Millennials may never be as rich as their parents - <AUTHOR> https://amp.businessinsider.com/1980s-millennials-wealth-the-great-recession-2018-5 <comment><USER2> As a millennial who's started their own business and been very active in moving my work life forward, I'd say a lot of millennials just have no clue how the real world works in regards to hard work + lots of failure => maybe success.

Many believe they are owed absurd luxuries from society and believe that all people who are financially independent / business owners are privileged evil people who took advantage of others. Complaining seems to be more mainstream than taking legitimate action to improve ones life / society in general.

I'm very much a fan of the rhetoric behind "Being a millennial is great because it's so easy to be better than the entirety of the millennial generation".

</comment><comment><USER3> It's interesting how people see lives as an outsider - I see many who are paid well yet are unhappy and complain they are poor all the times. I have been living in the last 10 years in the US (near the St Louis area) as an international student.

Some of the complaints are true, for example, housing has become very expensive. Part of what to blame is immigrants/international students (especially ones with rich parents in undergraduate) who drive up demands for land and housing.

But on the other hand, I know many millennial friends -- females and males -- who complained they "can't cook" and would eat out every meal and "food is very expensive." That "can't cook" disability is especially common among American friends for some reason. I know friends who work at Walmart who take home $1300 per month and have cell phone plans with unlimited everything for $120 per month because they can't live without a "good phone." Same for having pets, taking credit card loans, car payments, Netflix subscriptions, game consoles, dresses, cosmetics, non-GMO food, fancy gadgets, etc. When a phone or a laptop breaks, they say that's a piece of junk and throw it away to buy a new one. And at the end of the month, they ask where the money went. Sometimes I think because some people think they are entitled to the "lifestyle" they have now.

While I don't think it's fair to say everything has to stay the same, but I have seen and know people who don't take those things for granted in grad school. I see some people had depression, yet they didn't get a dog as a companion because they knew they couldn't afford a dog. When a laptop broke, they would try to ask a friend to fix it.

Yet, I think you would rarely hear a person complaining they couldn't afford a dog, you only hear people who have dogs and complain that "dogs are expensive" "people who have dogs are discriminated against" when it comes to housing, and they don't "make enough money." You hear people who complained they had to throw the laptop away to the trash can because it breaks after 2 years and they got ripped off for a piece of shit, and can't afford a "good" (aka expensive) new one. You hear people who dumped their phones in the toilet and are like "I _just_ know Apple and iPhones, and I like blue bubbles, don't ask me to buy any cheap shit," and at the same time "I don't make enough." You don't usually hear the person who rocks their 5 year old secondhand Android phone with a broken screen complaining about not having money to buy another phone.

Sometimes I wonder: Did their parents not cook at home ever? Did their parents change cars every 5 years and phones every 1.5? Did their parents throw a computer away because they spilled coffee on it? Did their parents _only_ use Apple because they _only_ know Apple? Did their parents never buy secondhand products?

The entitled are the ones who tend to complain the most about money. On the other hand, I see many who see life as self-sufficient, live humbly and enjoy life for whatever they have. The unprecedented amount of advertisement and social media might have contributed to that sense of entitlement. Keeping up with the Joneses is hard, who would have thought?

<comment><USER4> I agree with a lot of what you say. people waste money on dumb shit, for no good reason, and that's a terrible habit.

But:

>> I see some people had depression, yet they didn't get a dog as a companion because they knew they couldn't afford a dog.

This isn't entitlement. People do deserve some things in life. A dog for a depressed person in a isolated society seems like below basics, i would say.

And if the economic system can't even provide those basics, especially given all the tools technology have given it, maybe the problem is in that economic system?

<comment><USER3> I agree with you that the example is quite extreme if a dog is what is really needed to treat the depression. But on the other hand, there are other ways that a person can solve a problem without having a financial strain. Here the problem is being isolated, depressed. They can go out, make friends, volunteer, work out, invest in a new relationship. Maybe there exist people who none of those actions would help or applicable to them, and the few solutions left are getting a dog or taking drugs. Then, in that case, you can blame that it's not their basic needs being met.

But I personally know many who are depressed temporarily because they just broke up and they always wanted a dog. Therefore, as the doctor suggests, they get a note from a doctor to get a dog and shove it to the face of the current landlord (and in less than a year, get kicked out and have to find a far away and expensive place from work that allows dogs). Did the doctor tell them that the only solution is to get a dog? I doubt so. To me, that's an excuse to get a dog, not a necessity to treat depression.

<comment><USER4> All your points are from the view of a personal behaviour in a given world. And possibly this is the better way to act.

But the alternative view, of seeing the all powerful economic system failing to provide people as something as basic as a dog, and viewing this as a big failure may also be true.

<comment><USER3> What is a basic need? Something that you can't live without. A bare minimum that you can live with: Clean water, food, internet access, education, safety, housing, healthcare, a mattress, a fan in the summer and a heater in the winter, a mean to get to work are all basic needs. In most parts of the US, a driveable old car that doesn't break down every month is a basic need; a new, very safe, very reliable car is a luxury. Old people might be able to argue a dog being a basic need. But young non-disabled people who can go out and make friends saying I absolutely have to have a dog, I think, is pushing the definition of a basic need way too far. A dog is definitely a luxury to me, especially in sub/urban areas.

Maybe your (and my) parents used to spend very little for a dog and we have to spend a fortune now, but it doesn't make having a dog a basic need. It's just as good of an argument as they used to dream about a projector and now you can get one for $200. The dynamics of having things changes: Being able to get something cheap doesn't make it a basic need.

I am speaking as a dogs lover and the only reason I don't have a dog now is that I don't think I can afford a dog.

<comment><USER5> > _Maybe your (and my) parents used to spend very little for a dog and we have > to spend a fortune now, but it doesn 't make having a dog a basic need._

What exactly has changed about the cost of having a dog? Veterinary care has not drastically increased in price so far as I know, so what about having a dog is so expensive?

My last dog was "expensive", but I'm acutely aware of the fact that most of the expenses were things my parents simply did not do: buy a specialty breed from a reputable breeder for >$1000, have a dog walker visit daily, feed the dog expensive food, lots of toys and expensive treats.

Growing up, my dog was from a local breeder who probably ran a puppy mill. He ate pretty cheap food that came in a 30lb bag from the grocery store. He played in the yard with a tennis ball. No one came to walk him because he was outside all the time anyway. If I cared for my dog the way my parents did, the costs would be comparable.

I fully agree that having a dog is not a basic need, though.

<comment><USER3> >What exactly has changed about the cost of having a dog?

If you have land, I suppose having a dog is not more expensive. That's what my parents had, and I don't.

Part of what makes having a dog expensive for people who rent is the fact that they have to rent. When you have a dog you can kiss goodbye at least half of your rental options. The ones that allow dogs charge a premium on top of limited options.

Plus, even when you have land, when you have a dog and wants to take a vacation you have to take care of the dog. When you ask/hire a someone to take care of the dog, you have to pay them, etc.

<comment><USER5> None of this is different from our parents though. Landlords didn't want dogs in the 70s/80s/90s either. Nor did dogs take care of themselves when their owners went on vacation.

Lifestyle expectations and the way we treat dogs is different. People who grew up with outdoor dogs in the suburbs now want to live in urban apartments with indoor dogs. But that's kind of like saying cars are expensive because you have to rent a parking spot. You could see it that way, or recognize that as a cost of urban living instead.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> It hurts that this is linked directly to AMP.

<comment><USER7> [http://uk.businessinsider.com/1980s-millennials-wealth- the-g...](http://uk.businessinsider.com/1980s-millennials-wealth-the-great- recession-2018-5?r=US&IR=T)

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Millenials in China will.

<comment><USER9> Are you sure there are millenials in China? The generations concept is strongly defined by the context of USA. Only recently the idea of generations started spreading to the rest of the western world.

I don't think this article even considers anyone but USA.</comment></comment>


Using Static Analysis to Find Bugs in the Real World - <AUTHOR> http://cacm.acm.org/magazines/2010/2/69354-a-few-billion-lines-of-code-later/fulltext

<comment><AUTHOR> This is a re-post. I just wanted to find the old discussion again. It's a good article in any case, read it, if you haven't already.

I appreciate pointers to the old discussion on HN about it. Thanks!

</comment><comment><USER2> The following Google query (excuse my minimal effort including leaving the protocol designation) might be a place to start. I saw a few interesting- looking results. Be sure to click through one one of them where the top comment links to a prior HN post.

        site:news.ycombinator.com http://cacm.acm.org/magazines/2010/2/69354-a-few-billion-lines-of-code-later

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! Doesn't work for this one though, it seems.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: What are your favorite examples of great SAAS products? - <AUTHOR> I'm looking for some inspiration and ideas. What are some SAAS products that you use very often, or that are just awesome and really well done?<p>Ideally bootstrapped, and made by 1-3 people, but not necessarily. <comment><USER2> Drip (getdrip.com) is really phenomenal in terms of amount of functionality and polish for a small bootstrapped team. Ditto Postmark (an entirely different part of the email problem space, incidentally!)

ChurnBuster and Stunning have a stupidly high amount of business leverage to lines of code required to operate the business, and are among the best SaaS- for-SaaS you'll find out there.

Visual Website Optimizer (VWO) might be the most impressive SaaS shipped by a bootstrapped solo (originally) entrepreneur that I'm immediately aware of. The current version is also pretty well done, especially compared to the general level that marketing-oriented software operates at.

Products which are just great products: MailChimp, TaxAct, Honeybadger, Dead Man's Snitch (does one thing well), etc.

I collect SaaS like some kids collect baseball cards so I could go on for a while, and don't mean to slight the two dozen or so other ones I'm passing up here. Tried to skew towards more niche things that many HNers wouldn't have used before; I mean, you already know Gmail and Basecamp are great.

