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> This is an example of borrowing money to invest it ie leverage. Leverage can be a very powerful multiplier for wealth accumulation, but it is just a big an amplifier for downside risk. Once you move into leveraged investing you need to be much more sophisticated about your risk management. For instance, it is trivially easy to see a situation that involves correlated risks. That is, a massive stock downturn which causes the author to lose their job. They are then stuck not just with their paper losses (remember that they haven't _made_ any profit yet) but they also do not have the ability to pay off their debt.

</comment><comment><USER29> To add to points others have raised here, student loans are almost impossible to discharge in bankruptcy and backed by the full range of government collection methods (withholding of tax refunds, automatic wage garnishment, etc.). The only comparables are tax debt, child support, and possibly criminal restitution. There's not much of a safety net with student loans. There's some income-based repayment and forbearance options, but you pay more over time with these, and they only generally apply to federal loans, not private. Likewise there's some forgiveness options, only for federal loans, not private, and only after you've been bled dry for decades in poverty. Marry someone who's not poor? Forget it.

Basically, if you want security, try to get rid of student loans. I built up home equity and am now rolling my loans into a mortgage. 3% interest rate is lower than any refi options, no worries about the rate going up, and if I ever go broke, then worst case scenario I lose the house and am debt free.

</comment><comment><USER30> The way I see this is, the interest rate on your loans is like a guaranteed negative, compounding return that erodes your net worth. So, by paying down loans with 6% interest, it's akin to putting your money somewhere with a guaranteed 6% return, which sounds more appealing than an uncertain 8% market return.

<comment><USER31> If you have to pay tax on your investment return but can't deduct the cost of your debt, then reducing the 6% debt is more akin to getting a guaranteed return of something like 9% (more or less, depending on tax rates where you live).

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> I'm not too impressed with the author's logic, but I think that if you have federally subsidized student loans (i.e. low interest rates) not paying down your loans is a good idea.

The reason is that net worth and liquidity are two very different things. I'd much rather have $20k in a checking account and a $40k student loan balance with a $500 monthly payment then a $20k student loan balance and a $500 monthly payment.

Secondly, given the that potentially some of the interest is deductible, and that the term on a student loan can be 10-25 years you can ~breakeven in the fixed income markets investing in bonds as opposed to paying down your student loan (or you can keep the maturity of those investments shorter, have a moderately negative carry, and be short interest rates)

</comment><comment><USER33> Depends on your timeframe. The S&P returned -22% from 1/1/2000 to 1/1/2010, and only +43% from 1/1/2000 to today. The annualized return is nowhere near the 11% quoted in the article.

<comment><USER34> You aren't including dividend reinvestment and you are looking at the wrong time frame for the quoted percentage.

-5.65% from 1/2000 to 1/2010 with dividend reinvestment

+89.85% from 1/2000 to 12/2014 with dividend reinvestment

The annualized returns are generally over rolling 30 year periods. which 12/1984 to today is 8.79% without reinvestment or 11.32% with reinvestment of dividends.

[http://dqydj.net/sp-500-return-calculator/](http://dqydj.net/sp-500-return- calculator/)

<comment><USER8> Dividends are taxed at your income btw. So these values only make sense inside a tax-advantaged account.

They'll be a bit lower once you factor in taxes, which can be a sizable chuck (especially because that tax difference "compounds" year over year in the reinvestment case)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> Similarly, if your government exempts income tax on your pension contributions, ~30% right now and "10%" p.a. is probably the best expected return you'll make.

Even better, if your employer matches pension contributions, 100% right now is just about unbeatable.

Of course if you don't believe your pension will be around for you when you retire, perhaps you might disagree.

</comment><comment><USER36> Sure, if you can invest your excess cash into the stock market and earn more than your interest rate on your debt, it's a net win. The problem is that he is ignoring his downside. On a risk-adjusted basis he made a poor decision, which he'll probably discover if the stock market crashes again and he loses his job.

