China to begin two-child policy - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-34665539 <comment><USER2> One-child policy began in 1979. In 1980, My mother hid in her relatives' houses and finally delivered her second child - me. I was very lucky because if my mother was caught, I can't sit here to type these sentences.

I do understand the one-child policy because there are too many people in China, especially in cities. The population should be under control. (However, as far as I know, one-child policy never really works in the very poor area. It's common to have 3+ children there.)

In recent decades, China becomes much richer and people have better education. Many families (in cities) get used to having only one child and don't want to have the second child because the cost of raising a child becomes very high. Two-child policy should come earlier.

<comment><USER3> Why is there too many people in China? What is the standard to determine the right population?

<comment><USER4> There are too many people on the planet to start with, and 1/6 of them is in China. The effect that they are having on the environment (both in "nature" and in their own living spaces) is atrocious, but there are too many people to reasonably switch to a sustainable model. Additionally, if you account for the fact that a gigantic portion of their land is basically uninhabitable (the Gobi Desert), they have an unreal population density (among non-trivial sovereign nations). If their population keeps expanding unchecked, they'll stop being able to feed everyone.

<comment><USER5> > there are too many people on the planet to start with

Earth doesn't have too many people. The people inhabiting it are just, currently, quite wasteful with resources.

<comment><USER6> _Earth doesn 't have too many people. The people inhabiting it are just, currently, quite wasteful with resources._

What's the goal here? We could have many more people each living in misery, crowding, and poverty. Or we could have fewer people with each one being rich and free and having access to parks and open space to breathe and relax.

More people isn't somehow good in itself. Children are great but one or two is enough.

<comment><USER5> > We could have many more people each living in misery, crowding, and poverty. > Or we could have fewer people with each one being rich and free and having > access to parks and open space to breathe and relax.

A false dichotomy. The latter experience can be given to the former's population.

More people isn't somehow "good", but it's not bad.

<comment><USER7> > The latter experience can be given to the former's population.

How? Keep in mind only a small fraction of the world's population is even capable of being a tourist. Imagine how that changes when everyone is well-off enough to travel at will. Imagine your favorite beach, favorite museum, or your favorite national park and multiply the number of visitors by 10, 20, 40, etc. Waiting-lists for years to visit the Louvre. Prices so high that only the 1% of the 1% can afford to visit Maui.

Maybe you are assuming that VR will solve these issues? Perhaps a Matrix-like future awaits us.

<comment><USER8> Most of us discussing this are already living a Matrix-like reality. 80%+ of life in front of a screen, with that last bit of time at the gym (with screens), cafe/bar (with screens), or maybe an inner-city park (with cellphone screen out). A diet primarily consisting of processed grain, factory meat and barren vegetation. Blaming our inevitable neuroticism on a chemical imbalance or moral failure, not the alienated zoo life we live -- or worse, distracting ourselves so thoroughly we don't notice it. Of course this kind of person is going to think we can fit billions more on the planet.

Our wellbeing probably does rely on technology like VR and automation, but with so many mentally ill, I would say our current situation is already unacceptable (and has been for thousands of years). Adding billions more to the equation isn't going to help.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> From the article "All couples will now be allowed to have two children".

So it seems China isn't so much ending its one-child policy, as augmenting it by one to a two-child policy. This means the brutal and cruel enforcement will continue, only it will kick in at the third child instead of at the second.

<comment><USER10> China managed to succeed in increasing people wealth and loosening laws (still bad for Western standards, but huge step comparing to China 30 years ago). Only because West thinks this is "brutal and cruel" dosent mean our laws would ever worked there.

Some tried giving Arab countries democracy and it turned out they never really wanted it and most of the dictators were much better alternative (still bad, just better - to clarify).

Same with China - imagine them exploding with an extra 1 Billion people over next 20 years. Who will feed them? What would be social implications of such a move?

Our freedoms are not always applicable in other parts of the world.

<comment><USER11> >Same with China - imagine them exploding with an extra 1 Billion people over next 20 years. Who will feed them? What would be social implications of such a move?

Well for one thing, you'd have a billion more potential farmers...

Population growth is a pretty old problem, and if recent developed nations' demographic reports show, it solves itself once you reach a certain level of development.

China's success is not necessarily because of the policies in place by the government. It could very well be in spite of them.

<comment><USER12> a billion more potential farmers yes, but land and water are finite resources

<comment><USER13> Details. We'll just build multistorey farms.

<comment><USER14> If you're going the technical route, you can automate a lot of the farming. Still might not need more labor.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Before commenting on this, there are two things you need to read.

"China - total fertility rate (graph)"[1]

"List of famines in China."[2]

"China - Population 1950 - 2015" [3]

In 1970, the fertility rate (babies born per woman) was 6. That's huge but not untypical for an undeveloped country, where a lot of people die young. Once some basic modern medicine was deployed, the number of people surviving went way up, and the population doubled in 50 years, even with the one-child policy. It would have been much, much worse without it. Something had to be done. China has a history of famines, and the last big one was in 1962, and 20 million to 40 million people starved to death. Keeping that from happening again is a major goal of policy in China.

The one-child policy worked. The population is leveling off. The fertility rate is now around 1.55, which is about typical for a developed country. Once a country develops, the fertility rate drops off without coercion. China has reached that point, and no longer needs a mandatory one-child policy.

India's population grew by a factor of 3.4 during that period, but India has more arable land. China is a big country, but most of it is desert, tundra, or mountains. The US has six times the arable land per capita as China. China has nothing like the Midwestern US.

Actually, the one-child policy was relaxed years ago. Only some provinces require it.

[1] [http://www.china- profile.com/data/fig_WPP2010_TFR_1.htm](http://www.china- profile.com/data/fig_WPP2010_TFR_1.htm) [2] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_famines_in_China](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_famines_in_China) [3] [http://www.china-profile.com/data/fig_Pop_WPP2006.htm](http://www.china- profile.com/data/fig_Pop_WPP2006.htm)

<comment><USER16> > The one-child policy worked.

If you ignore the invasive health monitoring, gender selective abortions, forced abortions, and other human rights violations, sure.

But I'm not sure this cure wasn't worse than the disease. Especially, as you point out, since fertility rates seem to regulate themselves in developed countries.

I guess if you're a pure utilitarian, you could try to make the case that it all was a net benefit, but I don't see many utilitarians around these days.

<comment><USER17> Human rights are not some global constant, but something that evolves from culture & economics. China has experienced unprecedented growth in the past 30 years, never before seen in history. Hopefully its concepts of human rights will evolve with time, but to judge it now by the same measure we do for the West is unrealistic and impractical

<comment><USER18> It's also worth remembering that the West summoned its human rights by guillotining people until they finally appeared. It took a lot of blood to get there. Let's hope China can achieve it without so much bloodshed.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Overpopulation is an interesting problem, it exponentially affects every other problem we have -- some balance will have to be found between ultimately telling people they can't kids or maintaining that those people have autonomy over their own lives and can make such a decision. I don't know what the solution is - perhaps making the developing world developed as fast as possible.

<comment><USER20> Overpopulation is a non-problem. Fertility has fallow to near- or below- replacement rate everywhere in the world, except Afrika (which will likely follow in the next decades.)

A nice talk from Hans Rosling on this: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eA5BM7CE5-8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eA5BM7CE5-8)

<comment><USER21> You mean, it is not a problem because the planet can support that many? Or do you mean it is a problem, but it will solve itself? I don't think either is correct. The first is only true today because non-First World inhabitants are living on a much smaller ecological footprint than Europe and the US. However, that footprint is increasing rapidly. The second reading at least acknowledges there is a problem, but I think you are underestimating the correction required. I think the correction will not happen (at all, or fast enough) through natural means.

We are already at more than twice a sustainable population level. Even the most generous estimates I've seen place the Earth's carrying capacity at 7.7 billion people. But most estimates say that the Earth can support 2-3 billion people at modest levels of first-world consumption. The more our planet will be stripped of its resources now (whether through overfishing, destruction of forests, or climate change), the lower the sustainable planet population will become.

Put differently, we need to lose at least 5 billion people in the next decades without replacing them with a younger generation to be able to sustain the emancipation of emerging countries. It's not about population growth stabilizing, we need both massive negative population growth and halving of current energy use in developed countries. The only "natural" means through which I can see that happening is massive food shortages or horrific wars, and I think it's a pretty safe bet that the former will trigger the latter. It's also a pretty safe bet that our global society will disappear in that scenario, so I'd rather we have better solutions before that happens.

<comment><USER22> The earth doesn't have a "carrying capacity" or a "maximum population". The earth has resources that are used more or less sustainably at different times and in different places. If we all still lived like hunter gatherers we would have run out of resources and become extinct thousands of years ago. Luckily we've had social, economic, and technological development.

As soon as anyone frames sustainability challenges in terms of the earths "carrying capacity" they are revealing a bias that is unhelpful. Even if you accept the premise that the earth does have some 'maximum population' then so what? It's a useless proposition -- what are you going to do, force everyone to only have one child, that is unsustainable as China discovered.