</comment><comment><USER3> The last 5 I used today:

\- Help Scout builds awesome helpdesk software

\- Feedly a perfect RSS/feed reader

\- New Relic the best APM (and more) platform

\- Ghost Inspector is perfect for automated browser testing

\- and Runscope for API monitoring and testing.</comment>


Ask HN: Hostname Conventions for Distributed Systems? - <AUTHOR>

I've gone through a variety of hostnaming strategies over the years, and the one I use now is <service><##> (eg zookeeper01).
With distributed systems in particular, but any system in general, boxes can come and go, and I hate having holes in my names (eg zookeeper01, 02, 04, 05, 06). That, and by choosing the number of leading zeroes, you're guessing at the max number of servers this service will be served by.
How do people manage this? I'm thinking something like <service>-<random_token> (eg zookeeper-fi2) would make sense and be more scalable, but I'm interested in what strategies other people use.
(I'd create a poll but I don't have the 200 karma) =/ <comment><USER2> I like to think of everything as ephemeral. You can always write software for a new box to "fill in" holes when systems are replaced. I like this because it helps me when I assign roles or node based redundancy to my boxes.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah, the tokenized strategy is kinda going after the ephemeral nature of the boxes, which is why I like it. Do you use the numbered approach?

<comment><USER2> Yes. Numbered approach, which I like because I can pack data in. So for instance: dbserver_01_n01. Which is the first node of the first db server. I have servers that are mostly used in read only and others which are write only. But their roles switch. We do all of the writing (not users), so it makes sense to split the namespacing this way.</comment></comment></comment>


Wanted - Home Computers to Join in Research on Artificial Life - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/29/science/29grid.html?_r=1 <comment><USER2> Modeling a system theoretically capable of evolution is a great idea. However, I think EvoGrid would be better off modeling a system with some simple interactions rather than the real world biochemistry. The real world biochemistry is very redundant and the chances are higher that a simpler system would produce evolving life on the same computer power.

<comment><USER3> I agree wholeheartedly. However, there's a problem. To date, the only known physical system that has produced life is the one we are made of. To extend on that, we definitely have more knowledge now than before about the basic chemical interactions that make up many of the component molecules we're all built from. Despite this, we still haven't pieced together a bottom to top knowledge base of how you get from amino acids to dna/rna to functional, if simple, self-replicating systems.

In the last couple of years, advancements have been made in getting DNA and RNA to replicate independently in a test tube. Similarly, and more important, there have been at least a couple of experiments where completely synthetic RNA molecules (meaning manufactured and using amino acids not found in living creatures) have shown limited self-replication in test tube environments.

Other research efforts have been studying how certain collections of lipid (fat) molecules can form porous membranes, allowing some molecules to enter while blocking others. This is what our cell membranes do.

From the other direction, projects are in progress that are attempting to knock out all the un-necessary genes in a simple bacteria to create the simplest cell possible. Craig Venter is pretty far ahead on this. [http://www.ted.com/talks/craig_venter_is_on_the_verge_of_cre...](http://www.ted.com/talks/craig_venter_is_on_the_verge_of_creating_synthetic_life.html)

As part of that project(I think) they have created a fully synthetic genome. The next part is to put it into an artificial cell and get it replicating.

So we have approaches from both the top and bottom that are seeking to meet in the middle.

I think the EvoGrid, if they are actually trying to simulate real biochemistry, is a very valid approach to help solve this problem. We're probably very close to understanding how to go from basic biochemistry all the way up. An artificial simulation that incorporates known physical properties might offer some additional insights on how this works.

My belief is that once we have a rough draft of a theory on how it all fits together that can be experimentally repeated, it will provide a firm starting point for figuring out the mathematics behind why it works. Think of it as being similar to the Standard Model of physics, but for life. Once we know one set of rules that works, then it opens up the way for experimenters to setup massive simulations with all different kinds of parameters to explore the full range of possibilities for life.

One very interesting extension of this idea is that once we know for sure how carbon-based life arises from the proverbial molecular soup, it lets us start experimenting with other elements. We can examine if its possible for life to arise in previously dismissed areas of the universe. We could determine how likely it is for silicon-based biochemistry to work. It also gives us the opportunity to engineer life using elements that really can never get together in the regular old universe due to natual laws.

<comment><USER2> I like your point that it's necessary to figure out the math of replication first and then apply the knowledge in design of alternative computer-based replicators.

In addition to the approaches from top and bottom there is one more (bottom- bottom) approach: turn an existing cellular automation like Conway's Game of Life into an evolving computer-based replicator. As far as I know, all existing examples of cellular automation can only produce replicating systems. They are not evolving because they don't have selection. The moment one of these systems is tweaked so that it would also have a possibility to mutate and endure natural (artificial would be a better word here) selection, there will be evolving life in a computer.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Project site: <http://www.evogrid.org/index.php/Main_Page> They're looking for volunteer developers, don't seem to have anything running as yet.</comment>


As many as 1M sites imperiled by dangerous bug in WordPress plugin - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/security/2015/04/as-many-as-1-million-sites-imperiled-by-dangerous-bug-in-wordpress-plugin/

<comment><USER2> tl;dr (excerpts from Sucuri's blog post):

"The issue lies in the way WP-Super-Cache would display information stored in cache file's key..."

"....the $details[ 'key' ] is directly appended to the page's content, without being sanitized first..."</comment>


Show HN: Proby - Task monitoring made simple - <AUTHOR> http://probyapp.com Hello HN.
We were occasionally running into issues where our scheduled tasks would not start when expected.  There were many reasons for this (environment changes, lock files not being cleaned up properly, etc).  So, we created a simple application to monitor our scheduled tasks, and notify us if they didn't start or finish when expected.  Now we're notified immediately (via email or SMS) when a scheduled task isn't kicked off when it is supposed to.
The app also keeps track of the run times for past task executions, which has been useful in tracking down unexpected changes in task run times.
Proby is currently in closed beta, meaning we're letting people in slowly.  It is currently running on a VPS with a few other services.  We want to see if there is an interest in the app before purchasing better/additional hardware.
Use of the app is currently free.  At some point, when it is out of beta, we may begin charging a small fee for the service (although I'd imagine we'd have a free plan of some sort).  But, all of that is still up in the air.
What do you think? <comment><AUTHOR> Hello HN.

We were occasionally running into issues where our scheduled tasks would not start when expected. There were many reasons for this (environment changes, lock files not being cleaned up properly, etc). So, we created a simple application to monitor our scheduled tasks, and notify us if they didn't start or finish when expected. Now we're notified immediately (via email or SMS) when a scheduled task isn't kicked off when it is supposed to.

The app also keeps track of the run times for past task executions, which has been useful in tracking down unexpected changes in task run times.

Proby is currently in closed beta, meaning we're letting people in slowly. It is currently running on a VPS with a few other services. We want to see if there is an interest in the app before purchasing better/additional hardware.

Use of the app is currently free. At some point, when it is out of beta, we may begin charging a small fee for the service (although I'd imagine we'd have a free plan of some sort). But, all of that is still up in the air.

What do you think?

<comment><USER2> Ultimately for me, this would replace logs and email notification that are supported pretty well out of the box with cron. It is nice to have multiple scheduled tasks consolidated with a dashboard style interface.

I am confused with the selecting a timezone but all of the times being represented in UTC?

Also the representation of the cron schedule (7 * * * *) which I think could be represented in a more intuitive way. I have been looking at crontabs for years and every time I have to second guess myself.

This seems like a service that I would never want any downtime with, how do you manage that?

<comment><AUTHOR> The time zone setting for the task is used to determine when Proby should be expecting a notification from that task. We're still thinking of the best way to display the times on the dashboard. Listing all of the tasks in the same time zone makes them easily sortable based on the last execution time (we could still support this sort order while displaying the tasks in their configured time zone...but it may be more confusing if each time was in a different time zone). We've also thought about listing all of the tasks in the user's time zone. Jury's still out on this.

Representing the cron schedule in some other format is also feedback we have received before. I just haven't found a way to cleanly and concisely display the schedule in a format other than the cron format.

Regarding the downtime...we don't manage that right now. We're running on a single VPS. The goal of the beta is to determine if there is enough interest (and potential financial support) to deploy Proby to a more robust and fault tolerant setup.

Thanks for the feedback!

<comment><USER3> totally agree on the cron format. we could take a look at cronwtf as a cron to english translator. (<http://cronwtf.github.com/> and <https://github.com/technoweenie/cronwtf>)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Reminds me that I need to build something in Nagios to do this for my cronjobs.

The idea of sending my cronjobs to someone else to do this creeps me about (perhaps irrationally), but either way, thanks for the reminder I need to do this myself :)

</comment><comment><USER5> Very nice, but one suggestion, the 'dashboard' view might benefit from showing a sequence of graphics that show either the status of the last x number of runs:

      X X X ok ok ok X ok

obviously color-coded to stand out, or at a minimum show the time elapsed since last successful run.

This way provides a real at-a-glance way to see one or more broken tasks.

<comment><AUTHOR> Good suggestion, thanks!

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> It looks pretty nice ... and adding the start and finish notifications doesn't seem too hard.

But it seems to me that if Doug really meant what he said below, he would have got up, walked down the hallway and given John a real pat on the back ;)

<comment><USER7> heh, well, that's a bit harder /c most of our team is remote, but you're right. John, you get a cookie on Friday!

<comment><USER6> Cool! ... I too sit in my home-office and often think about how much of my day was spent in worthless activity at the office. Sounds like you guys have a great company culture ... I had to quit that job to become enlightened.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Nice work John! My favorite feature is seeing a graph of historical run time. Really helpful to figure out how a job is doing performance wise.