</comment><comment><USER37> But what if this happens?

[http://finance.yahoo.com/echarts?s=%5En225+interactive](http://finance.yahoo.com/echarts?s=%5En225+interactive)

</comment><comment><USER8> Except you don't know if the stock market is going to go up 20% (as per 2009 through today), or go down by 20% (as per 2007 or 2000).

Paying off your debts is reliable. Gambling your borrowed money on the stock market seems like poor advice in general, even if the historical average works out.

You gotta plan for the worst, and in the worst case, your money is worth half of what you put in two or three years from now AND you got a massive student loan burden.

</comment><comment><USER38> One wrinkle people are missing is that, for recent borrowers, the downside risk of not being able to make your minimum payment is eliminated. You never owe more than 10% of your disposable income for your federal student loans, and anything you don't pay off in 20 years is forgiven.

<comment><USER39> I believe anything forgiven is counted as income. So you're going to be hit with a huge tax bill 25 years later.

<comment><USER38> It's not clear how that will be handled, and in any case, because unpaid interest is not compounding, it's not as big of a tax bill as you might think.

<comment><USER39> I believe it does compound but on a yearly basis instead of monthly.

Personally I was considering putting all my loan money into bitcoins but decided to be responsible. Sort of kicking myself in the ass for that decision.

<comment><USER40> Pat yourself on the back for excellent process based decision making and ignore the outcome.

<comment><USER39> I agree but it's hard to feel that way while jobless and in debt.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> I don't know of any competent financial planner that would seriously advise hanging onto debt at 6% and investing that money in equities. Even if this turns out to be a good idea in retrospect, it's terribly risky.

</comment><comment><USER42> You need to account for the value of debt vs the value of investment. Most people would attribute a higher (negative) value to personal debt than personal investment.

</comment><comment><USER43> "Genius". He essentially borrowed money to invest in the stock market... Hmm, that sounds familiar....

</comment><comment><USER44> I think the author's advice is basically to take out a leveraged bet on the stock market.

>Sure, that is simplifying it a bit. Obviously, the stock market doesn't return 10% every year on the dot.

He mentions this as an aside but it's very important to consider the time period he invested in. Below is the continuous return for S&P500 in a 4 year period:

End: 1848.36 (12/31/13) Start: 1115.1 (12/31/09) Return: 13%

End: 1426.19 (12/31/12) Start: 903.25 (12/31/08) Return: 11%

End: 1257.6 (12/30/11) Start: 1468.36 (12/31/07) Return: -4%

End: 1257.64 (12/31/10) Start: 1418.3 (12/29/06) Return: -3%

End: 1115.1 (12/31/09) Start: 1248.29 (12/30/05) Return: -3%

End: 903.25 (12/31/08) Start: 1211.92 (12/31/04) Return: -7%

End: 1468.36 (12/31/07) Start: 1111.92 (12/31/03) Return: 7%

End: 1418.3 (12/29/06) Start: 879.82 (12/31/02) Return: 12%

End: 1248.29 (12/30/05) Start: 1148.08 (12/31/01) Return: 2%

End: 1211.92 (12/31/04) Start: 1320.28 (12/29/00) Return: -2%

End: 1111.92 (12/31/03) Start: 1469.25 (12/31/99) Return: -7%

End: 879.82 (12/31/02) Start: 1229.23 (12/31/98) Return: -8%

End: 1148.08 (12/31/01) Start: 970.43 (12/31/97) Return: 4%

End: 1320.28 (12/29/00) Start: 740.74 (12/31/96) Return: 14%

Hardly the no-brainer the author makes it out to be. In fact, only half the returns were positive. Maybe it's unfair to consider a 4 year time period, although that is what the author states. The 10 year returns still don't look great.