Luckily, as the parent pointed out, overpopulation is not a problem. The rate of growth continues to decrease, and global populations will peak in my lifetime.

<comment><USER21> "Ecologists define carrying capacity as the maximal population size of a given species that an area can support without reducing its ability to support the same species in the future" [http://www.dieoff.org/page112.htm](http://www.dieoff.org/page112.htm)

In the interest of (scientific) discourse, it is generally unhelpful to redefine or ignore generic definitions. Are you asserting that the earth doesn't support any species, or that is perfectly possible to have googolplex people living on earth without reducing earth's ability to support googolplex people in the future?

<comment><USER23> I think the post is saying that defining the carrying capacity of a technological species is an exercise in futility. Malthus was writing about this many years ago - humans have a habit of raising the bar.

In answer to your googolplex question - I think it's safer to bet on the technology developing to support such a population than against it. (Though I think we'll either be extinct or an interstellar species before then.)

<comment><USER21> I (think I) understood the GP post, I just have very little tolerance for idiotic and easily falsifiable statements. Therefore, I chose to respond to the first sentence only, and ignore the rest of the post.

My use of that population number was simply that: a refutation of the assertion that the earth has no population limit, as it will be hard to argue that our planet can support 10^9980 humans per square millimeter of land area. A genuine "argumentum ad absurdum", to counter the GP's completely nonsensical opening statement.

<comment><USER24> I interpreted the opposition to using carrying capacity to mean that it's not helpful from the perspective of a technological species. If we had that many humans, the odds seem high that we would have a way to supplement resources available to use from outside Earth. Carrying capacity is really about an _ecosystem_ and the resources it can provide vs competition with other species. We effectively have no competition, and we can create our own ecosystems, so it's kind of a strawman to apply the wildlife biology concept to our understanding of how human populations will evolve in the future.

<comment><USER21> Ah, but that would have been an interesting discussion. We could have discussed the merits of carrying capacity with respect to a species that builds its own ecosystem, or whether it makes sense to consider the entire planet a single ecosystem. We could have a meaningful discussion about the various population estimates and what they're based on. Or we could have discussed whether it makes sense to consider ourselves in competition with future generations.

But instead of that, the initial reply:

\- refused the basic premise that would have allowed that discussion, by indirectly positing that space on earth is infinite

\- followed it up with a very questionable assertion that earth's resources are used "more or less sustainably" (which is already at odds with the previous assertion that resources are infinite, and ignores the many species we've already hunted to extinction)

\- added a non-sequitur that we would have run out of resources as hunter- gatherers (again at odds with the initial statement)

\- justified the plain refusal of the basic premise with an ad-hominem about bias

\- continued on with the apathetic rationalization that nothing can be done anyway

\- concluded by reiterating the initial statement without further substantiation

Now, you may argue that my refusal to engage in that discussion is my weakness and it would still have been possible to salvage something positive, however my time is finite and there's better, less taxing discussions to be had.

(/me out, accepting that meta-justification is considered offtopic and will be downmodded).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Once-child policy was brutally enforced and cruel. It was also highly effective way to reduce poverty.

China vs. India: GDP per capita versus fertility rate

[http://www.google.se/publicdata/explore?ds=d5bncppjof8f9_&ct...](http://www.google.se/publicdata/explore?ds=d5bncppjof8f9_&ctype=b&strail=false&bcs=d&nselm=h&met_y=sp_dyn_tfrt_in&scale_y=lin&ind_y=false&met_s=sp_pop_totl&scale_s=lin&ind_s=false&dimp_c=country:region&met_x=ny_gdp_pcap_kd&scale_x=lin&ind_x=false&idim=country:IND:CHN&ifdim=country&tunit=Y&pit=1382997600000&hl=en_US&dl=en_US&ind=false&icfg&iconSize=0.5)

<comment><USER26> >It was also highly effective way to reduce poverty.

Citation needed; correlation does not equal causation. Other East Asian countries showed similar reductions in fertility in spite of no similar policies, and much greater reductions in poverty.

China vs. India vs. Asian Tigers (Hong Kong, Singapore, Korea): GDP per capita versus fertility rate

[http://www.google.se/publicdata/explore?ds=d5bncppjof8f9_&ct...](http://www.google.se/publicdata/explore?ds=d5bncppjof8f9_&ctype=b&strail=false&bcs=d&nselm=h&met_y=sp_dyn_tfrt_in&scale_y=lin&ind_y=false&met_s=sp_pop_totl&scale_s=lin&ind_s=false&dimp_c=country:region&met_x=ny_gdp_pcap_kd&scale_x=lin&ind_x=false&idim=country:IND:CHN&ifdim=country&tunit=Y&pit=1382997600000&hl=en_US&dl=en_US&ind=false&icfg&iconSize=0.5#!ctype=b&strail=false&bcs=d&nselm=h&met_x=ny_gdp_pcap_kd&scale_x=lin&ind_x=false&met_y=sp_dyn_tfrt_in&scale_y=lin&ind_y=false&met_s=sp_pop_totl&scale_s=lin&ind_s=false&dimp_c=country:region&idim=country:IND:CHN:HKG:KOR:SGP&ifdim=country&pit=-289566000000&hl=en_US&dl=en_US&ind=false)

Taiwan excluded because it seems to be missing from that dataset.

<comment><USER27> It could be that it worked in China, in concert with other policies. Because it didn't work elsewhere is also correlation without causation.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Are there any psychology/sociology studies how one-child policy impacted China's society? It has been documented how having one child vs siblings impact one's psyche. I wonder what kind of impact it has on a culture/society as a whole if most are from single-child families.

<comment><USER29> See this Science paper: [https://www.sciencemag.org/content/339/6122/953](https://www.sciencemag.org/content/339/6122/953)

Their main finding: "[We find that the one-child policy] has produced significantly less trusting, less trustworthy, more risk-averse, less competitive, more pessimistic, and less conscientious individuals."

<comment> o0-0o In my personal experiences dating women from China that now live in the US: There is also a loneliness, depression, and generalized malaise to their thoughts due to being an 'only child'.

<comment><USER28> If we take that observation as general rule (not that it is, but let's pretend) - wouldn't that make for a stronger collective then? In order to mitigate those issues. Lots of interesting speculations can be made. Sociologists and psychologists must have a field day there.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> This has been expected for a while.

Hopefully it can help address the increasing gender imbalance. It has reached 6:5 male to female births, resulting in huge numbers of Chinese men who cannot find marriage partners.

<comment><USER31> There are 9 million more boys than girls, according to [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_China](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_China). That is a massive number.

<comment><USER32> Sorry I'm not sure which bit of the article you are referencing.

The 2011 projection says 19 million more boys than girls (Age 0-14).

And 34 million more males than females if you look at the whole population.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> I've been on vacation in China this summer and a tourist guide told me that they can have as many children as they want, but 1) they have to pay some sort of one time fee for the second and successive children (maybe 10,000 Yuan? can't remember) and 2) school, healthcare, etc are to be paid in full for those children. Basically if you're not reasonably wealthy you can afford only one child.

</comment><comment><USER34> This link has a bit more information: [http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/china/2013-11/15/c_1328919...](http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/china/2013-11/15/c_132891920.htm)

(Yes, it's from a couple of years ago, but it describes China's thinking).

<comment><USER35> "China will loosen its decades-long one-child population policy, allowing couples to have two children if one of them is an only child, according to a key decision issued on Friday by the Communist Party of China (CPC)."

So there are still rules, just not as stringent.

<comment><USER36> The parent links to an old article, and that's the old rule which was just overturned. Now everybody can have two -- but apparently still no more than two?

<comment><USER35> Presumably you can still have more than two if you afford it (you pay a hefty fine).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> Overpopulation isn't that of a big problem as the politics make it seem.

<comment><USER38> Why (I am serious, as IMHO today's global population is too big)?

<comment><USER39> If you place all 7.3 billion people onto an area of the size of Austria, every one has more than 11m² to their own.

Of course this illustration is a simplification but it brings the world population back to perspective.

<comment><USER38> But problem is resource consumption, no?

It's a complete speculation, because I can't cite this, but isn't Earth not capable of sustaining 7+ billion people? Exponential population growth brings even greater exponential rise of greenhouse effect, oil consumption, deforestation, etc. IMHO it is the main problem of overpopulation.

<comment> UK-AL Nobody knows what its capable of sustaining. There's stuff like using resources more efficiently, recycling etc. We aren't good at these things yet, consumption could go a lot higher with improvements to those.

<comment><USER18> > _We aren 't good at these things yet, consumption could go a lot higher with > improvements to those._

That's an Malthusianism[0] right here. Why recycling and increased efficiency themselves aren't a solution? Because people will increase their consumption to offset all the gains.

C.f.:

"Why are even some affluent parts of the world running out of fresh water? Because if they weren't, they'd keep watering their lawns until they were."