</comment><comment><USER8> Looks great. Is that your own design or based on a template from Themeforest or similar? If a template, do you mind saying which one?

<comment><AUTHOR> The design was done in house at Signal by Drew Myler. That boy can make a pile of horse shit look sexy.</comment></comment>


Omega-3: Intervention for childhood behavioral problems? (2015) - <AUTHOR> https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2015/05/150515134827.htm <comment><USER2> Endocannabinoids are produced by the body when Omega-3 is consumed.

Too much Omega-6 seems to limit the body's ability to utilize Omega-3.

Reducing inflammation (which is good for hyper-inflammation, which pollution can cause or worsen) is one function of the endocannabinoid system (ECS).

A search for `Omega-3 endonannabinoids` on GScholar: [https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C43&q=ome...](https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C43&q=omega-3+endocannabinoids)

The Omega-3 wikipedia page lists a number of foods sorted by Omega-3 content in descending order: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Omega-3_fatty_acid#Dietary_sou...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Omega-3_fatty_acid#Dietary_sources)

The top two sources (flax and hemp) are plant based and thus have ALA but not the DHA or EPA that some animal sources have.

Fish don't produce Omega-3: they eat algae and then the PUFAs (polyunsaturated fatty acids) are stored in fat.

Fish and cheap fish oil may have other contaminants due to pollution in our lakes, streams, and oceans.

It's important to eat a balanced diet. Eating anti-inflammatory (and anti- oxidant) foods is one way to regulate hyperinflammation.

Any form of combustion (burning carbon matter) produces carbon monoxide. CO is terrible for most living things in part because the unbound oxygen binds to whatever it finds (oxidization).

</comment><comment><USER3> I wonder how much of the association of poverty with crime can be explained by poor nutrition.

<comment><USER4> Poor nutrition, more likely to live in more heavily polluted areas. Can't be a good combination. We now have a pretty good understanding of how bad leaded gasoline was. Maybe in another fifty years we'll look back at junk food and wonder "how could we have been so stupid"?

I think it would be wise to increase funding of nutritional science. Many of the most basic controversies remain unresolved (fat, sugar, salt). The most bizarre conditions can sometimes be treated using supplements of seemingly unrelated nutrients (behavioural problems: omega 3, migraine: b2). But sample sizes are always small, double blind studies are hard and rare, there are tons of confounding factors.

<comment><USER5> > I think it would be wise to increase funding of nutritional science. Many of > the most basic controversies remain unresolved (fat, sugar, salt).

Yep, just be careful. We are just now recovering from the phase where one actual scientists mislead others to think that fat was bad and sugar wasn't :-/

In the eighties many children died because of SIDS because of one scientist who convinced others that infants shouldn't sleep the way they had always slept - face up.

etc etc.

<comment><USER6> Yes completely! Medicine has done wonders but also has some serious skeletons in the closet when it comes to medical reversals.

I've found this book to be fascinating and super enlightening about what has gone wrong even in recent history.

[https://www.amazon.com/Ending-Medical-Reversal-Improving- Out...](https://www.amazon.com/Ending-Medical-Reversal-Improving- Outcomes/dp/1421417723)

I'm hopeful one day that fat demonization will be formally reversed.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Omega-3 is not a single thing. There are three important acids, ALA, EPA, and DHA. The first can be found in some plant sources, I mostly get it from flax, soy, and kale.

The latter two are only found in fish, and for the vegetarians, algae. A few people have mentioned cod liver oil. I supplement with an algae oil, it contains the omega-3s and I believe avoids the worry of toxic metals.

<comment><USER8> > avoids the worry of toxic metals.

And, more importantly, of overfishing. When I looked into supplements a year ago l, the algae capsules named "Opti3" had the highest EPA & DHA / Cost ratio and are fully vegan.

<comment><USER9> Yup, go straight to the source (where fish get theirs)

<comment><USER10> The fish or marine invertebrates synthesize EPA and DHA by consuming microalgae that {1}do not contain both.

{1} [https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/24152561](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/24152561)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Wow, this is amazing. My parents use to give me 2 or 3 capsules of cod liver oil daily growing up (since I was 4 or 5). I didn't know realize it had such a huge health benefit. The other daily supplement I took was liquid Feroglobin, an iron supplement.

I'm feeling thankful that they were so health-conscious.

<comment><USER12> How is cod liver oil made? Is it extracted from cods livers? :)

If yes, is there a risk of heavy metal poisoning?

<comment><USER13> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cod_liver_oil#Manufacture](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cod_liver_oil#Manufacture).

And the liver is a filter, so heavy metals and PCBs do accumulate there, yes. I wouldn't know whether that is a big concern.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> "The researchers caution that this is still preliminary work in uncovering the role nutrition plays in the link between brain development and antisocial behavior. The changes seen in the one-year period of the experiment may not last, and the results may not be generalizable outside the unique context of Mauritius."

Wish articles/research papers/etc would put such warnings at the beginning of the article rather than towards the end.

Also if omega-3 is truly a miracle "food" then can't we simply compare the populations that consume a lot of omega-3 ( fish primarily ) vs those who don't? Can't we compare nations that consume a lot of fish vs those that don't? Are one more antisocial than the other? Are the children better behaved in one vs the other? Are the brains healthier/more developed in one compared to the other? If the answer was yes, maybe then we should do further research on omega-3?

<comment><USER15> Another study (from 2006): [https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2006/oct/17/prisonsandp...](https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2006/oct/17/prisonsandprobation.ukcrime) "Omega-3, junk food and the link between violence and what we eat ... Research with British and US offenders suggests nutritional deficiencies may play a key role in aggressive behaviour ... Demar has been taking part in a clinical trial at the US government's National Institutes for Health, near Washington. The study is investigating the effects of omega-3 fatty acid supplements on the brain, and the pills that have effected Demar's "miracle" are doses of fish oil. The results emerging from this study are at the cutting edge of the debate on crime and punishment. In Britain we lock up more people than ever before. Nearly 80,000 people are now in our prisons, which reached their capacity this week. But the new research calls into question the very basis of criminal justice and the notion of culpability. It suggests that individuals may not always be responsible for their aggression. Taken together with a study in a high-security prison for young offenders in the UK, it shows that violent behaviour may be attributable at least in part to nutritional deficiencies. The UK prison trial at Aylesbury jail showed that when young men there were fed multivitamins, minerals and essential fatty acids, the number of violent offences they committed in the prison fell by 37%. Although no one is suggesting that poor diet alone can account for complex social problems, the former chief inspector of prisons Lord Ramsbotham says that he is now "absolutely convinced that there is a direct link between diet and antisocial behaviour, both that bad diet causes bad behaviour and that good diet prevents it." ..."

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Oh, so cool, from first impressions it looks like solid good scientific method at work:

\- 200 participants, which is not super many, but already something to at least start talking about in terms of statistics & non-fluke probability;

\- your gold standard of: "put forward a theory, then run an experiment that can falsify it" (vs. e.g. retroactive)

\- according to the article's title, randomized, double-blind, and placebo- controlled.

I didn't read the actual article, and I'm not a scientist myself or good enough in statistics to be able to validate it further for no errors, but the initial signals already make me so happy that in nutritioning there are people trying to do good science! <3

<comment><USER17> I've seen similar studies bouncing around. The results are always kinda promising, maybe.

The important thing here is fish burps.

Omega 3 pills are relatively inexpensive with the really only negative side effect being fish burps. So maybe it does work for aggression, antisocial behavior (heart disease, protection from Nuero cognitive disorders later in life), or maybe it doesn't. But if all it costs is a few bucks and some fish burps, isn't it worth trying?

</comment></comment><comment> jerome-jh Omega-3 can also be had from unprocessed vegetable oils, especially colza/rapeseed. But because not only omega-3 matters, a mix of olive and colza oils is advised for a good balance of omega-3-6-9.

I have not read the full article. It just reminds me of my mother's view where food decides everything else.

<comment><USER7> EPA and DHA can be had from plants? Which ones? Rapeseed only has ALA. As far as I know, those other omega-3s are only found in fish or algae oil.

<comment><USER18> ALA converts to EPA and DHA to some extent.

[https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/9637947](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/9637947)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> It's important to note that not all omega 3 is equal; plant derived omega 3 (ALA) is hard for the body to synthesize and use where animal derived omega 3 (EPA & DHA) is easier to synthesize for use.</comment>


The Mystery of Fogbank (2009) - <AUTHOR> https://www.weeklystandard.com/jonathan-v-last/the-fog-of-war <comment><USER2> One thing the article doesn't say was that early attempts to recreate Fogbank failed because the materials used to make it were too pure. They had to put back in the impurities to get the same product.

(I read about this in a Navy magazine when my son and I slept on this ship

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Little_Rock_(CL-92)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Little_Rock_\(CL-92\))

as a Cub Scout activity.)

My guess about Fogbank is that it might not do much at all from a weapons physics standpoint, but it is highly rigid so that the weapon maintains its dimensions throughout the process of launch and atmospheric reentry, never mind the long time of sitting in the launch tube.

Aerogels are fun materials to play with since they are amazingly light and rigid; drop a piece on the floor and you hear a very high pitching ring thanks to that.

<comment><AUTHOR> At the risk of ending up at a black site. A literature review suggests that when it is used as an interstage material - FOGBANK acts as a lens i.e. it directs and focuses the neutron flux from the primary device and does something with the X-Rays produced to help trigger the secondary.

Whatever it does, it is an extremely critical component worth spending god knows how much money on.