End: 1848.36 (12/31/13) Start: 1111.92 (12/31/03) Return: 5%

End: 1426.19 (12/31/12) Start: 879.82 (12/31/02) Return: 5%

End: 1257.6 (12/30/11) Start: 1148.08 (12/31/01) Return: 1%

End: 1257.64 (12/31/10) Start: 1320.28 (12/29/00) Return: 0%

End: 1115.1 (12/31/09) Start: 1469.25 (12/31/99) Return: -3%

End: 903.25 (12/31/08) Start: 1229.23 (12/31/98) Return: -3%

End: 1468.36 (12/31/07) Start: 970.43 (12/31/97) Return: 4%

End: 1418.3 (12/29/06) Start: 740.74 (12/31/96) Return: 6%

End: 1248.29 (12/30/05) Start: 615.93 (12/29/95) Return: 7%

End: 1211.92 (12/31/04) Start: 459.27 (12/30/94) Return: 10%

End: 1111.92 (12/31/03) Start: 466.45 (12/31/93) Return: 9%

End: 879.82 (12/31/02) Start: 435.71 (12/31/92) Return: 7%

End: 1148.08 (12/31/01) Start: 417.09 (12/31/91) Return: 10%

End: 1320.28 (12/29/00) Start: 330.22 (12/31/90) Return: 14%

Picking stocks as the author alluded to will probably make the actual results much worse.

I think it's generally irresponsible to give one data point and an oversimplified statistic about average annual returns to financially vulnerable students. Especially considering that the authors approach would essentially be a levered bet. Tax implications aside, if you're paying 3-6% interest on your loans, paying them off is a guaranteed return. Compare that to the appropriate risk-free benchmarks and you'll see that it's definitely a smart decision to payoff the loans as soon as possible.

Few notes, returns calculated are continuous compounding although I don't think student loans are continuously compounded. Also, I chose year end dates for convenience, although I'm sure if you took other dates, your results would vary greatly (but that's sort of my point)</comment>


How iPhone apps are like McDonalds hamburgers. - <AUTHOR> http://technologizer.com/2010/10/18/after-a-while-you-stop-counting/

<comment><USER2> "When do Apple and Apple watchers stop caring so much about how exactly how many iPhone apps there are?"

By your example, somewhere beyond "billions and billions".

The U.S. seems to do the same thing with our deficit. It's over $13 Trillion USD, and yet they don't put that under every government office sign.

At some point, numbers seem to get just too big to matter to people. Kind of like Richie Rich and all of the jewels and jewelry all over his estate. It was just there. It didn't matter.

BTW- Richie Rich is back. "The first new Richie Rich comic should hit retail in early 2011.": <http://www.icv2.com/articles/news/18545.html>

</comment><comment><USER3> The reason the McDonalds signs lost the "billions served" isn't because corporate just stopped caring. McDonalds, like most successful mega corporations, doesn't do _anything_ without numbers and studies to back it up.

What happened is the marketing message changed. No longer does McDonalds need to prove that they are legitimate fast food vendor by telling everyone "hey - we've sold a lot of hamburgers!". If anything, they're now trying to gloss over the notion that they stamp out 2 million of these uninspired little blobs every hour.

The consumer climate has changed and now "billions served" doesn't sound nearly as impressive as "we handmade this one for you".</comment>


Microsoft aims to supply Chinese government with customized Windows 10 - <AUTHOR> http://www.theverge.com/2015/12/17/10362638/microsoft-windows-10-custom-china-government <comment><USER2> I think everyone here knows what "customized" really means, right?

<comment><USER3> No, what does it mean?

<comment><USER4> Microsoft Windows 10 Encryption Backdoors Edition R1, Chinese Language

<comment><USER3> Seems unlikely that Microsoft would try to slip such a backdoor in, given that this special governmental release would be under additional scrutiny from the Chinese state.