[0] - [http://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=418](http://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=418)

<comment> UK-AL Increasing consumption isn't necessary a bad thing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> r-w _The Giver_ 's portrayal of systematic euthanasia of the elderly comes to mind. I _really_ hope we never have to make that kind of decision. After all, what choice could possibly be compatible with our principles of liberty, equality, respect, and fairness? This may be the hardest ethical problem we can't afford not to solve.

<comment><USER40> Seems fairly easy to me. Pay 18 year old boys $10k to get a vasectomy. Watch birth rates plummet. Captialism gives us systematic inequality, we should use it to fix more problems

<comment><USER41> ???

That's not the way you control birth rates.

You control birth rates by controlling FEMALE fertility... not male fertility.

There are mathematical reasons behind this, but for the purposes of simplicity I'll give the lay explanation. ie - A female can only have one (or so) child every 9 months. A single human male can produce one every day. So having a population with only one male, but 100 females, allows for a FAR higher reproduction rate than a population with 100 males, but only one female.

<comment><USER40> Vasectomy is currently the only permanent sterilization procedure without serious health risks. Barring some strange shift in cultural attitudes where fertile males suddenly become irresistible to every female on earth it should do fine until we find a better way for both genders. Don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good.

<comment><USER41> In that case... I hope you have some strange shift in cultural attitudes planned for preventing females from being forcibly used by fertile males. I'm not saying we need a perfect method... I'm saying we need a method that acknowledges the realities that many populations around the world live in. Female victimization is a reality in a lot of places on this planet. (To be completely fair... it's a reality even here in the US. Even on the university campus I'm sitting on.)

<comment><USER40> Do you have any proof that rape makes a significant contribution to population growth or just grasping at straws?

<comment><USER41> Rape was the major contributor to population growth in Eastern Kivu back when Nkunda was running rampant. And, to keep everything honest, it still is. (Particularly in Goma). It's not like rape and massacres went away because the Rwandans decided to replace their warlords. The Rwandans still do what Rwandans do I'm sure.

I'm only saying that you ascribe certain properties to the populations you are dealing with. And there are definitely places in the world where your assumptions fail to hold up. But biology ALWAYS holds up.

By the way... I was being kind. Rape is only ONE whole in your plan. There are many. For instance, your plan also assumes women will never simply get horny. Or that they will only "get off" in certain predetermined ways that your plan deems acceptable. Your plan assumes a lot ... and all of it from your own perspective and belief system. If we work within biological limits... we achieve our goals regardless of the local belief system.

<comment><USER42> You can have sex with an infertile man. Vasectomy does not make the man lack lust, it just makes the man infertile.

<comment><USER43> One possible problem I see is that females becoming comparatively "irresponsible" about birth control due to perception of males having vasectomy, which may increase accidental pregnancies. I am not taking birth control methods used for STD protection into account here, but the the award of 10k may need to be carefully set so as to have an optimal ratio of infertile vs fertile males. Seems like an interesting proposal though.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> Talk about bad things about China -> Get upvotes.

Talk about good things about China -> Get downvotes and people rebutting you with clearly one-sided sources.

Am I surprised? No.

Am I pissed? No.

I believe time will tell.

<comment><USER18> I don't know. Going through the comments, people here seem to be ahead of the curve in accepting that China may actually have had a point. But it's hard to agree with for many, because that would mean conceding that undemocratic solutions can be good and effective.

<comment><USER17> Ya I find that westerners in general have a REALLY hard time dealing with the success of China in the past 30 years, all of which springs from undemocratic policy. All media articles I read about China are ridiculously spun to grasp at straws for flaws in the government, while glossing over the tremendous good that the government has done for the people.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER45> The once-child policy has been gradually weakened for some time. It will be interesting to see the future population trend in China. I can see it going one of two ways:

1\. Multiple children has previously been reserved to those with political connections or money. Now that everyone can have two they will jump at the opportunity.

or

2\. Almost every young person in China has grown up in a single child family and sees it as the normal family. Social norms are also based around parents dedicating a lot of resources to one child. So they continue to have only one child. In about a decade China may have to start encouraging people to have more children, like Japan.

<comment><USER46> I like that question, and I've asked a few people here (I live in Chengdu, China) about it. Anecdotally, it's some of both. City people tend to view raising a child as very expensive, mainly because of education, so many expect they can only afford one. And since that has become the new norm, they're comfortable with that. But many also plan to have two children.

Most I've met who already have a child and could feasibly have a second, don't plan to. I suspect they've already gone through the decision to only have one and don't want to revisit it.

However, I don't know what the rural attitudes are, since I haven't talked with people in the countryside.

I think China's demographic future looks a lot like South Korea's or Japan's, with a shortage of young people:

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

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

<comment><USER47> > I don't know what the rural attitudes are, since I haven't talked with > people in the countryside

Rural families have largely been exempted from the one-child policy for a while now. This new development won't change anything for people living in the countryside.

> I think China's demographic future looks a lot like South Korea's or Japan's

Yeah, China already has an issue with a rapidly aging population. It's called the 4-2-1 problem (4 grandparents, 2 parents, 1 child). But this happens in most developed countries. For instance, the average age in the US would be much higher if it weren't for immigration. The native birth rate isn't very high.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER48> China's 1 child policy (now 2 child, I guess) is a difficult to fully form an opinion on.

On one hand, "population crisis" is something a lot of people are concerned about^ and the policy was a direct and practical way of tackling it. On the other, it is unmistakably totalitarian.

Going to 2 is a strange choice. It's just as totalitarian, but probably has a fairly negligible effect on average fertility rate. I guess they don't see

^On a tangent, I don't totally buy population crisis and judging from how rarely I hear it mentioned these days I think I'm not alone. There is obviously some natural limit on human population, but I don't think we're near it.

The fact that we hear less concern about it is says something interesting about the zeitgeist. I think people believe in technological progress more in 2015 than they have since the space age and nuclear age of 50 years ago, maybe more than ever. At our current rate (ignoring the projected gradual reduction) we'll double every 65 years. I can certainly see us absorbing doubling population density in that time considering all the empty oceans, deserts, the potential for landless food productions, megacities and all that jazz. I mean, If the US & Australia went to the population densities of Germany and France (moderately dense with quite a lot of open spaces), we would be good for another 100 years.

Basically, I think we have the space.

<comment><USER49> We've definitely got the space and the resources. The demographic-economic paradox shows that solving the problem of overpopulation is simply a matter of distributing the renewable surplus we have of food water and shelter to the close to 50% of the world which struggles to obtain. This would create a positive feedback loop which would in turn pay for itself.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographic- economic_paradox](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographic-economic_paradox)

>There exists a realizable, evolutionary alternative to our being either atom- bombed into extinction or crowding ourselves off the planet. The alternative is the computer-persuadable veering of big business from its weaponry fixation to accommodation of all humanity at an aerospace level of technology, with the vastly larger, far more enduringly profitable for all, entirely new World Livingry Service Industry. It is statistically evident that the more advanced the living standard, the lower the birth rate.

-Buckminster Fuller, Foreword to Grunch of Giants

[https://tripinsurancestore.com/4/grunch-of- giants.pdf](https://tripinsurancestore.com/4/grunch-of-giants.pdf)

</comment></comment><comment><USER50> So many people here with really outdated ideas about what causes over population and how to control it. Wish they would read this article by Melinda Gates on some myths around this subject: [http://www.gatesfoundation.org/Who- We-Are/Resources-and-Medi...](http://www.gatesfoundation.org/Who-We- Are/Resources-and-Media/Annual-Letters-List/Annual-Letter-2014#MYTHTHREE)

</comment><comment><USER51> The sad part is the policy was likely unnecessary given what we now know about the effects of urban migration and modern healthcare on reducing population growth.

It's often too expensive to have multiple children in a large city, and when infant and child mortality is reduced there's less incentive to have lots of kids (so people use birth control).

</comment><comment><USER52> A pension crisis in China would be tremendously disastrous; something one can barely picture.

With growth and technology, fertility rates goes down and emerging markets,specially BRIC nations, will be severely affected by this.

</comment><comment><USER53> China doesn't qualify as per [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_ecologica...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_ecological_footprint)

</comment><comment><USER54> Thats a good thing. Pressures like these have pushed technological progress forward. Either that, or a natural cycle of starvation and death, unlikely but possible. Let's see what happens.

</comment><comment><USER55> I though one-child policy wasn't enforced for quite awhile, but after reading comments it appears if still was until today.

</comment><comment><USER56> Can someone shine a light on the expected macro economic effects of this decision, both in china and worldwide ?

</comment><comment><USER57> Africa : 2,5 billions by 2050 China ends one-chile policy

bye bye green Earth, hello surpopulation and pollution...

</comment><comment><USER58> is it just me, or are the axis on the graphs all messed up?

</comment><comment><USER59> Future historians will regard it as the #1 contribution of Xi's presidency.

</comment><comment><USER60> "A Christian Manifesto" by Francis A. Schaeffer gives a reason why.