<comment><USER3> IIRC, according to Richard Rhodes in 'Dark Sun', the key insight (with Teller and Ulam disputing who had it first) needed to make a true fusion bomb (as opposed to a boosted fission bomb) is that the fusion part has to be far enough separated, from the fission bomb that starts it, that it can do its thing before it is blasted apart by the shock wave from the fission bomb. That raises the problem of how to transfer energy from the fission bomb to the fusion part, and the solution is to surround the latter with something that will absorb some of the X-rays and vaporize, thus applying a very uniform compression of the fusion part. Wikipedia says that polystyrene foam was used in early bombs [1], and apparently polyethylene was used in the original Ivy Mike device. I have no idea whether this is actually the purpose of fogbank.

One problem with re-creating or replacing any special material critical to the weapons' functioning is that test-ban treaties forbid an end-to-end test of bombs using the new stuff.

Update: see also 'Speculation on Fogbank' [2]

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

[2] [https://www.armscontrolwonk.com/archive/201814/fogbank/](https://www.armscontrolwonk.com/archive/201814/fogbank/)

<comment><USER4> Thank you to yourself and the person you're replying to for an interesting thread (with links!).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Wikipedia on Fogbank:

 _in the words of former Oak Ridge general manager Dennis Ruddy, "The material is classified. Its composition is classified. Its use in the weapon is classified, and the process itself is classified."_

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

<comment><USER6> Interestingly...the first portion of the weekly standard article seems to pretty clearly match wikipedia.

I'm wondering who is plagiarizing whom?

<comment><USER7> See the references in the wikipedia article. Article came first it appears.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I am pretty sure it is not aerogel. The material has to be transparent for neutrons, lightweight, and immediately vaporizable to create radiation and/or ablation pressure. Styrofoam fits the bill; usual aerogels do not.

From what I know about the Stockpile Stewardship program, they had difficulties in recreating the exact composition (including impurities) of many weapon components, probably including the interstage — because the only way to make sure that new weapons and their replacement parts will work without tests (which are now banned) is to recreate everything to the smallest detail. So the problem is not manufacturing some exotic material, but recreating the exact composition and impurities.

<comment><USER9> This is a good point- imagine having to recreate, exactly, plastic foam manufacturing processes from decades earlier. How much shop tradition- "oh, yeah, the official design says we do this, but Bob over there figured out a clever trick that saves a lot of time and now we all do it instead"\- might you have to track down or rediscover?

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Related from 2017 and 2010:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15331731](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15331731)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1928233](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1928233)

</comment><comment><USER11> shame they didn't stockpile but I guess once you start stockpiling, its admitting you didn't mean to do START after all.

</comment><comment><USER4> > So what is Fogbank, anyway?...

>...But all of that hardly matters

Considering I felt compelled to read most of the article to find out what it is, I disagree. Just tell us upfront already.

<comment><USER12> Its a 0/2 flying wall that can't take or deal combat damage. What more do you need to know?

<comment><USER13> I signed up for an HN login to tell you how much I enjoyed this comment, brother.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Recalls Steven Wright:

"He told me that he had spent most of his life working on a research project for the government trying to find out

who financed the Pyramids.

He worked on it for 30 years, and they paid him an incredible amount of money. He told me he was pretty sure it was a guy named Eddie."

[https://jjkentala.typepad.com/blog/2010/01/steven- wrights-19...](https://jjkentala.typepad.com/blog/2010/01/steven- wrights-1986-hbo-special.html)</comment>


Is this game good enough to succeed in AppStore?     - <AUTHOR>

http://www.kongregate.com/games/davidmduarte/tzolkin <comment><USER2> It's polished, but the game does not have marketable unique features. i.e. it would only see success if the market were to go through a very long period where no or few new matching games are released.

Right now that market is congested with titles, and to break through the noise you would have to substantially raise scope and provide more content and IP(story, characters, elaborate level design, etc.) or more features(multiplayer, level editor, additional game dynamics like the RPG elements of Puzzle Quest et al.)

If you want to break through without raising scope, look for a niche that hasn't been well-covered, and prototype it a few times until you hit on one with a good dynamic.

For example, matching plus tower defense. Will it work? The examples I've seen are few and do it in the crudest way(minigame + minigame - never a recipe for success). Find a way to change their mechanics so that they integrate better, and you might strike gold. Even if you fail, you'll still accumulate design ideas that can be fed into the next game.

</comment><comment><USER3> Yep, the polish of the mechanics is there.

Maybe try to put something more significant inside the blocks, like a sci-fi theme (birds and pigs are popular too I hear :)

Fun to play.

</comment><comment><USER4> I actually played it for a while and it's actually kind of addicting.

</comment><comment><USER5> No one here will be able to tell you whether or not something will definitely succeed or not. The best way to find out is to try. Anyone that claims otherwise is full of it.

<comment><USER5> Not sure who downvoted me for this but I share the same sentiment being said here when I made this comment: <http://www.humbledmba.com/dont-give-bullshit- advice>

Think about all the times ideas like million dollar homepage and pet rocks pops up. People are quick to judge but never seem to see that what they think will succeed or fail is purely an opinion. You can't predict whether something will be a success or not for others.</comment></comment>


Study: carpooling apps could reduce traffic 3x in NYC - <AUTHOR> https://www.csail.mit.edu/ridesharing_reduces_traffic_300_percent <comment><USER2> I find the focus on congestion within the transport space to be perplexing. I'm guessing it is to do with the visibility of congestion. Waze recently did a survey and identified the Netherlands as the best place to drive ([https://www.waze.com/driverindex](https://www.waze.com/driverindex)).

The Netherlands is also the only western country with a negative obesity trend expected to hit 8% by 2030, currently at 10% vs the UK's 25%. The USA I believe is getting close to 36%.

We can try and blame our diets, however our built environment is creating a public health crisis of inoordinate scale. The car is very much to blame for this.

The car and car sharing is not the answer to traffic. Creating segregated end to end cycle networks with good junctions enabling people to choose to ride up to 5 miles to school/work is absolutely critical to avert this public health crisis.

<comment><USER3> Much of the academic research I have read (Check out Good Calories, Bad Calories by Gary Taubes) shows the exact opposite to be true.

Our diets accounts for dramatically much higher cause of obesity than our environment and specifically cars.

<comment><USER4> Diet definitely has a bigger impact than exercise, but isn't there still a correlation between more urban areas and lower obesity even when controlling for poverty?

There may be other factors to urban, non-car-based living besides the extra physical activity that encourages lower weight. It's maybe as simple as without a car you can't go to Costco and stock up on huge sacks of unhealthy foods in one go -- beats me, I'd be interested to learn more.

<comment><USER5> On my phone so I can't find the right metastudy but yes, there is an inverse correlation between urban lifestyles and obesity rates but it's a tenuous one. In cities like Atlanta, St. Louis, Montgomery, and San Antonio the difference in obesity rates from rural and suburban areas in the same state is almost nonexistent but Houston, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and New York see much lower rates in obesity. (within city limits, their metropolitan areas are a while different animal).

I have a feeling that it's mostly due to a hybrid peer pressure/economic effect. When you're in a group of friends and the majority want to go to a healthier restaurant or everyone in your neighborhood goes to the local mom and pop grocery store instead of Safeway, it becomes a self reinforcing pressure to eat healthy. More healthy restaurants will open and more small grocery stores will be built to serve individual neighborhoods while market share is slowly taken from unhealthy restaurants and chain groceries. Eventually, a significant portion of people who would otherwise have trouble controlling their weight stick with the healthier diet out of inertia or convenience.

I also saw a study (although not a very conclusive one) that suggested that discrimination could play a part. A higher cost of living in cities means that a lot more jobs that can support the lifestyle have a physical appearance component to them. Salespeople in high end boutiques, consultants, etc are economically more viable in denser areas and if clients or employers discriminate based on looks, there will be fewer job opportunities for the obese, making it harder for them to live in urban areas.

<comment><USER6> Do you know if there's a study that breaks this down by population density instead? My intuition (having lived for 6 years without a car in Atlanta) is that obesity levels aren't going to be significantly different in a sprawling, low-density city like Atlanta, where everyone drives, but in a dense, walkable, and public-transit friendly city like NYC you will see a difference.

<comment><USER5> Not off the top of my head but there are plenty of such studies. That still wouldn't give a clear picture because Los Angeles is also a low density car centric city but because it's in California, healthy eating is culturally more prevalent and fresh food is easier to come by.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> In India I experienced low tech ride sharing. You stand at an intersection and a three wheeler asks you where you're going. You get in, and the driver heads to a major intersection near your destination.

Along the way he asks other people standing at intersections if they are going his way, and if they are they pile in. The more people he stuffs into his three wheeler the more money he makes per trip.

It was an unpleasant ride.

<comment><USER8> +1 for 'it was an unpleasant ride'. I think that's the biggest friction point many ride sharing apps face.

<comment><USER9> Subways are also an unpleasant ride at the moment. But if it is cheap enough, why not?

<comment><USER10> Subways are primarily unpleasant because of the (worst parts of the) clientele, not because of the rider density. Just the simple act of requiring riders to have a credit card will get rid of >90% of the unpleasant co-riders.

<comment><USER11> What is the point of public transportation if you don't want the public to use it?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> New York City includes Brooklyn, Queens, Bronx and Staten Island as well. Misleading title and perhaps incomplete study if footprint of cabs is not included from those remaining boroughs in this study. If you live in Manhattan, then you don't use cabs as much within Manhattan because subways cover Manhattan pretty well and travel times in cabs are hellish comparing to subway commute. You often use cabs when you commute to other boroughs from Manhattan because, for example, Brooklyn and Queens do not have great subway network.

<comment><USER13> I didn't know how big New York City was until I went from Central Park (North side) to the Brooklyn Botanic Garden... walking... never again!

<comment><USER14> For my 30th bday, some friends and I walked around the perimeter of Manhattan. It took just over 20 hours, but that's mostly because we stopped several at bars along the way.