<comment><USER4> I meant to imply the backdoor was state sponsored.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Frankly it's refreshing to see a slightly more balanced perspective on China in this article. The side note that Chinese people were suspicious of Windows because of the NSA was particularly good.</comment>


A.I. Downs Expert Human Fighter Pilot in Dogfights - <AUTHOR> http://www.popsci.com/ai-pilot-beats-air-combat-expert-in-dogfight <comment><USER2> >For current mission profiles, ALPHA's red forces are handicapped with shorter range missiles and a reduced missile payload than the blue opposing forces. ALPHA also does not have airborne warning and control system (AWACS) support providing 360° long range radar coverage of the area; while blue does have AWACS. The aircraft for both teams are identical in terms of their mechanical performance.

>When Geno took manual control of the blue aircraft against the reds controlled by the baseline controller AFRL had previously been utilizing, he could easily defeat it. However, even after repeated attempts against the more mature version of ALPHA, not only could he not score a kill against it, he was shot out of the air by the reds every time after protracted engagements.

That's pretty damning. They tied one electronic arm behind the AI's back and it was still able to down a veteran pilot.

IRL the AI aircraft would likely have substantially better performance than a manned aircraft, making the disparity even worse.

This all squares with what I've been hearing in recent years. There seems to be quite a bit of resistance to the idea of unmanned fighters in the upper ranks of the USAF, but the writing is on the wall. Been there for a long time now.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Their "paper": [http://www.omicsgroup.org/journals/genetic-fuzzy-based- artif...](http://www.omicsgroup.org/journals/genetic-fuzzy-based-artificial- intelligence-for-unmanned-combat-aerialvehicle-control-in-simulated-air- combat-missions-2167-0374-1000144.pdf)

The paper is very vague on the technical details, unfortunately. This appears to be a largely hardcoded logic-based system with some genetic programming (rather than a machine learned system).</comment>


A Reluctant Argument Against Putting Content Online - <AUTHOR> http://www.tomstechblog.com/post/Some-Sad-News-About-Online-Content.aspx

<comment><AUTHOR> I'll be honest. I'm testing a HN button that I wrote for my blogging platform (Blogengine .net) and that's why I posted this. So you can feel free to ignore it and I apologize in advance for the shameless self promotion.

That said, it is an interesting issue and I always appreciate people's thoughts on what I write so if you have a sec I'd love for you to check it out.

Anyway...</comment>


Methane emitted by humans vastly underestimated - <AUTHOR> https://www.rochester.edu/newscenter/methane-emitted-via-human-fossil-fuel-use-vastly-underestimated-416492/ <comment><USER2> I clicked this article hoping to read about farts. Hint, the article is not about farts.</comment>


Tar and Curl Come to Windows - <AUTHOR> https://blogs.technet.microsoft.com/virtualization/2017/12/19/tar-and-curl-come-to-windows/ <comment><USER2> Malware authors all over the world must be ecstatic</comment>


PEP 495 – Local Time Disambiguation - <AUTHOR> https://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0495/ <comment><USER2> If anyone is interested, this is has been implemented in a backwards- compatible way in the latest version of python-dateutil's time zones, so it has been effectively backported to python 2.6+ and python 3.3+.

Release notes: [https://github.com/dateutil/dateutil/releases/tag/2.6.0](https://github.com/dateutil/dateutil/releases/tag/2.6.0)

Documentation: [https://dateutil.readthedocs.io/en/latest/tz.html#dateutil.t...](https://dateutil.readthedocs.io/en/latest/tz.html#dateutil.tz.enfold)

</comment><comment><USER3> Sometimes I get the feeling that people who make decisions about how to tell time are deliberately fucking with programmers. Half-hour DSTs and timezones? Leap-seconds? Still using the Julian calendar? FEBRUARY 30?!?!? [1]

You guys are dicks.

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/February_30#Swedish_calendar](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/February_30#Swedish_calendar)</comment>


Really, product only matters? - <AUTHOR> http://kamil.rudnicki.info/post/28121846349/brad-smith-you-said-that-product-only-matters-really

<comment><USER2> I think you need to be a little more careful with the word "product". I first learned that it has a little extra jargon above-and-beyond coding when I read a Joel on Software article about the "Developer Abstraction Layer." I won't link it because it's sort of a one-off comment (actually three or four one-off comments):

"Both of these companies can easily be wiped out by a company that's driven by programmers and organized to put programmers in the driver's seat, but which have an excellent abstraction that does all the hard work to convert code into products below the decks."