Our creator inspires freedom and love. When we follow him we seek to spread freedom to not only ourselves but to others as well. A population willingly adopting the new testament Biblical principles will spread freedom willingly.

The humanist world view on the other hand has no moral absolutes and must enforce the popular or elected rules onto the majority by force.

America has been slowly transitioning from a Bible believing nation to a humanist world view. The result is predictable, the loss of individual freedom and the increase in the use of force to preserve the lack of these freedoms.

<comment><USER61> > America has been slowly transitioning from a Bible believing nation to a > humanist world view.

America has been slowly transitioning from a superstitious nation to a more rational one.

Fixed that for you.

> The humanist world view on the other hand has no moral absolutes and must > enforce the popular or elected rules onto the majority by force.

No one has moral absolutes, they do not exist except in the minds of those who want to force their morality onto others who don't agree with them. Laws aren't about morals, they're about reason.

<comment><USER62> > America has been slowly transitioning from a superstitious nation to a more > rational one.

lulz

Rationality requires laws of logic--which do not exist in a humanistic, materialistic world.

Tell me, can you stub your toe on the law of non-contradiction? No? How does it exist then?

<comment><USER14> I guess liquid water doesn't exist.

I'm really unsure what point you're trying to make.

<comment><USER62> It's an expression. Liquid water has mass and takes up space. It's material. It exists in a materialistic universe where the only things that exist are matter an energy.

On the other hand, there's nothing physical about "laws." They lose their law- like properties and become conventions of thought rather than regulators of truth and rationality in a world where only matter and energy exist.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER63> Oo0o0ps, you know this before us Chinese.

</comment><comment><USER64> Isn't this an old news?

</comment><comment><USER65> Need more of them to make iPhones.

<comment><USER66> You say it in a crass way but actually, the point of the growing middle class and shifting of China's economic base means there are going to be fewer people making iphones.

Next it will move to Vietnam

<comment><USER18> Maybe we can abuse the fine folks in Shenzhen one last time and automate the entire manufacturing industry away?

<comment><USER66> China is getting really good at assembly robots too.

However if the process can be completely automated then why not do the manufacturing right where the bulk of consumption is going to happen to reduce shipping costs which are always growing.

<comment><USER18> That's a good point, but we still need to reach that outcome, and this will happen graudally. Whatever the end results of robofactory revolution, it will have to _start_ here, in the factory of the world, because that's where we make robots for cheap.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER66> Middle-class in China is going to be fascinating to watch as it consumes all resources.

(four times the entire population of the USA for perspective)

I guess the logic is it will help their economy?

<comment><USER67> The interesting thing about humans is that they adapt. There's a reason economic growth exists, and not all of it relies on: suck up more oil, chop down more wood.</comment></comment>


Swatting Started as an Online Gaming Prank. Then It Turned Deadly - <AUTHOR> https://wired.com/story/swatting-deadly-online-gaming-prank/ <comment><USER2> Swatting predates online gaming. I have early 90s era bbs txt files clearly describing the practice. I wish they would do better reporting, they used to be the my favorite. I bet they themselves have noted prior art, given their age. Also, it was never a prank in the old docs, it was revenge, or 'the perfect murder'.

I feel like I need to start writing again after this barrage of terrible media since the election. Can we all raise the collective bar please?</comment>


Can a Clay Institute question be shot in a few paragraphs? - <AUTHOR> http://rjlipton.wordpress.com/about-me/#comment-53210

<comment><USER2> Can a Clay Institute question be shot in a few paragraphs? Yes. As a trivial example, "The Riemann Hypothesis is false because 0.50001 + 897894982...i is a zero of the Riemann Zeta Function" would work.

Is this particular example any such thing? No, it's the nonsense that's all too typical of philosophers.</comment>


Twitter puts warning on Trump tweet for "glorifying violence" - <AUTHOR> https://www.cnn.com/2020/05/29/tech/trump-twitter-minneapolis/index.html <comment><USER2> [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23349195](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23349195) : 102 comments

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23347792](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23347792) : Marked as dupe

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23347415](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23347415) : Marked as dupe

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23347155](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23347155) : 564 comments

Edit: now 582 comments and still climbing ...

Edit2: Running at about one new comment every 20 seconds, and 7 points every 4 minutes.

<comment><AUTHOR> My conclusion is that HN's default search results are not very good for checking if something has already been submitted. Searching for "twitter" doesn't show any of these submissions, presumably because the default search shows only "popular" submissions.

HN should really implement something like stack exchange where it auto- searches for potential dupes

<comment><USER2> Searching for Twitter and Trump, and changing the search to "Date", shows all of them ... it's how I found them:

[https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...](https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&query=twitter&sort=byDate&type=story)

Having said which, the last of them is still on the Front Page.</comment></comment></comment>


Should you have Bitcoin in Your Investment Portfolio? - <AUTHOR> http://btcgeek.com/bitcoin-in-your-investment-portfolio/ <comment><USER2> No.

Early people got lucky as with any ponzi scheme that hits big. Nothing new. Happened several times in history. Only difference with btc is that late adoptors saw the ponzi potential and exploited it, since it's basically an unregulated exchange. There wasn't a initiator like previous case to charge someone easily.

Now, just buy a few when you need to play with it, but yours drugs, and be gone.

<comment><USER3> Time will tell. Bookmarking your comment.</comment></comment>


Vermin Supreme - <AUTHOR> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vermin_Supreme <comment><USER2> This man's positive role in defusing tense stand-offs at political rallies and short circuiting bad faith discussion derailing with incredibly skilful humour is tragically underrated.</comment>


The Secret History of the U.S. intelligence community's battle with Iran - <AUTHOR> https://news.yahoo.com/shadow-force-the-secret-history-of-the-us-intelligence-communitys-battle-with-irans-revolutionary-guard-090000959.html <comment><USER2> Now this looks like a fascinating idea for an article given current events. I can't wait to read about how the US and UK intelligence communities orchestrated a coup to get rid of Iran's democratically-elected leader Mosaddegh in 1953 to install a brutal dictator who bent the knee to western oil companies, and how that's influenced geopolitics to this day.

Oh, wait, no, of course that's not what the article is about. It's a "Iran bad because reasons!" propaganda piece by a paid-for US intelligence community shill on behalf of his paymasters in the Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs, aka "Warmongering Neoliberals R Us".</comment>


Ruby On REST 2: Representers and the DCI Pattern - <AUTHOR> http://nicksda.apotomo.de/2011/12/ruby-on-rest-2-representers-and-the-dci-pattern/

<comment><USER2> I don't get it. If your models grow too large and do too much, then you refactor them into models that each have a single responsibility.

DCI could still be a good idea if the abstraction it provided is good. I'm not convinced that is the case. The main problem I have with it is that it doesn't scale down as well as MVC do, meaning that if you start out with it you will have a lot of mostly empty classes. No gain at all in that case.

In the other scenario when you have some really big models, then you should refactor them anyhow. Will the DCI pattern be a good fit then? Perhaps, perhaps not.

</comment><comment><USER3> Can anyone double-check my interpretation of this?

Good fat model design: break up units of behavior and related variables into modules, and include them in the model. Few people actually break them up, but that's unrelated to what's "good". Advantages: related behavior is encapsulated, likely in separate files, and methods are always available down the pipeline. Disadvantages: huge numbers of methods at any given time.

DCI design: .extend those modules into the models as you need them. Advantages: related behavior is encapsulated, likely in separate files, and code is declarative about what it intends to be used for and cannot be used otherwise. Disadvantages: have to new.extend(YourModule) every time.

If that's the case, I can see the advantage around guaranteeing things aren't using it outside of the controller-declared intended usage. More controllable / predictable code, basically. But breaking things into modules is a good idea _anyway_ , regardless of if people actually do so, and aside from the increased control I don't see how this is different than module-including models.

Better, I'll admit, but they seem to be claiming ponies and rainbows that'll knock your socks off, when what they're offering is just a style choice (many modules per model) + per-instance mixins rather than per-class, which seems to imply to me that they're allowing a lot more manipulation of the models further down the rendering pipeline than is generally recommended in MVC.

<comment><USER4> >> which seems to imply to me that they're allowing a lot more manipulation of the models further down the rendering pipeline than is generally recommended in MVC.

Of note, is that the inventor of MVC is also the inventor of DCI. Consequently, I think you'd agree that perhaps he didn't agree with you :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Can I solicit some dumbed down explanations of DCI? I've read a few articles about it, as well as the Wikipedia entry, and I still have no idea what it's all about.

<comment><AUTHOR> The metaphore of DCI is a theatre. The context is the director. Chooses who plays what, instruct them how to do it and then let them play.

Theory:

1\. Expose use-cases (context) as first-class citizens of your code.

2\. Each use-case selects which objects are needed for this use-case.

3\. Extend the objects only with the roles that are needed in this use-case.

4\. Start the interaction.

Example:

Buying a product.