<comment><USER15> There's a yearly event that does this, called The Great Saunter. A friend of mine did it last year, and we met her and walked for a mile or so.

It took her and most others around 12 hours; I can easily believe 20 if you're stopping at bars along the way :P

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> And a grid of regular bus service could replace every car in LA. That'd be a harder sell though.

<comment><USER17> Yeah but I bet you can't name 15 cities larger than LA that depend on an outdated tech like trains. When's the last time you saw one of those at TechCrunch Disrupt?

Seriously though, this is a solved problem everywhere but major US cities. Paris - which once loved cars - has totally changed over to being bus, bike, and train promoting, and it works.

<comment><USER18> There are cultural reasons why what works in Europe won't work in most of the US.

If I can't take my car or park for a reasonable fee, I simply won't go somewhere and most of the people I know are the same.

<comment><USER19> I see this in Tokyo. Americans just stuck at home, stranded and helpless because of their culturally reasons. Oh no wait they just use the awesome public transport system. But it's very difficult for them to enjoy such efficience because...you..know...culture

<comment><USER20> Huh? Americans don't have a cultural aversion to using world class public transit when in a place like Tokyo. They have a cultural aversion to altering their cities in the radical ways that'd be necessary to build a functional public transit. They call this NIMBY.

<comment><USER21> It's not really even cultural. It is a socio-economic and technological issue. Every rich country that settled new territory or experienced massive growth after the invention of the car has cities that are spread out.

Europe was already developed pre-car. Asia had huge population growth when their people generally couldn't afford cars.

This is why US cities that were big before the Model T have a dense core with decent public transit. And cities that exploded after the Model T are basically suburbs of themselves, LA, Houston, Jacksonville. It's always why newly formed European suburbs often are just as car reliant as US suburbs. Though it's worth noting that some European suburbs existed before cars and at the time were just outlying cities that now got subsumed into the metro area.

If Japan had a new city naturally develop in an open area, it would a lot more like LA than Tokyo.

<comment><USER22> DC in the US is a solid counter example as low density city older than the car. Density is based on a huge range of factors with for example geography playing a significant role. Another huge factor is they type of industry. Garment factory's for example have historically had very high density's where Iron Works are much lower density.

<comment><USER21> DC is a pretty good counter example. As you say the type of work matters, and DC has never an industrial town. It was also a planned city. It was intended to not be dense from the start. Something like 40% of DC is federal government land.

DC also is doing a decent job at using mass transit to re-densify areas. The orange line corridor is making suburbs become dense. That is pretty unique in America.

<comment><USER23> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_cities_b...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_cities_by_population_density#Incorporated_places_with_a_density_of_over_10.2C000_people_per_square_mile)

For a city that was "intended to not be dense from the start", it sure is up there as far as density and would be #16 on the list if it counted as a part of a state.

DC is incredibly dense by American standards and is actually one of the very few places in the US that you can get by without a car (which is, of course, priced into exorbitant rents and property prices)

I guess what I meant to say is that the grandparent comment is blatantly false. DC _is_ a high density city and is much more like a European city in that it combines decent public transport and medium-rise developments.

<comment><USER22> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paris](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paris)

      DC has 158.1 km2 with 681,170 people or 4,308 people per km ^2.

      Paris has 105.4 km2 with 2,265,886 people or 250,065 people per km2

In other words DC has less than 2% of Paris's population density. Note, Paris is a turist destination so many shot's look like DC, but this is the real city: [http://i.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix/2015/04/15/17/278DF7CF0000057...](http://i.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix/2015/04/15/17/278DF7CF00000578-3032452-image-m-8_1429115791409.jpg)

<comment><USER18> DC would have a much greater population density if developers were permitted to build upwards.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Height_of_Buildings_Act_of_191...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Height_of_Buildings_Act_of_1910)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> This is great news, until we look at the open space and say, "Wow! Now we can fit so many more commuters on these streets."

Nature abhors a vacuum.

Not to denigrate the science, I respect the math greatly. It's just that NYC culture is about trying to cram the most things in one place. Few open resources like Central Park remain so very long.

<comment><USER25> But nature seems to just not abhor the "vacuum" left in cars filled with just a single rider hard enough to fill that. This is about finding a lower bound for the vehicles needed to fulfill demand with multi-occupancy.

What I would find even more interesting is if they used the same simulation to determine the number of cars required to fulfill that demand _without_ multi- occupancy, but with the same level of dispatch smarts and similarly strict optimization for the lowest number of cars possible.

Why would this be interesting? There are not 13000 cabs because less would not be able to meet the existing demand, there are 13000 cabs because the market is big enough to support them (and decisions regarding the volume of the medallion system are surely not done with the optimization vigor as researchers looking for an impressive lower bound in a simulation). Hailable transportation is a very special market where more supply only increases instant hailability, but does not have the conventional effect of decreasing prices. And because more supply means more congestion, it can even _increase_ prices (when rates have a time component on top of a distance component) and demand (when permanent congestion makes it unattractive to have a personal vehicle).

<comment><USER26> > But nature seems to just not abhor the "vacuum" left in cars filled with > just a single rider hard enough to fill that.

I'm not sure exactly what this sentence is supposed to mean, but I assure you as an NYC outer-borough resident, if you created a traffic vacuum in manhattan I would be driving there filling the vacuum by the end of the day.

<comment><USER24> I believe what they're saying refers to the empty 3 seats you might find in a singly-occupied 4 passenger car, as is often seen commuting.

And I basically agree. There is still space in many passenger vehicles. And the vacuum is not strong to get those filled, because it is not infinite or even powerful enough, but there are people trying to fill those spaces to some extent. That was some of the original pitch of the "sharing economy..." That if you had "extra space in your car or house," you could fill it with a rider or a roomer.

It's just that managing the complexities of the extra space in a vehicle is very difficult, particularly in comparison to the simplicity of filling any empty Manhattan streets with new instances of vehicles.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> The article doesn't link to the study. Here it is:

[http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2017/01/01/1611675114.full...](http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2017/01/01/1611675114.full?sid=004341e7-5cb6-4525-be40-4b3fdbcb80e5)

</comment><comment><USER28> Anecdotally, the times I see taxis most crowded/unavailable in New York is in the East Village / Lower East Side on weekend nights, headed towards the bridge; my guess is that most of the passengers are drunk and trying to get home, and I don't particularly want to share a normal-sized car with three drunk strangers. (Enhancing subway coverage between that area of town and Brooklyn would help; if someone vomits on a subway, it's easy enough to move to the end of the car or to the next car.)

Also it's not clear to me if this research assumes that every cab is carrying a single person. That's often not true, especially for the going-home-from-a- night-out crowd.

</comment><comment><USER29> Pet peeve: how do you "reduce traffic by 3x"? Shouldn't this be "reduce traffic by 66%"

<comment><USER30> Both of those statements are nonmathematical when parsed strictly, you need a translation mechanic to turn them into a forumula ("per cent", literally, doesn't mean a multiplier either). It happens that the percent framing became common earlier, but when it did it was surely just as ad hoc.

Multiplier framing like that is at least as common, and given that "3" is easier to understand than "66" (which one has to recognize as the result of 100*(1-(1/3)) for goodness sake!) I genuinely don't understand your peeve here.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> I think America should look into the point to point system that Istanbul developed (and likely other places) called the dolmuş. These are 10 seat cars where people split the price to move along one line. (People will usually go end to end, but can get out along the ride as desired.) The route never deviates as to provide predictability.

That said, most people take cabs because they don't want to be around other people -- else, they would take the subway, no?

<comment><USER28> Apart from the subway and bus systems in New York, we have the 10-seat-car-on- a-fixed-route system too: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dollar_vans_in_the_New_York_me...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dollar_vans_in_the_New_York_metropolitan_area)

Most of the time in NYC when I take a cab, it's because there isn't sufficient subway or bus coverage for the route I want: either I'm going to/from somewhere deep into Brooklyn or Queens where it's a 10+ minute walk to the nearest subway (and I'll need at least one transfer once I'm on the subway system), or I'm trying to take some particular trip across Manhattan that requires multiple transfers and is much faster by cab. As you'd expect, the trips that aren't well-served by subway are rare, but they do exist.

<comment><USER32> > The New York City-area dollar van system is highly used, and in 2011, it was > rated the 20th most used "bus system" in the United States. The dollar van > and jitney system has been praised as "quietly disruptive" as compared to > other ride-share services, such as Uber. This has allowed the vans to > operate without being restricted by the Taxi and Limousine Commission (TLC).

That's very interesting, it fills a void during public worker strikes spontaneously and ends up being a widely popular service. Thanks for the link.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> For a while now, I've been wanting to explore single-seating electric commute pods. At least from my basic analysis, they would be more efficient at moving people from point A to point B within an urban area.

Cars, imho, are too inefficient a mode of transport for short distances. You have to make sure they're at capacity to reach 100% utilization.

If anyone is interested in talking more about this or exploring it, I'd love to hear from you.

</comment><comment><USER34> Any city building high-throughput transit corridors should take this into account. I think carpooling and on-demand, self-driven vehicles can help.

Some adjustments might include putting stations _further away_ from each other, so total travel time decreases. If your last mile is solved by carpooling, you can go an extra block to get on a train / subway / etc.

Some transit agencies might even consider including these vehicles as part of their overall offering, especially if that replaces "park and ride". That land near stations is more valuable when developed with something other than a parking lot.

</comment><comment><USER35> I'll continue my little crusade by reminding people that when talking about a reduction, you should use a fraction or percentage less than 100 for clarity.

For example, this article should have been titled "carpooling apps could reduce traffic by one third" or "reduce traffic to 1/3 of current levels"

"Reducing something by three times its original amount" is a difficult sentence to parse correctly, and the linguistically correct interpretation is almost certainly not what you mean.