Notice the emphasis on the difference between the code and how it is packaged into a whole experience. The "product" is not just something which developers contribute to in Joel's world, but something which lots of people are involved in.

I try to tell people about the truly mad ideas, as I see them, in science. One of them occurs in electronics and nuclear chain reactions and biological evolution: it's the idea of "feedback". Here's the nuclear version: you've got all of these nuclei which are too heavy, they "want" to fall apart, they just need a little disturbance. (It helps to think of mousetraps: they're in a metastable state and they just need a good jostle to collapse to a new equilibrium, releasing a bunch of energy.) This disturbance usually has to come from a free neutron which smacks into the nucleus. Nuclei are small, and so you might think this is excessively unlikely, and that there would be complex probability arguments involved in understanding the procedure. Actually, it's much more simple.

To get a chain reaction, the neutrons formed by one fissioning nucleus need to cause other nuclei to fission. If each fission creates, on average, even a little more than one other fission, then you have positive feedback, and an exponential growth -- unbounded energy. If each fission creates on average less than one, then you will have exponential die-off of any reaction, with finite energy. (The "special case" of exactly one is what you need to simulate if you want to create a stable nuclear reactor; you need another feedback system sitting on top of your existing one which lowers the expected value if it gets too high, or raises it as it gets low.) The same principle viewed different ways is evolution by natural selection (the genes which characterize the population are precisely those which cause themselves to be more likely), or the psychology of neurosis (paranoia is defined by the fact that it causes those you love to fail you, thus feeding the paranoia). In the language of probability, if N is the number of events caused immediately by one event, you need E(N) > 1\. That's the entire mathematics for positive feedback.

The reason that you want to focus on product is, I think, because you are struggling and struggling to get this value as high as possible. You need the expected value of converts, given one convert, to get greater than one. If you can do that, then _traction builds automatically_ , as people who hear about it contact others to join further. In the long run, the people with the best product have the exponential advantage.

This is not to invalidate the problem-in-the-street of "how do I survive the times when E(N) < 1?". I am often reminded of the Chinese formulation of Buddhism, where you have an abstract goal (realize that all things are empty), but a concrete goal (there is a lot of meaning here and now), and you must form a synthesis of these two opposites. Your long-run abstract goal is certainly "chain reaction"; your short-run concrete goal is simply to stay afloat.

<comment><AUTHOR> Great example to support your thinking. I hope that I understand that correctly - you are saying that product as a some bigger thing then some code is the main thing startup should focus on, and you have to get >1 in "expirience" with it? :)

<comment><USER2> "E(N)" is not experience but "expected value." The expected value of the number of fissions caused by a fission must be greater than 1, then you explode.

Basically, suppose you can market more. Each time you market a given amount M, you create a new convert. 2M, two new converts. 3M, three new converts.

As E(N) gets close to 1, these converts create their own new converts. There's a sort of multiplying factor for the final number of converts if E(N) < 1, it's 1/(1 - E(N)).

So if every convert ends up converting, on average, 2/3 of a new convert, then M now generates 1/(1 - 2/3) = 3 converts total. That's a multiplication of your investment in marketing by 3. So you can spend one third the marketing money! If you can boost this rate from 66.7% to 80% your marketing becomes 5x more effective. If each convert creates, on average, 0.9 converts, you're now 10x more effective with your marketing money. The moment you get to 1.0 or higher, the system goes viral and spreads to everyone with no investment necessary (think Wikipedia, Google, Facebook).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> A good product _will_ help make selling _way, way_ easier. If we see a sale as a pie composed of two pieces(the actual product and then the marketing or pitch), the better and more self-explainable the former is, the easier the latter becomes.