1\. UserBuysAProduct object, that can be executed.

2\. Objects/actors needed: user, shop

3\. Extend user with a Buyer role and shop with ProductCatalogue and OrderManager.

4\. call shop.buy_product(user, product)

<comment><USER5> Ok, so this is a way of decomposing just the domain model into smaller parts: a minimal model, role objects that extend it for particular purposes, and context objects that assemble a set of models and roles for a particular use case.

The rationale is, presumably, that you can add and change particular use cases independently of each other and the core model.

Right?

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, exactly.

The idea is that the Data doesn't change that often, so it's kept separate from the things that change frequently - roles, use-cases.

Exposing use-cases is also an important goal, usually they are scattered across the codebase.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> There are many reasons to push application logic as low as possible in an application stack.

Let me give you an example: The people designing the database did not make the "email" column check that the address was valid. Then someone designing a new top-tier application (say android app) forgot to add the email check to the app. Then a user mistakenly puts his phone number into the field and now the auto-mailer (designed in 1998) breaks because the developer assumed the database would at least provide a syntactically correct email address.

Pushing logic down as low as it goes, or adding an abstraction layer (middleware) to the system greatly reduces overall maintenance cost. So doing some vertical scaling here and there is more cost effective.

</comment><comment><USER7> Does anyone have links to samples of DCI-structured code other than the very small money-transfer example Google turns up? I'm really intrigued by the idea, but I'd like to look at some examples with multiple contexts and roles acting on the same data classes.</comment>


TD Ameritrade Inches Closer to Enabling In-Vehicle Trading - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-07-22/td-ameritrade-inches-closer-to-enabling-in-vehicle-trading <comment><AUTHOR> As Matt Levine says:

Come On:

TD Ameritrade's new voice-activated investing technology brings investors one step closer to trading while driving.

The Omaha, Nebraska-based financial services company is launching an in- vehicle offering that enables account holders to check their portfolio or receive a quote on a security via voice command. ...

"One day we hope to add a transactional layer where you can make trades on the go," Sunayna Tuteja, head of strategic partnerships and emerging technologies at TD Ameritrade Holding Corp., said in an interview.

Why? Don't trade stocks while driving! Nothing in this newsletter is investment advice, but that's as close as you'll get. It's also driving advice though! Keep your focus on the road! You don't want to crash into a tree and leave your family with nothing because you blew all your savings on frenetic vehicular day-trading.

Fine fine fine I will make an exception for autonomous vehicles. I assume that fully self-driving Teslas will come with a brokerage app, but it'll only let you buy Tesla shares. Don't even ask what the car does if you try to short the stock.</comment>


COP21: Climate deal final draft 'agreed' in Paris - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-35079532 <comment><USER2> Looking at this, and also at the New York Times article[0] it appears that

1) The plans that the nations put forward are about 1/2 the reduction in emissions required to prevent a 2 degree C rise in temperature.

2) There are no legally binding targets for emission reduction

3) There is no enforcement

How can anyone see this conference as a net positive? We spent a lot of money, and emitted a lot of CO2 flying hundreds if not thousands of people to Paris, to come up with the equivalent of a change.org petition in terms of actual legal value. I think this is a net negative. It seems that after all the pre- conference hype about this being the last chance, the delegates actually couldn't agree to something substantial and just signed a feel good document that actually doesn't require anything concrete of the countries other than good intentions and then are making a big deal how they signed a treaty to save the world. This is grandstanding, inefficiency, and waste with no benefit for anybody (except for the frequent flyer miles of the journalists covering the conference).

0) [http://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/13/world/europe/climate- chang...](http://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/13/world/europe/climate-change- accord-paris.html?_r=0)

<comment><USER3> Goddamnit. Couldn't we have _tried_ , as a species, _not_ to commit suicide?

<comment><USER4> No. We are too addicted to cheap energy to go back.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I was a litle confused, but I asume the article is talking about °C instead of C? Or is C another unit used for a range or something?

<comment><USER6> Almost certainly degrees Celsius. Has the "°" symbol in the "too hard basket"? (to be fair I did copy and paste it from your comment, that's the fastest way I could get it done).

<comment><USER7> ° is shift+alt+8 on mac</comment></comment></comment>


World's top supercomputer from '09 is now obsolete, will be dismantled - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2013/03/worlds-fastest-supercomputer-from-09-is-now-obsolete-will-be-dismantled/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+arstechnica%2Findex+%28Ars+Technica+-+All+content%29 <comment><USER3> Something about these numbers doesn't quite make sense. The reason cited for dismantling the machine is that "it isn't energy-efficient enough to make the power bill worth it." But the supercomputer uses 2345 kilowatts, which at US prices of around 15 cents per kWh would cost $352 / hour to run in energy costs. By comparison, the $120 million cost of building roadrunner, amortized over the four years it's been running, comes out to $3400 / hour. The article makes it sound like the power bill is costing them a fortune, at $3 million a year, it isn't that much at all next to the $120 million price tag.

<comment><USER4> They already have the Titan, four times more efficient, with 17 pflop consuming only 8000 kwh.

<comment><USER5> Titan is for open science, not classified research as roadrunner was. Sequoia is the new classified nuclear supercomputer.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> It's interesting to read articles like this since I came from bizarro not-so- HPC world where "we" (academic department) didn't pay for electricity (the university did!), so there was no incentive at all to retire obsolete hardware. Right up until I left many months ago, I was running jobs on a cluster made up of 84 servers on death's door, each with dual-processor (not dual-core!) Nocona Xeons or Opteron 240s.

"Oh, but there's a cost to support obsolete hardware!" Yeah, sure, but the person supporting everything was me, and I was a constant cost to keep around whether I supported crappy obsolete hardware or shiny new hardware.

<comment><USER7> In terms of age this system isn't a dinosaur - the problem is the hardware architecture as stated in the article: Cell is now obsolete, noone wants to program new software for it anymore. X86 systems on the other hand, even older ones, can still be targeted by new Software without problems, so it may still make sense to keep them. To be blunt, the accelerator market simply moved to NVIDIA Tesla.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> "At more than one quadrillion floating point operations per second..." - <USER2> fast is that when cracking typical passwords or mining bitcoins? If we have an encrypted drive, how long would it take to find the passphrase with it?

<comment><USER9> Bitcoin uses double SHA256 which is all integer operations, so that's not directly comparable to flops.

As far as I know most passwords hashes are also integer operations.

The cell processor in the ps3, despite being optimized for floating point ops, can do about 22.23 Mh/s. Assuming each of the 12,960 PowerXCell 8is in Roadrunner can do the same: 12960 * 23.23 ~= 288100 Mh/s which would earn you about 21.6 BTC/day at the current difficulty. That's about $2000/day at current prices.

The PowerXCells also have 8 SPUs vs 6 in the ps3, so they are potentially 25% faster.

<comment><USER10> For bitcoin mining you probably want to use Titan's 56k GPUs. I've run jobs at full scale on Titan, sometimes I forget it can be pretty cool to be in HPC!

<comment><USER7> I'm also interested in what language and tooling you're using, plus the scientific field. Depending on what you do, you might be interested in [1]. It's my current project dealing with better tooling for CPU and GPU compatible Fortran code.

[1] <http://github.com/muellermichel/Hybrid-Fortran>

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Well, that's four years. Only a year ahead of normal amortization schedules.

</comment><comment><USER12> How many years till everyone's cell phone has this much computing power?

<comment><USER13> Let's suppose current medium-spec cellphones have a gigahertz CPU, and that it can do one flop per cycle, peak performance. That's probably a tenth of a flop per cycle at LINPACK, which is how the Top500 list is ranked. So that's a hundred megaflops in your cell phone today, guessing.

This was the first petaflop machine. A petaflop is a million gigaflops, or ten million current cellphones. That's roughly 23 doublings in performance. If Moore's Law were to continue at one doubling per two years, that would be 46 years, or about 2059. Another ten or fifteen years might pass before low-end cellphones have it.

But 46 years is a long time. 46 years ago was 1967. There were no packet- switched computer networks. Nobody had ever seen a video arcade. Computers mostly interacted with people via punched cards, or at best a teletype. The Bloom filter had not yet been discovered. Timesharing and high-level languages were radical, risky concepts; the popular high-level languages of the time were all domain-specific, not general-purpose like C. There was no such thing as a mouse. There were graphical user interfaces and virtual reality. Humans had never walked on the moon.

46 years from now, there may not be cellphones, or humans. We certainly won't still be doubling the density of planar silicon chips every 18 months.

<comment><USER14> Not sure we will still have cellphones 46 years from now.

<comment><USER13> What is WRONG WITH YOU?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> RIP Cell processor.

</comment><comment><USER16> flops = floating operations per second, why all this tech articles keep using terms like "petaflop"? It is not plural, it doesn't make sense.

</comment><comment><USER17> What better way to spend the public dime than this.

</comment><comment><USER18> Oh I wish I have a supercomputer and could play with one right now.