</comment><comment><USER36> It would help if NYC would actually encourage not to drive. I was recently there with 3 people in the car and compared driving & parking in Manhattan vs. parking outside and taking a train in. In many cities (Amsterdam as an excellent example), you get cheap, secure parking lots outside of the city that you can combine with a train/subway ticket. In NYC, this would've been much more expensive than parking for 3 days.

<comment><USER37> I agree. It would be great if NYC eliminated its free street parking (perhaps making it residents-only) and priced the rest comparably to parking in Secaucus.

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> the obsession with number crunching in the transportation space is really unfortunate because if you just focus on what is going on 'IN THE STREET' , you will see that black market transportation already optimizes for transportation. the problem is that it is not legal, let alone funded for growth.

there are too many vested special interests,namely, the police, the mass transit system, the cab drivers, and now, yes, uber and the ride sharing apps have become part of the institutional dead weight on policy change.

if you want to see what common sense would dictate in ride sharing , it would be pretty simple.

mini busses would not only be allowed all over new york , anywhere and everywhere ( because they already run up and down flatbush avenue in brooklyn) , but large companies would ----if ONLY THEY WERE invited by nyc government </comment><comment>---flock to build premium versions of minibusses with a minimum of one entrance per 2 passengers all along the side of the vehicle.

the designs for such a vehicle are plenty. MANY examples of these designs exist. they are also easily buildable even with safety gear and precautions built in.

optimizing ride sharing is obvious, you give people vehicles with enough entrances and enough privacy so that every pair of people can get enter together, and at most a stranger will be forced to share a pseudo cabin with one other stranger.

the problem as always IS NOT THE LACK OF MATH AND NUMBER CRUNCHING BY WONKIES , it is the vested interests that have crushed innovation by having their meathook money suckers squidlike suffocating government with the help of willingly crooked politicians.

the same issue plagues all major metropolitan areas in the u.s. , especially san francisco.

i vote peter theil for dictator of california.

</comment><comment><USER39> The article doesn't make the claim in this headline. It makes the claim that NYC could theoretically have 3x fewer cabs. @dang

</comment><comment><USER40> While the algorithm is an interesting development, any discussion of 'reducing traffic' without even acknowledging the concept of induced demand is an indicator that someone isn't engaging with urban planning remotely seriously. (hopefully just the person in the PR office?)

<comment><USER41> Do you mean like the increased total number of cars on the road since ride share has become popular (not sure this is the case, but it seems to be in dense urban areas where drivers come in from the suburbs)?

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> Link to the paper: [http://ares.lids.mit.edu/fm/documents/anytime.pdf](http://ares.lids.mit.edu/fm/documents/anytime.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER43> Parking apps would reduce it by 30%!

Also not shabby eh?

</comment><comment><USER44> We've updated the link from [http://www.theverge.com/2017/1/2/14147286/mit- research-nyc-t...](http://www.theverge.com/2017/1/2/14147286/mit-research-nyc- taxi-carpool-uber-lyft), which points to this.

</comment><comment><USER45> So happy and proud I know these people - they are amazing!</comment>


Scott and Scurvy (2010) - <AUTHOR> http://idlewords.com/2010/03/scott_and_scurvy.htm <comment><USER2> Great article :) Particularly the summary where the author asks whether issues we have now might be similarly due to ignorance that we will condemn in 60 years.

</comment><comment><USER3> The article doesn't mention the "other" South Pole explorer who worried about scurvy, but prevented it. Roald Amundsen arranged for seal meat and a version of pemmican that had vegatables and oatmeal[1].

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amundsen%27s_South_Pole_expedi...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amundsen%27s_South_Pole_expedition#Transport,_equipment_and_supplies)

</comment><comment><USER4> The whole "Scurvy has been conquered ever since the Lind experiment" is a rather (English) biased view. Other cures/preventions were known way earlier.

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

being one of them

</comment><comment><USER5> Stop reading the comments here and go read the article. It's about a 20 minute read and is well worth it.

</comment><comment><USER6> Turns out Vitamin C is not even necessary. If all you eat is fresh meat, you won't have scurvy.

<comment><USER7> The article mentions that this is because fresh meat contains enough Vitamin C to prevent deficiency.

<comment><USER6> It's because of collagen in meat.

<comment><USER8> No it's not. Dietary collagen in broken down by the digestive system just like other protein.

<comment><USER6> The role of vitamin C in collagen synthesis is to oxydize lysine and proline. If you already consume enough hydroxylysine and hydroxyproline, which can be found in collagen, then you don't need the vitamin C.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Lincoln Index: Estimating the number of bugs left to find (2010) - <AUTHOR> https://www.johndcook.com/blog/2010/07/13/lincoln-index/ <comment><USER2> I thought this meant insects and that reminded me of a favorite paper with the subtitle "A bird in the hand is worth log n in the bush" [https://arxiv.org/abs/1511.07428](https://arxiv.org/abs/1511.07428) In this different problem (estimating the number of species you have yet to encounter based off the number of individuals from that species you have observed so far), the cute answer is that you're "done" finding new species when you have found at least two individuals from each species. Would this generalize to software bugs by saying that at least two testers had found each bug in order to assume that the software was bug-free?

</comment><comment><USER3> IME unfound bugs tend to cluster in specific areas where testers didn't realize that they needed to look. Once the tester is aware of where they need to look for them then they quickly evaporate.

This method requires that a tester is looking for bugs randomly and is as likely to cover any realistic use case as any other use. In practice I find that's almost never true.

<comment><USER4> That's a good point, and it's doubly true when you are looking for security vulnerabilities. If your bugs affect user experience, then a rarely encountered bug is not much of a problem. If your bugs are security vulnerabilities, then the bugs may be equally exploitable regardless of how rare they are to encounter.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> As an old adage goes -

        The number of bugs remaining is directly
        proportional to the number of bugs found.

<comment> java-man and another one:

there are always at least two bugs still present in the code.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> This is interesting, but it requires an otherwise borderline insane test plan to get the information necessary to calculate.

<comment><USER7> Yes: the test plan is generally achieved by adversarial fault injection.

That is how you should test your test system.

You should also classify the faults you inject and somehow (preferably from practice) estimate how often they occur.

<comment><USER8> Didn't people mostly give up on doing that after bugs injected on purpose somehow keep reaching production, despite various failsafes?

<comment><USER9> That can only happen if you inject the bugs directly into the code where they could make it into source control, instead of doing it all on a test automation server that only ever pulls the code. You need the automation anyway (you weren't thinking about doing manual fault injection, right?), so siloing it off from production shouldn't be too hard.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Doesn't this also assume that the testers have _exactly_ the same area of responsibility? If you subdivide the work in any way, the probabilities of tester 1 and tester 2 finding a specific bug are decidedly not independent, but very much dependent on which one of them is working on the component with the bug.

<comment><USER11> I was wondering if we could use this by having two different people execute a test pass that covers an area of concern and then calculate the Lincoln estimate for that.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Matt Parker made a great video of estimating the size of a population using a version of this technique. (in this case the population is statisticians in their natural environment)

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MTmnVBJ9gCI](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MTmnVBJ9gCI)

</comment><comment><USER13> Here's a way to apply this idea to an open source project. The issue tracker could allow people to submit bugs, but a cron job running once per minute would move all the externally submitted bugs to an internal bug tracker that only the developers on the project could see. Then the independence assumption would be closer to being satisfied.

</comment><comment><USER14> There are several well known techniques, look under "Software Reliability Growth Models"....

</comment><comment><USER15> Can this be extended to N testers?

<comment><USER16> That's a really interesting question (and one for which I don't know enough probability theory to give a good answer).

At the very least, if you have N testers you can apply the technique pairwise to generate N(N - 1)/2 estimates for the number of bugs. Taking the average or median of these estimates would probably give you a more robust value for the total number of bugs.

You could also build a correlation matrix between testers (i.e. are bugs really independently found or do some testers tend to find the same bugs) and you could test the assumption that bugs are equally hard to find (which realistically isn't the case).

With that new insight into your original data, you could compute an _a posteriori_ estimate for the total number of bugs, Bayes style.

(In other words, you start with the prior assumption that testers are independent and bugs are equally hard to find to build a first answer. Based on this estimate, you revise your assumption with a more realistic probability distribution for bugs and testers, and use that distribution to compute a new answer)

Or, maybe just stop messing with R and get on with fixing all the bugs found by your N testers.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> This is from 2010.</comment>


Alternative Appage... - <AUTHOR>

Hey all,<p>I'm looking to find an application I can use for our restaurants wine list (ipad, android tablet etc.) http://www.incentient.com/contact.php seem to have one called "SmartCellar" but they're sales are useless (I'm in the UK and they can't seem to help) <comment><AUTHOR> any suggestions is my question? Or would I be better doing this as a web based thing?</comment>


Mozilla to sell ads in Firefox Web Browser - <AUTHOR> http://adage.com/article/special-report-iab-annual-meeting/mozilla-sell-ads-firefox/291641/

<comment><USER2> If this happens hopefully someone forks firefox and strips out this garbage.

</comment><comment><USER3> A small very vocal subset of users is going to throw a fit. And a forked version of the browser (Iceweasel?) is going to strip out the ad functionality, assuming it is not just a toggle in the browser.

 _" Mozilla is moving from a dumb window to the internet to a smart agent on behalf of the user, putting the user first," Mr. Herman said._

Or Mozilla is trying to pay the bills and not be so beholden to Google. I don't think users are clamoring for more advertising.

Good move, if they manage to pull it off well enough.

<comment><USER4> If it make them possible to build a fast browser !

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Well... guess it's time to go back to Chrome.

I'm just going to hope I woke up in bizzaro-world and this is not actually happening on Earth Prime.