Let's say you have a product that is sold once every hour per sales/rep for $30/month. A good product's _main job_ is to increase your retention and thus _to increase your revenue_. A super shitty product, even if sold like cupcakes because of your selling skills, will likely result in higher cancellations and less revenue overall than a product that can be sold AND is useful.

The two things are not mutually exclusive and they both are critical in making revenue.

</comment><comment><USER4> To provide a good case study, I'll share my own personal experience.

I created the website <http://drivingtests101.com/>, a free driving test prep website for all vehicles types across 11 countries, this past year, as well as mobile apps for 4 countries.

Lets take a look at the website only. I believe the quality of the product is very good and this is proved by reaching the #2 downloaded education app in a country. However, despite this success on the app side, it was very slow on the website side because it was not marketed well, no one knew about it and no one could do find it.

In my experience, it is very rare for a product to become truly viral from the start.

If you want to grow fast, you need to spend resources on marketing to reach your customer, whether it be through paid or non-paid (eg - social media) means, although every case is specific.

 __ __ _For the website, spending money on SEO and taking the time to write a few articles increased traffic tenfold in the first month!_ __ __

You learn by doing, but I would highly recommend throwing a few marketing things against the wall to see what sticks.

Good luck!

<comment><AUTHOR> Great, thanks for concrete example

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> When I'm approached to join an 'idea', I look for three things. Without these three, the idea has a tough time becoming a product.

Technical expertise: someone needs to be able to build something people want (and ideally will pay for). Things like lean methodology help provide the focus and direction to find this.

Marketing expertise: someone needs to be able to reach your market so they find you and convert.

Money: either you have some, make some with the product, or someone brings it to the table.

These things can be done by 1-3+ people, if they aren't there, I hesitate.

Maybe this is why I like pursuing ideas that make money. I'm open to ideas but they are just that, resource hungry ideas that need money.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for answer. But, I'm thinking what is marketing expertise in practice, maybe you can write a case study...

<comment><USER6> He did a pretty good job describing it - somehow, we need to reach the market.

There's probably an infinite number of possible routes to do this, everything from "viral growth" to direct marketing to "one of the co-founders is good friends with our 30 halo customers."

One thing that product can do that marketing can't - an amazing product can grow itself. (Slowly, but still...)</comment></comment></comment>


Why Such a Deep Recession? - <AUTHOR> http://econlog.econlib.org/archives/2010/01/why_such_a_deep.html

<comment><USER2> One vampire site I googled says "It is not a good idea to take more than one pint from a donor in a 56 day period." (Verifies with Wikipedia)</comment>


Jeffrey Epstein infiltrated science because it was ready to accommodate him - <AUTHOR> https://www.theverge.com/2019/9/19/20870858/jeffrey-epstein-science-philanthropy-donation-prestige-mit <comment><USER2> Now, I don't know all of the story behind this situation - so pardon me if I come off as ignorant.

Why would anybody give a single damn about where the money is coming from if it's helping achieve a goal that could benefit scientific advancement? There's too much income inequality, funding problems, etc. etc. causing problems all over the US to simply ignore the amount of money that could potentially benefit people around the world depending on the discoveries that could be made.

Now, I'm not saying that the things Epstein did weren't absolutely morally and ethically bankrupt. Why can't the people/companies receiving the money simply make a public statement "we are taking this money for the greater good because we know it will help us achieve 'X', we do not, cannot, and will never support Epstein in any way other than accepting donations".

<comment><USER3> That's not really what happened at MIT. He got personal letters of thanks from the president and was invited to hang around the AI lab. The article gets into this at the bottom, about reputation laundering. Epstein gets to call himself a tech donor, hangs out in cool places, starts to look like a nice, respectable guy while he's still carrying out his freaky eugenics project.

<comment><USER4> >freaky eugenics project

I thought I was up to speed on Epstein, but this is news to me.