<comment><USER18> I wonder what's wrong with this comment, I get downvoted for wishing out loud for a supercomputer to code on?</comment></comment>


Get your PhD in JavaScript - <AUTHOR> http://serialtrier.wordpress.com/2010/08/01/get-your-phd-in-javascript/

<comment><USER2> Ironically, if more people took the time to learn the language and the browsers they wouldn't need to load a few hundred kb of [insert library] just to validate a form. Those "10,000s of lines of client code" would be reduced significantly.</comment>


Oklahoma Earthquakes Are a National Security Threat - <AUTHOR> http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-10-23/oklahoma-earthquakes-are-a-national-security-threat <comment><USER2> This reminds me of the Oklahoma ghost town that resulted from unregulated mining practices[0].

[0] [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Picher,_Oklahoma](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Picher,_Oklahoma)

</comment><comment><USER3> For those interested in more on the topic of the earthquakes: [http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/04/13/weather- undergr...](http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/04/13/weather-underground)

<comment><USER4> Good information in The New Yorker piece, unlike the continuing coverage I have been reading in Bloomberg, which uses _fracking_ as a refrain with minimal information attached.

This is about disposal of waste water from watered-out fields, not about fracking. The New Yorker correctly points out less than 10% of the water going down these disposal wells is from fracking operations. So why does Bloomberg (and not just Bloomberg) keep raising the fracking bogey-man?

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Wastewater injection wells, contrary to popular press, are not used primarily for the disposal of fracking fluid or other drilling waste products. Produced water is, by far, the largest component going into wastewater injection wells.

When you get oil and gas out of the ground, a lot of salt water comes with it. Sometimes, especially in Oklahoma, there can be 10 times as much water as oil. This "produced water" is used for injection into other wells to displace oil, but there's enough left over to require wastewater injection wells for its disposal.

[http://energyindepth.org/wp- content/uploads/2015/02/Wastewat...](http://energyindepth.org/wp- content/uploads/2015/02/Wastewater-Disposal-Q-and-A1.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER6> The most amazing part of this article is the U.S. would use this seemingly massive reserve in 3 days.

<comment><AUTHOR> If you think Cushing storage of 3 days is massive, you will be shocked with Strategic Petroleum Reserve maintained by US govt, that covers a large swath underground below Texas and Louisiana states, and only holds about 30 days of consumption.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strategic_Petroleum_Reserve_%2...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strategic_Petroleum_Reserve_%28United_States%29)

Actually, Cushing storage is not that much. Unlike SPR, it is mostly short term storage in between transit. Cushing is a transfer point between different pipelines that connect at Cushing which also later became a delivery point for oil and gas futures traded in futures market.

<comment><USER7> The norm for a country's total reserves is 90 days of imports ([https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_strategic_petroleum_r...](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_strategic_petroleum_reserves#International_Energy_Agency_reserves))

US imports are about 1/4 of consumption ([http://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.cfm?id=32&t=6](http://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.cfm?id=32&t=6)), so total reserves (including commercial storage) should be around 25 days.

As to Cushing, from both the article and what you say I would be more concerned about losing those pipes than of losing the oil stored there.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> _The role that fracking plays in the rise of earthquakes has been hugely controversial in Oklahoma, where one in five jobs is tied to the oil and gas industry._

"It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it." ― Upton Sinclair

<comment><USER9> Try fracking under his house and he will understand it...

<comment><USER10> Fracking is not the same thing as injection wells.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> What isn't a national security threat now?

<comment><AUTHOR> Since 9/11, the threshold for being considered national security has gone down significantly, too much paranoia. Of course the private businesses, in this case O&G companies, trading exchange and trading firms, benefit from certain assets being declared of national security importance as the cost of securing get transferred to the government and taxpayers.

<comment><USER12> Yeah, whatever. Let's see the US run out of oil, then let's wait 30 days or so, and then you try telling me (if you're still alive) that it's not a national security issue.

<comment><USER11> Oil is sold through OPEC, the US won't run out of oil in isolation (and of course it won't run out at all).

Oil is also distributed all over the earth at various costs to extract, so oil would rise in price as a commodity decades before it actually runs out. It would gradually price itself out of different uses.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Given the resistance to equate increased earthquake activity elsewhere, it is interesting to see fracking stopped due to earthquake concerns at the oil reserves. I suspect this could be a strong argument to use in other cities experiencing previously-rare earthquakes, like Plano, TX.

[http://earthquaketrack.com/us-tx-plano/recent](http://earthquaketrack.com/us- tx-plano/recent)

</comment><comment><USER14> The Denver Rocky Flats injection quakes of the 1960s stopped within months of halting injections. I dont think ending oil production is politically platable, so they will have to find alternative waste treatment.</comment>


Fwaf – Machine Learning Driven Web Application Firewall - <AUTHOR> http://fsecurify.com/fwaf-machine-learning-driven-web-application-firewall/ <comment><USER2> It seems like what it actually "learned" is no better than banning some keywords, for example:

      >>> p=lambda x:lgs.predict(vectorizer.transform([x]))
      >>> p("/product.php?name=etc")
      array([1])
      >>> p("/login.php?name=rfoo&pass=hehe")
      array([1])
      >>> p("/download.php?file=/root/.bashrc")
      array([0])
      >>> p("/example/test/q=" + lorem + "<script>alert(1)</script>") # len(lorem) = 4488
      array([0])

(FYI 1 means malicious and 0 means clean)

<comment><AUTHOR> If you have a look at the data, there is a wide variety of malicious commands that it can detect.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Doesn't look like he did any cross-validation, hence the high accuracy. Always keep a hold-out set to test against

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> In case someone is having difficulty with the link, here is an alternative:

[https://web.archive.org/web/20170514081124/http://fsecurify....](https://web.archive.org/web/20170514081124/http://fsecurify.com/fwaf- machine-learning-driven-web-application-firewall/)

Apologies for inconvenience.

Thanks

</comment><comment><USER4> Like others have said, you might be overfitting your training data here: your model is just memorising the examples you give it and would fail if somebody slightly varies some payload. (inserting some whitespace or something)

Another thing to keep in mind is that an accuracy of 99% doesn't mean much in an unbalanced problem like yours (much more clean queries than malicious once).

What you should show instead is precision (of the ones labeled malicious, how many are actually malicious?) and recall (out of the malicious queries in the dataset, how many did your model label as malicious?)

<comment><USER4> Try to also do cross-validation (check sklearn's stratified K-Folds) to be more confident you're not just overfitting.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> The similarities in name _and_ logo to F-Secure are a little bothersome.

<comment><AUTHOR> They have a straight F :p

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> [http://yararules.com/2017/04/06/yara-rules-strings- statistic...](http://yararules.com/2017/04/06/yara-rules-strings-statistical- study/)

</comment><comment><USER7> Fun, will look into this! Wonder if anyone can point to other datasets?

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> The website is working a bit slow but the page is loading. If you are facing any problem, please wait for a minute and the page will load.

<comment><USER8> All I got is blank page.

<comment><AUTHOR> Here you go: [https://github.com/faizann24/Fwaf-Machine-Learning-driven- We...](https://github.com/faizann24/Fwaf-Machine-Learning-driven-Web- Application-Firewall)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Why use a trigram as n ?

<comment><USER10> Trigrams are a known sweetspot. Its a practical heuristic. Got no proofs to link. Wrote awikipedia semana parser and witnessed similar results in practice.

Going above 3 adds very,very little precision while guzzling space. Using 2 shows a drop in precision.

Probably has todo with how human built systems are built (we make them in our image - and we seem to have a thing for 3s - map(subject, verb, object) -> (origin, data, destinstion) etc)

Addendum; if you know what PCA is, id wager that added n gram dimensions share a linear dependency with lower dimensions - so sharing a statistical resemblence (covar(A,B) -> 0) that adds very little to the data's variability once you start adding dims above 3.

<comment><USER10> Why the downvotes with out correction?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Woo, saving this.im planning a similar ptoject once im done with my studies.</comment>


Star Trek and the ideas we must reject to save our future - <AUTHOR> http://scottberkun.com/2018/star-trek-and-the-ideas-we-must-reject-to-save-our-future/ <comment><USER2> > Star Trek of course conveniently skips over how they got from our primitive > world to theirs. Even assuming Ms. Unknown is right, how do we get there? > It's hard to see it happening without a science fiction cliche like a > terrible world war or alien invasion, something to force our myopic species > to recognize our survival depends on our partnership in sharing spaceship > earth and not petty self-interests,

The turning point was the Bell Riots in San Francisco as a consequence of the 'inhumane internment camps for the poor'. [http://memory- alpha.wikia.com/wiki/Bell_Riots](http://memory- alpha.wikia.com/wiki/Bell_Riots) .

Not really a science fiction cliche.</comment>


Should you keep a copy of all the code you write? - <AUTHOR> http://programmers.stackexchange.com/questions/154155/should-you-keep-a-copy-of-all-the-code-you-write

<comment><USER2> "The code that you write on the computer should only stay on the compter that you wrote it on and nowhere else."