</comment><comment><USER6> The tone and facts in this article don't seem right.

From the official Mozilla blog post: "Mozilla is kicking off an exploration" "Directory Tiles will instead suggest pre-packaged content for first-time users." "While we have not worked out the entire product roadmap, we are beginning to talk to content partners about the opportunity, and plan to start showing Directory Tiles to new Firefox users as soon as we have the user experience right"

Sounds like early days, the news article made it sound like a done deal.

I think UP is a much more interesting project in terms of advertising and improving how the web works. [https://blog.mozilla.org/labs/2013/12/user- personalization-u...](https://blog.mozilla.org/labs/2013/12/user- personalization-update/)

<comment><USER7> "Tiles"?!

I guess they didn't notice how "well" Microsoft does with Tiles on the desktop where even the most die hard Win8 apologist says "When you use start8, it's not so bad as you never have to see them."

And if they are talking about that dumb grid when opening a blank tab, that was the first thing I deactivated when it was introduced. When I open a new tab, I have a site in mind I wish to open. I do not need to see my top most visited sites in a grid. That's what the pull down list of the address bar is there for. And neither do I need to see ads in that grid.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Can someone slap me in the face so that I can wake up, please?

[https://twitter.com/dherman76/status/433320156496789504](https://twitter.com/dherman76/status/433320156496789504)

</comment><comment><USER9> So really what they're doing is stealing opera's idea. This could be advertising, or it could be awesome. I suppose we'll just have to wait and see what the details are and who they partner with.

</comment><comment><USER10> I guess they have to make money somehow.

Glad I use Chrome, though.

</comment><comment><USER11> Will AdBlock be able to block them?</comment>


Toucan teaches you new skills while you browse the web - <AUTHOR> https://jointoucan.com/ <comment><USER2> I can imagine a lot of ways how this might work, but the website does not explain much. Maybe it should have a short screencast as an example. Or at least screenshots.

I also assume this collects a lot of data on the user? How is that handled?

<comment><USER3> Yes, a screencast would be nice, but more than that, there's no Privacy Policy?

Edit: there is, but they don't link to it on the homepage

[https://jointoucan.com/privacy-policy](https://jointoucan.com/privacy-policy)

<comment><USER4> Also that privacy policy says nothing, and seem to just be copy pasted from the Internet.

If this is the company's approach on handling very private user data (ie. the contents of a number of websites they visit, including facebook, airbnb, office365, all of google.com), then this is a hard pass from me, and a huge red flag.

EDIT: here's a list of all sites the extension accesses: [https://paste.q3k.org/paste/uj- GbID4#g7IYwrXiF6zXlnlxQYguMlr...](https://paste.q3k.org/paste/uj- GbID4#g7IYwrXiF6zXlnlxQYguMlr1A8U3OyfwslJWCFyYQKd)

EDIT2: looking at the source code of the extension (extracted from the source map), it at least tracks and sends off any tab hostname (or URL?) you've visited: [https://paste.q3k.org/paste/gxklokkF#055mmZ9Qu- zeiAwXGpWqSpw...](https://paste.q3k.org/paste/gxklokkF#055mmZ9Qu- zeiAwXGpWqSpwj+aHz0r16Bq3HUOsAOx5) , for any of the URLs in the allowed URLs list (which in turn has some websites whitelisted that you really might not want others to know you have visited)

EDIT3: if I read the code correctly, they actually send off the entire URL, not just the hostname. But someone would have to check this in practice to be sure.

<comment><USER5> Creating a set of whitelisted sites that this would work on is a better approach than other extensions like Grammarly have used in the past (not sure if they still do) and grant access to all browsing. However, this specific whitelist is such a weird combination of sites. It includes numerous financial and banking sites, porn sites, and e-commerce sites. Those are exactly the type of sites that I don't think you want on a whitelist as they are going to be full of information that people want private. This should probably be limited to sites with a lower likelihood of compromising data like news sites and potentially social media sites.

<comment><USER6> Hey there! We definitely agree with you. While we were trying to avoid asking for permission to run on all sites before gaining our users trust, we also wanted to find the right balance of working on popular sites to show the value of Toucan. For this, we used a list of the top 500 sites around the world without any filter (which there definitely should have been). Thank you so much for pointing this out, as this was not our intention. We will be combing through this list shortly and updating to make sure Toucan is only enabled by default on sites that our users would feel comfortable with. Again, really appreciate your insight here, this is tremendously helpful.

<comment><USER5> Good on you for acknowledging that is a problem and moving to fix it. The existing list makes a lot more sense now that I know it is just the top 500 sites.

I think you generally want to stick to sites that are both public and consumption oriented. News sites and places like Wikipedia are the obvious examples. Social media is a little more questionable since there is a mix of public and private data. I think an ideal system would break sites out into categories like news, education, pop culture, social media, etc. You then allow the users to either turn off a category as a whole or provide an advanced mode to manually disable individual sites. Although it has been a while since I messed with browser extension permissions so I don't remember if these permissions can even be set on a conditional basis. Either way, there can always be an option in the extension settings to ignore those pages even if the browser technically gives you permissions to them.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I get a mostly-empty page[0] on Win 10 with Firefox 76 and cookies blocked from cdnjs.cloudlfare and js.stripe.

[0]: [https://i.imgur.com/LHCYCCw.png](https://i.imgur.com/LHCYCCw.png)

<comment><USER8> Yeah, there's something on the site that's being blocked by my ublock. Turning it off revived the page for me.

Update: it's not ublock. Tried refreshing a few times with ublock enabled and it works. I think it was just an unstable cdn somewhere

<comment><USER9> Maybe, but I'm getting random 404s on the js urls themselves without any blocking.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Hey everyone! I'm Shaun Merritt, the Co-Founder and CTO of Toucan (jointoucan.com). Happy to answer any questions that you have about our product, and incredibly grateful for all the great feedback. I'll be jumping into some of the comments too. Excited for you all to give it a try. :)

<comment><USER10> What are you using to do translations?

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I installed it to try it out, but it takes over your new tab page which I already have configured, so I just immediately uninstalled it. Maybe I didn't read closely enough and it said it was going to do that, but clearly I missed it and don't want that happening.

</comment><comment><USER12> When I navigate to that page on my iOS device, all I see is a green upper bar with a hamburger menu. Clicking on the menu offers "log in" and "add toucan"

I clicked back.

<comment><USER6> Hi there! I'm so sorry you experienced that. We are currently optimized for Chrome on desktop, but definitely should add a mobile warning about that on our mobile landing page. The blank page is due to content blockers on iOS, and we will be working to make sure that our site works with the most popular ad blockers and browsers going forward to give you a better experience. I really appreciate the feedback and detailed explanation here, this will help tremendously as we continue to better Toucan.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> The home page is useless in describing the product. Please provide a demo gif or video in the home page showing how it works.

</comment><comment><USER14> At first glance it isn't obvious what Toucan is meant to teach. Apparently, it exposes you to contextual information on a given topic.

I am not sure that is how you teach "skills" or build declarative knowledge.

</comment><comment><USER15> I think it's a real interesting idea and could work!

I got a little confused when I removed a pack and it stayed, but then I saw remove -> removed.

Then I added a pack and went to a website to test and didn't see anything.

Soccer Hooliganism -> Wikipedia on soccer, couldn't see anything.

Because I was not totally sure what it does I wondered if it only works on language. I assume it's just to learn about Soccer Hooliganism though.

(I haven't signed up, have approved access to sites, ublocker running)

[edit] Playing more - Difficulty, could go below Easy into the void on the tab

</comment><comment><USER16> What I gathered from the website is that Toucan can swap in "comida" for "food"; I can pretty well extrapolate the language-learning function from that example. But, um, does it do anything else?

<comment><USER17> It probably sends your data to their server so you have the comfort of knowing your browsing history is being backed up.</comment></comment>


Android 2.3 Gingerbread source code is being released right now - <AUTHOR> http://groups.google.com/group/android-building/browse_thread/thread/91172a81604c8a0

<comment><USER2> Why don't the Android people work in public like the Chrome team?

<comment><USER3> I don't have an answer, but it really undermines their "openness" argument.

Related question, if someone knows: Does the Android team take patches from those outside Google? (I know that Chrome does.)

<comment><USER4> No the openness argument is that the code is open and it is. It is 100% open source, Apache and GPL. What this does is _limit_ their openness. You can't see every line as it's written.

I would guess they do it this way because they work with a lot of unreleased hardware, and the carriers and manufacturers don't want any leaks.

Lots of programmers prefer to tinker in private and only submit to repositories after everything is cleaned up and debugged. Others are fine with exposing every keystroke. In both cases we should be grateful if the end result contributed to the public good as Free Software.

<comment><USER3> Wait, I'm not sure I understand: "the openness argument is that the code is open and it is" and "this does is limit their openness" -- what do you mean by that?

Anyway, my point is that you would not call Firefox an open source project if it was developed internally by Mozilla and just released code every major release. It's not that I don't think it's good that that they release the code, it's that they use "open" as an argument when it's only open when it benefits them -- and not a second before.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I think the follow up note might mean that this shouldn't have been front- paged here at HN, [http://groups.google.com/group/android- building/browse_frm/t...](http://groups.google.com/group/android- building/browse_frm/thread/cdc28fe70b173b15)

Stop syncing!

<comment><USER6> I doubt that this shouldn't have been here on HN -- Google knows and anticipates that all news around Android are being watched closely and heavily anticipated by a large and tech savvy audience. I'm just not sure what to think about the current release delay. I have a hard time believing Google just pushes the code to kernel.org without contributing network infrastructure and servers... couldn't they easily help out kernel.org if this was just a technical problem.