<comment><USER3> Not sure exactly how widely known this was but Epstein started telling people about it in the early 2000's according to [https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/31/business/jeffrey- epstein-...](https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/31/business/jeffrey-epstein- eugenics.html) Seems like he brought it up to investors and scientists for at least 5 years.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The world is not black and white. It is possible for a bad guy to do some good things and a good guy to do some bad things.

If money from a bad dude gets used for a good cause like science, I don't really have a problem with that.

<comment><USER6> He got things for that money though. Epstein got to visit the MIT campus, with women in tow. Students were forced to make him a replica of the Disobedience Prize orb. He specifically cited scientists and tech people to intimidate his victims and persuade the police to leave him alone.

You have to look at the other side of the relationship when someone donates. It's not just about taking the money, the person giving it is getting something in return and that's not always a good thing. In Epstein's case, it was tragic.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Jeffrey Epstein also met with presidents and other top level elites. Talking with academics is the expression of his power and not the source. Otherwise academics is the doorway into the social circle of presidents and other power elites, which is really dubious, like you'd have to punch above Richard Feynman to convert academic prestige into power.

Being metaphorical Richard Stallman doesn't give you access to party with presidents.</comment>


MySQL, Alter Table, and How to Observe Progress - <AUTHOR> http://gabrielcain.com/blog/2009/08/05/mysql-alter-table-and-how-to-observe-progress/ <comment><USER2> Is it normal for a MySQL ALTER TABLE to run for 22 hours on a table with less than 50 million rows?

<comment><USER3> There are many variables. Memory, disk speed, average row length, whether or not MySQL has been correctly tuned to handle that kind of load.

<comment><USER4> And of course whatever else is running on that machine. If you do this on a production server then you might end up seeking back and forth across the disk all the time.

Alter tables are pretty bad, there is a quick way to do them though, here is how:

\- create new table, right structure, no keys

\- load data in it (now you should have a .MYD)

\- create table with all keys defined, copy the .frm and .MYI files over the ones of the .MYD above

\- flush tables (don't forget this, alternatively you can shut down mysql at this point and use the my*chk tool with the -r option to recreate your indexes)

\- repair table (skip if you shutdown mysql above)

This will work a whole lot faster than an alter table on a table of the same size, but it is a very gory hack and I would advise you to make a backup before trying any of this.

<comment><USER3> If you have a highly available setup with master-master replication, you can simply run SET SQL_LOG_BIN=0; ALTER TABLE whatever; on the inactive master, then swap masters and do the same on the previously active master.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


AJAX and Django Views - <AUTHOR> http://brack3t.com/ajax-and-django-views.html

<comment><USER2> Very good article. Using AJAX with Django always feels a bit unnatural, as there's no standard way to do it and everyone has its own way of dealing with it, so it's interesting to see how others do it (in particular utility functions). I think there are also django packages that provide an AJAXy layer (but never used it).

It's already hinted at in the blog post, but for writing clean apps using AJAX a lot, django-tastypie and backbone.js really do work well together (I've just started using them in combination in my latest toy project).

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah, we have another post in the pipeline for exploring Tastypie, especially for a) using it with Backbone, and b) using it as a simple writable API for jQuery.

Django does seem to be fairly open-ended when it comes to AJAX, and while there may no be standard way to do it, I think approaches like we take are a lot more reliable than some of the others I've seen.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> That bit of CSRF javascript does not "ignore" CSRF checking, and is not unsafe. The only difference is that it sets the CSRF token value as a request header rather than a POST value. The browser still needs to have that CSRF cookie value.

Edit: Code backing from middleware/csrf.py:

request_csrf_token = request.POST.get('csrfmiddlewaretoken', '') if request_csrf_token == "": # Fall back to X-CSRFToken, to make things easier for AJAX request_csrf_token = request.META.get('HTTP_X_CSRFTOKEN', '')

<comment><USER4> You're right. That was an oversight on our side and we've corrected it. Thanks.</comment></comment>