That is what I was taught. What it means is that if you write some code on your work computer, it stays on your work computer. If you write it on your home computer, it stays on your home computer. Nowhere else.

(obviously there are exceptions, but the basic rule is a good thing to remember)</comment>


Which of the java web development framework is best for startup project? - <AUTHOR>

<comment><USER2> It depends on what your project is about and what are you building.

Check out Play - I'm not a Java dev, but it should be fairly popular: [http://www.playframework.com/](http://www.playframework.com/)

<comment><AUTHOR> What about the wicket framework, is it ok?

<comment><USER2> Haven't heard of it unfortunately so I can't comment on it.

Generally speaking, the number of followers/contributors at Github is a pretty good sign of the overall activity of certain framework. Play has way higher numbers - you can see that here:

[https://github.com/playframework/playframework](https://github.com/playframework/playframework) [https://github.com/apache/wicket](https://github.com/apache/wicket)</comment></comment></comment>


You Can't Take It With You - <AUTHOR> http://steveblank.com/2010/07/26/you-cant-take-it-with-you/

<comment><USER2> I had a conversation with a well-known entrepreneur in my city. He has created a chain of cafés (completely different from my field) but we talked a lot (in fact, he talked, I questioned and listened) and I learned a great deal.

At the end of the conversation, he said "it has been a long time since I talked that much". WHAT? It meant that I was probably one of the few lucky who had learned from his experience. I always thought that entrepreneur were sharing their knowledge to everyone once they were big enough.

I hope that he will write about this someday but for the moment, I'll just write it myself in a document and try to find a way to share it.

<comment><USER3> It properly meant that he didn't run into any good listeners.

Most people, including me at times, take part in a conversation just to say something, which means that those who listen can learn a lot.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Quick poll: When you were in school, especially college, were the best teachers young or old?

There are young teachers with talent, but in my opinion, the most outstanding lecturers were older and had a depth and variety of experience that the young ones couldn't match. Older teachers have the fabled 10,000 hours of deliberate practice to account for, as well as a diversity of experience and the time necessary to assemble some perspective on all of it.

So here's a big +1 for hiring adjunct professors from outside the usual pool of fresh young faces. Let the young people work, and the old people teach.

<comment><USER5> Both (I think).

When getting my master's the most interesting instructors were the about-to- retire grey hair teaching Software Project Management who had decades of PM war stories mostly from massive Government projects.

At the other end was the young guy (looked like he was the youngest instructor in the program) teaching Introduction to Networks. He was absolutely amazing: there seemed to be nothing that he didn't know on any aspect of either circuit-switched or packet-switched networks! I think only once did he say "I'll have to research that and let you know next week." He was probably older than he looked since he'd worked quite a while at either Alcatel or Nortel.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Better to take it one step further. Find people like this, interview them, put the videos online and let everybody share in their wisdom.

<comment><USER7> Sweet fancy Moses, please no videos. Transcribe to text.

My bandwidth reading is an order of magnitude greater reading than watching.

I've almost given up on video on the web for interviews.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> He probably has a point about preserving your knowledge but I find his fascination with this 'Fortune 100 lawyer' a little odd. Those are the guys that battle out stuff like Microsoft/SCO vs. IBM or the hypothetical "MPEG-LA patent trolls Google for WebM", right?

<comment><USER9> He is not fascinated with the lawyer but with his proficiency in his field, the field is irrelevant.

<comment><USER10> Hmm, but:

 _I'll use misdirection to get the opposing counsel thinking I'm heading in one direction_

This is the wrong lesson. He's good at exploiting the legal system, that's all. It's not about who is right, it's about who has the cleverer lawyer. All this guy's "experience" is zero-sum, he's creating no wealth, he's purely parasitic. He's like a salesman who sells you something you don't want just because he's good at persuasion. Why would you want to teach the next generation of lawyers to milk their clients more effectively?

<comment><USER11> In an adversarial system like the US and the UK each side in the case is expected to put up the best argument possible presenting their side of the case - it's not about them presenting the "truth" (although they obviously can't lie).

<comment><USER12> I read a passage on a standardized exam once that led me to believe that of the US and UK, only the US was adversarial, and the UK was more inquisitorial. The point of the exam passage was the contrast: in the UK, for example, both sides had to present all of the evidence they had. Not so in the US. Perhaps it's more of a sliding scale between the systems than a dichotomy.

Now, I have to admit I never followed up on this, maybe the passage was fictionalized.

<comment><USER13> US and UK have pretty much the same legal system. The French legal system is inquisitorial and pretty much all of Europe or is it the world except for the common wealth?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Because non-tech knowledge, being harder to reverse-engineer, is harder to pass down. The main point seems kind of like Asimov's Foundation, keep from falling back too many generations by leaving key checkpoint materials while cutting out some of the initially necessary but essentially unworking steps that we just go through to reach a solution (assumption -> oh this would be no that can't be -> ok reduction ad absurdum -> next possibility).

</comment><comment><USER15> I came to a similiar conclusion a few weeks ago and have just finished setting up a system to try and record anything interesting I learn or find out in life in text and/or video form. I can't wait to get it rolling. Merely being able to read digests of what I've read or learn before should, I hope, bring most of the ideas back. Is there a name for this sort of recording?

<comment><USER13> Yes. Its a diary.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> There's an entire field devoted to this: Knowledge Management (<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knowledge_management>).

</comment><comment><USER17> I doubt the lawyer would risk his career by giving away his strategy/tactics.

<comment><USER18> Hence the suggestion that he do it after retiring from practice.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> _If you don't teach it or write it down, the accumulated knowledge of your career is gone._ Yeah. Keep your knowledge in a working memory. Keep your tools sharp. We learn by doing and so on..

Add to this that in an IT field things are changing so fast, that you need a constant daily learning to stay in a shape.

</comment><comment><USER20> _I worry we may be heading for a future in which only a few people plot their own itinerary through no-land, while everyone else books a package tour._

That's been the case for the majority of human history. It's mostly the case now. Most non-religious, progressive thinking people, don't actually think through most issues for themselves. They believe in institutions - academia, NPR, etc. Most people believe what they do about nutrition for instance, not from reading studies themselves, but through accredited officials (PHD's) as interpreted by the NYTimes.

<comment><USER21> How did this get here?</comment></comment>


Go 1.10 Release Notes - <AUTHOR> https://golang.org/doc/go1.10 <comment><USER2> One of the most important changes in Go 1.10: Go is now suitable for working with the containers! Hooray!

What I mean here is that this problem is finally fixed: [https://www.weave.works/blog/linux-namespaces-and-go-don- t-m...](https://www.weave.works/blog/linux-namespaces-and-go-don-t-mix) GH issue: [https://github.com/golang/go/issues/20676](https://github.com/golang/go/issues/20676) The fix itself: [https://go-review.googlesource.com/c/go/+/46033](https://go- review.googlesource.com/c/go/+/46033) Relevant part of the release notes: [https://golang.org/doc/go1.10#runtime](https://golang.org/doc/go1.10#runtime)

<comment><USER3> This is a very important fix for writing things like file servers (think smbd, sftp...), which need to use seteuid/setfsuid.

</comment></comment><comment> old-gregg Quickly tested it on our OSS repo [1] and based on several averaged runs, 1.10 is both faster to compile (even not taking caching into account) and produces smaller executables, a welcome reversal of the past trend.

Compile times on Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-7820X CPU @ 3.60GHz:

      Go 1.9.2     7.2sec avg
      Go 1.10      6.1sec avg       -15.3%

Binary sizes:

      Go 1.9.2     50,727,552 bytes
      Go 1.10      49,604,128 bytes -2.2%

[1] [https://github.com/gravitational/teleport](https://github.com/gravitational/teleport) if you want to try it yourself, run `make clean` followed by `time make`

<comment><USER4> Do you executables run faster, or slower?

<comment><USER5> They should be faster: [https://golang.org/doc/go1.10#performance](https://golang.org/doc/go1.10#performance)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> > "If the environment variable $GOROOT is unset, the go tool previously used > the default GOROOT set during toolchain compilation. Now, before falling > back to that default, the go tool attempts to deduce GOROOT from its own > executable path. This allows binary distributions to be unpacked anywhere in > the file system and then be used without setting GOROOT explicitly."

At last! Yes!

<comment><USER7> IMHO, all programs ought to behave like this and be self-contained within a directory.

<comment><USER8> Standard practice back in the MS-DOS days, what Microsoft now calls _xcopy_ deploy, because that is how we used to do it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9>
      The go test command now caches test results: if the test
      executable and command line match a previous run and the
      files and environment variables consulted by that run
      have not changed either, go test will print the previous
      test output, replacing the elapsed time with the string
      "(cached)."

This is my favorite part of the release.

<comment><USER10> I don't understand the utility. Why am I running tests again if nothing has changed? Is this just to speed up multipackage testing use cases?