<comment><USER7> Google and HP did recently provide new servers for kernel.org: [http://google- opensource.blogspot.com/2010/11/objects-in-mir...](http://google- opensource.blogspot.com/2010/11/objects-in-mirror.html)</comment></comment></comment>


Fund manager sets goats grazing in blighted Detroit - <AUTHOR> http://dealbook.nytimes.com/2014/06/05/fund-manager-sets-goats-grazing-in-blighted-detroit/?_php=true&_type=blogs&_r=0

<comment><AUTHOR> If you want a neighborhood by neighborhood view of Detroit's blight problem check out [http://www.motorcitymapping.org](http://www.motorcitymapping.org)</comment>


A Visual Explanation of SQL Joins (2007) - <AUTHOR> http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2007/10/a-visual-explanation-of-sql-joins.html

<comment><USER2> I think it's best just to read what a cartesian product is, then consider that all joins are just simple filter operations after you've already made a cartesian product.

(although modern databases may do something more complicated, I'm not sure)

<comment><USER3> Databases turn the big Cartesian product into a large number of smaller Cartesian products by inexpensively grouping values such that keys not in the group are guaranteed to not meet the filter operation criterion.

Instead of n^2 operations it is more like m * ((n/m)^2) that can be evaluated in parallel across the m groups.

The simplest example of this is hash joins and equality filters. Keys that match on equality will also be grouped into the same hash bucket, reducing the search space. Keys that hash to different buckets will never be equal. The join is therefore the union of the cartesian product on each hash bucket, which requires fewer operations than filtering the cartesian product of the entire key set.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> sigh... this is totally wrong... as Jeff himself kinda realized with his comment "There's also a cartesian product or cross join, which as far as I can tell, can't be expressed as a Venn diagram"

SQL does have set operations, and the Venn diagram treatment is much less terrible [though still not quite accurate] at explaining SQL set semantics.

The biggest flaw with the Venn diagram thing is that it doesn't capture the productive aspect of joins.

A inner join B on (some-condition) will produce ALL combinations of A records pasted to B records where some-condition holds.

The Venn diagram approach can't distinguish between a single A-pasted-to-B record and 100 thousand combinations of A-pasted-to-different-Bs. All it can say is that the resulting combinations consist of some set of A and B records.

Venn diagrams don't accurately describe the records resulting from a join at all. At best, they rule out records that can't occur.

So they're not so great as an explanatory device.

<comment><USER5> It's good enough for a beginner to start with. Provided they know it's not the complete picture.

<comment><USER4> Really? Even if it NEVER produces the right answer? How is it useful then?

A [inner|left|right|outer|cross|natural|whatever] join B NEVER produces a result that is in either A or B. It produces something larger, that wasn't it A or B before.

It's like trying to describe the result of meiosis with a Venn diagram. It's the combinations that matter, and the combinations are not reflected in the Venn diagram.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I made something a while back that compares lists/tables and visually shows results:

<http://skratchdot.github.io/list-tool/>

Some of the algorithms aren't optimized (as to keep results in the order they were processed).

It was more of an experiment to play with web workers and responsive design.

</comment><comment><USER7> I liked the article a lot. For more detail its worth looking at:

Join Processing in Relational Databases, Priti Mishra and Margaret H. Eich, ACM Computing Surveys (CSUR) Surveys, Volume 24 Issue 1, March 1992, Pages 63 - 113

via [http://www.allthingsdistributed.com/2013/04/join- processing-...](http://www.allthingsdistributed.com/2013/04/join-processing- relational-databases.html)

</comment><comment><USER8> I like that this only covers left outer joins as opposed to left and right outer joins.

The difference between the two is sometimes confusing for people, so I've always suggested that people learn one and stick with it, since you can accomplish the exact same thing with either.

<comment><USER9> For that matter, most queries work nicely if you avoid null attributes altogether, and stick to (LEFT INNER) JOIN, WHERE ... IN, UNION, INTERSECT and EXCEPT.</comment></comment>


China rejects Harvard study suggesting Covid-19 was circulating last summer - <AUTHOR> https://www.ft.com/content/3e16a585-7993-4d9e-b62f-f345a22ea49c <comment><AUTHOR> [https://archive.vn/44rOC](https://archive.vn/44rOC)</comment>


The French, Coming Apart - <AUTHOR> https://www.city-journal.org/html/french-coming-apart-15125.html <comment><USER2> This a very long article, the main theme is that different factions in France are in a kind of soft war with a clear faction on the loosing side. They are immigrants, the Elite and the older working class.

As a old Frenchman I would say two things that are self contradictory, first I think this guy makes a good diagnostic of the current situation, second: Things are not that simple, the last time France was a pleasant utopia was before WWII. After that it had continously been a mess:

De Gaulle made a coup to get the power in 1958, Paratroopers were sent to Paris[0], Corsica was briefly taken under military rules[0] and the IV republic died quietly without blood bath. The 70" were nice but the 80" were horrible economically speaking. After that it was the rise of Europe, which closed plants but did not created jobs. Most of the economy is now controlled by the state (56%).

Since 2008 we have lost most of the freedom that citizens enjoy under democracy: Our parliament has no right, there are moral laws as in 1984, generalized spying on citizens and soldiers in arms are everywhere in public spaces.

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

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Op%C3%A9ration_Corse](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Op%C3%A9ration_Corse)

<comment><USER3> There's also the _Midnight in Paris_ theorem ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Midnight_in_Paris](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Midnight_in_Paris)) where everyone's idea of a golden-age in Paris is someone else's least favourite, and the true golden-age was actually an earlier era...

> The 70" were nice but the 80" were horrible economically speaking.

That's basically how it went for many countries in the Western world. The 1970s weren't bad, but the 1980s saw income inequality start to spike completely out of control. Income for the average person stagnated, and in all honestly has never really recovered.

France is a peculiar institution with a wild, tangled history, but it's not immune to global trends.

<comment><USER4> Odd because the current adult generation, born in the 80s probably only remember the fruits of the 70s tree: music, movies, games, fashion, electronics.

<comment><USER3> 1970s: Economy is pretty shitty, but it's shitty for everyone equally.

1980s: Economy is doing alright but only for the 1%. Everyone else is stuck in the shitty 1970s.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I want to thank @redsummer for posting this fascinating article. Despite its flaws, Hacker News is one of the best things going on the Internet right now, especially for retired folks like me who have the time to wade through the new stuff and find the occasional gem.

My takeaway is that globalization has winners and losers. The winners get to keep the spoils and write the history books. The losers are debased and then ignored.

<comment><USER6> It really was a great read. Most importantly to me, I got a lot of insight into American society by reading a bit about French society and politics.

It's things like this that make me wish I knew another language so I could peer across that barrier and into another microcosm more often.

<comment><USER2> I am a bit late to reply, but languages are changing also. The average written French in media is now much poorer in vocabulary than it was before 1995, and there now are many grammar mistakes. The language evolves continuously.

And the spoken French has incredibly changed in the last decades. Most young people would have problem to understand the spoken French of 1900.

That said, French (like English in GB, or German) spread a lot thanks to TV in the 50'/60'. When I was young there was still old people speaking the local language of their tiny part of Brittany.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> This is an excellent and unsettling article. The problem is that neither the old parties nor the new right have any solutions that would really solve the problems.

</comment><comment><USER8> Nothing to see. The article is not even about France or French, it's only about Paris.

Paris is getting evermore expensive and people are driven away. Just like every major city in the world. The people who already got a property are golden, while everyone else will never manage to afford one.

Same issue with all the major cities: London, Paris, Geneva, Zurich, New York, SF, Tokyo, Hong Kong...

<comment><USER2> It is perhaps a global issue, but it has not much to do with Paris. I live in one of the "rich" towns mentionned in the article (Rennes) and the unemployment rate is an incredibly high 15%! The article is IMO more about a state that had killed the private sector, which was previously providing good jobs.

Now as you say, the middle class who made every efforts to get the magical "Master in something", still do not have access to state sponsored housing and do not either find any of the highly qualified jobs that were promised by countless politicians.

The citizens whose parents emigrated decades here ago, are very angry toward the state, even if they live in state social housing, because they have no jobs either and they live constant harassment by police forces.</comment></comment>


Nasty bug lets hackers into Apple computers - <AUTHOR> http://money.cnn.com/2015/06/03/technology/mac-bug/index.html

<comment><USER2> Dumb article. This is all you need to know:

> This isn't an easy hack. An attacker first needs administrative access to a > machine.

So essentially they discovered another way of updating the uEFI rather than just, you know, updating the uEFI?</comment>


Microsoft manages interns better than Google - <AUTHOR> http://blog.brandonbloom.name/2008/06/microsoft-manages-interns-better-than.html

<comment><USER2> From friends who've interned at both places (and from my own experiences at one of the two), I would agree with this assessment. Google gets all the hype for free food and being quirky, but Microsoft seems to provide a more consistent experience for interns. Both places are full of smart engineers, but the people management seems better at Microsoft (perhaps necessitated by the size of the company!).

</comment><comment><USER3> This paints with a pretty wide brush. Would you like to share any specific instances where people Microsoft went that extra mile?

</comment><comment><USER4> 'The title of this post is hyperbole' - no, 'Microsoft manages interns 100 times better than Google' would be hyperbole.

</comment><comment><USER5> I would say "experiences like that happen" and this guy is more than likely a outlier. Not to say that Microsoft manages their interns better and provide more support and resources than Google does or vice versa. But ones experience is going to rely heavily on the team the work with and their skills and personality. A mismatch of one against the other can make the situation seem like something it isn't.

<comment><AUTHOR> That's why I ended the post by saying this was a personal experience. I just wanted to make the point that it certainly appeared like Microsoft was better prepared to cope with this situation and it also seemed that it was due to a more mature internship program. I loved working for both companies and there will definitely be pro-Google posts in the future :-)</comment></comment>