<comment><USER11> Not a Go developer but bazel in Java does the same thing and it's really helpful when writing test cases. Say I am editing two test methods within a test suite of 30 test cases, it will run only those two tests. For the rest 28 it will show the cached output.

<comment><USER10> But thats the thing, this is _not_ incremental compile/test. Its just checking the binary output (at least as far as I can tell).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> One thing not mentioned in the release note is that the plugin package now supports macOS: [https://godoc.org/plugin](https://godoc.org/plugin)

Also, "[this package] has known issues" was removed from the doc.

<comment><USER13> I don't know why they left it out, it's the best news I could have hoped for from 1.10. All this after I set up a semi-complicated series of make targets to compile these plugins in Docker containers and use volumes pipe them out.

<comment><USER14> Barely anybody uses them though.

<comment><USER15> They were previously linux only. When Windows support lands, there's a lot we'll be able to do in our open source product in terms of modularity. It's a pretty big deal for us.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Would anyone be able to explain to me what this means (from the release notes [1])?

> _Go 1.10 is the last release that will run on OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion or OS > X 10.9 Mavericks. Go 1.11 will require OS X 10.10 Yosemite or later._

Would Go programs just not compile on those OS versions, or not run entirely?

[1] [https://golang.org/doc/go1.10](https://golang.org/doc/go1.10)

<comment><USER17> Also, how is this not a breaking change? They talk so much about BC but cut minor releases that don't run on the same OS versions as the previous release? Same with FreeBSD:

> As announced in the Go 1.9 release notes, Go 1.10 now requires FreeBSD 10.3 > or later; support for FreeBSD 9.3 has been removed.

<comment><USER18> This is what the Go 1 Promise has to say about operating systems. They very specifically call that out as an area where they do not guarantee compatibility.

[https://golang.org/doc/go1compat#operating_systems](https://golang.org/doc/go1compat#operating_systems)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I have been using the 1.10 release candidate for a while, and I have been really appreciating the build caching. It makes running tests after a small change as much as 10x faster for me (especially on projects that import huge libraries, like the AWS library).

</comment><comment><USER20> As someone with no skin in the game, it seems to me that the philosophical conundrum of Go is whether one needs to use a language designed to produce the kind of code consistency it gives to Google-scale orgs or if you're better off working with a more "dangerous" or harder-to-read language which may create more technical debt but also allow you forge your own path as your devs prefer.

I keep looking at languages like Go and frameworks like Angular as being steered for huge-org problems, but I wonder if startups are better off incurring the debt of riskier, less conservative languages and paradigms and worrying about the technical debt only once they've reached the scale where it a) actually matters to your agility in delivering customer value and b) you have the capital to make it worth solving the problem.

Maybe this is reading too much into the generics kerfluffle, but I would love to be enlightened if anyone can clarify this further.

<comment><USER4> My experience from a host of language experiments of late: ranging from F#, to Rust, to Nim, to C#, to Go, to C++

Is that it just doesn't matter very much. F# has very powerful generics, and there are particular circumstances where that saves me a lot of typing. But you can still get it done in C# with less powerful generics, or Go with none.

F# has sum types, and replaces null with an option type - great ideas, but you can approximate these ideas in any language if you need to.

Similarly, Nim's metaprogramming has let me do some really clever things, but again, it just saves some typing.

I've found that language features and properties are often given more weight than they deserve. The really hard problems I've had when coding are just the actual problems. And while a particular language can be life-changing in particular problem domains, its rare that they are life changing in general.

Go is maybe the _language_ I think is least interesting of all of the ones I've played with but I currently prefer it over the others because

1\. stable, mature language and tools (unlike nim) 2\. fast compile times (unlike rust) 3\. compiles to native executables

F# might be my favorite if it had fast compile times and native compilation. Rust might be my favorite if I ever grok the borrow checker. But if someone said I had to use language X to do project Y I would almost always be fine with it, unless there were insurmountable performance problems caused by the language.

<comment><USER21> Go is like the Six Million Dollar Man language, compared to C. It's everything C can do, but much better.

Both C and Go are very, very simple languages; there aren't many keywords, and it's pretty easy to grok both at a functional level. It takes, of course, a bit to reach the second-level understanding you need to make full use of either language, but it's easy to hit the ground running in both.

We sometimes get stuck on one language being better than others because it has X feature or Y concept, and I've seen some people essentially _root_ for one language over another. But at the end of the day, languages are tools to get your work done, and _on balance_ the work is going to be hard whichever route you go. Use the one that suits the talents you have available and that broadly complements the needs that you have.

<comment><USER22> Everything C can do but better? Sure you are not confusing Go with Rust?

Go does have a GC, not manual memory management

Go can't interact performantly with other languages.

Go is like Java (not C). Its kind of nice but deliberatley sabotaged by (Big Company).

<comment><USER21> I'm pretty sure I'm not confusing it with Rust!

That said, I don't think there's anything more I can say which can add to the conversation. I'm happy to allow what I have said to stand.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Can someone tell me what is going on here: the release notes [[https://golang.org/doc/go1.10#language](https://golang.org/doc/go1.10#language)] state that

> A corner case involving shifts by untyped constants has been clarified, and > as a result the compilers have been updated to allow the index expression > `x[1.0 << s]` where s is an untyped constant; the go/types package already > did.

But the docs [[https://golang.org/ref/spec#Operators](https://golang.org/ref/spec#Operators)] state that

> `var u = 1.0<<s // illegal: 1.0 has type float64, cannot shift`

<comment><USER24> It's probably to do with the fact that one is a "number".

If I'm correct, that means in `x[1.0 << s]`. 1.0 is a "number", therefore the shift is valid, but in `var u = 1.0 << s`, it's a float64, and therefore the shift is invalid.

see also: [https://blog.golang.org/constants](https://blog.golang.org/constants)

<comment><USER23> Ah, thanks.

<comment><USER25> @cshenton 's answer is not perfect. The "var u = 1.0<<s" in go spec is illegal is because s is a variable, so 1.0 will be deduced as a flaot64. However, in "x[1.0 << s]", s is a constant, so 1.0 will be deduced as int.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> > _Options specified by cgo using #cgo CFLAGS and the like are now checked > against a whitelist of permitted options. This closes a security hole in > which a downloaded package uses compiler options like -fplugin to run > arbitrary code on the machine where it is being built._

How strong is the guarantee of "no code execution during build"?

I'm currently working on a Go build system and my understanding is that the Go compiler was designed for compiling untrusted code. You'd have to exploit the compiler on order to get RCE, right?

(I'm sandboxing it either way, but it's good to know for risk assessment)

<comment><USER26> Here's how it works.

`go build` on a pure Go code only executes the compiler and linker of the go toolchain.

If you add cgo to the mix, `go build` might invoke system C++ compiler (gcc, clang, mingw) to compile the C part of the code and system C++ linker.

The issue was that gcc allows arbitrary plugins and if the right cgo flags were provided, gcc would load and execute such plugin, leading to executing whatever code was in the plugin.

That hole was plugged in 1.10.

This is the whole story. There are no other vectors of executing code that is not part of Go toolchain.

Then again, what is your threat model?

If you worry that blindly compiling my evil package will execute my evil code during build, you should also worry that linking my evil package will execute my evil code when you run your compiled executable.

<comment><USER3> Threat model is building (but not executing) untrusted code.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> i love golang

</comment><comment><USER28> Have they fixed already the GOPATH crap?

<comment><USER29> >The GOPATH environment variable now has a default value if it is unset. It defaults to $HOME/go on Unix and %USERPROFILE%/go on Windows.

If this is what you are talking about - they 'fixed' it in 1.8 a year ago.

<comment><USER30> IMHO, fixing it would be being able to build go code on random directories without env hackery.

<comment><USER31> I think this is on the roadmap but I'm not sure the priority. Check out this proposal [https://gist.github.com/sdboyer/def9b138af448f39300cb078b0e9...](https://gist.github.com/sdboyer/def9b138af448f39300cb078b0e94cc3)

EDIT: Found the proposal on the dep roadmap: [https://github.com/golang/dep/wiki/Roadmap](https://github.com/golang/dep/wiki/Roadmap)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> In case you are wondering: "generics" is mentioned 5 times (now 6) in the comments right now.

<comment><USER33> That was the first thing you searched for too?

I just come here to eat popcorn and learn about type theory.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Release notes: [https://golang.org/doc/go1.10](https://golang.org/doc/go1.10)

<comment><USER34> We've changed to that URL from [https://blog.golang.org/go1.10](https://blog.golang.org/go1.10).

<comment><USER35> Maybe merge with this: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16395607](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16395607)

<comment><USER34> Thanks! Done.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> There are no significant changes to the language specification

This is my least favorite part of the release.

<comment><USER4> It is already turing complete! :D

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> Does it have generics yet?

<comment><USER38> > There are no significant changes to the language specification.

I'll continue hoping goderive becomes a language that displaces go.

<comment><USER39> Go++</comment></comment></comment>