InfluxDB has taken its open-source business to Silicon Valley - <AUTHOR> http://technical.ly/brooklyn/2015/03/25/influxdb-paul-dix-moves-to-silicon-valley/ <comment><USER2> I really want to love influxdb because I think the world needs a better answer to time series databases that doesn't include java (OpenTSDB, Cassandra). The underlying storage engine (leveldb/rocksdb) is quite solid. I'm currently running 3 nodes in production (for collecting stats) and doing a few thousand writes/s. I'm not using any of the clustering features, I probably won't even evaluate that until 0.9.

I'm currently running the latest 0.8.x release and there are a few issues:

1.My influxdb instances stop servicing reads once every 12 hours so I have a cron job that force restarts it. [https://github.com/influxdb/influxdb/issues/1116](https://github.com/influxdb/influxdb/issues/1116)

2\. Enabling the graphite plugin on the first run can crash the process (the creation of the default cluster admin user seems to be racy). Not a big deal except in automated deployment scenarios.

3\. I lost an entire database (luckily it was just used for storing grafana graph definitions and not actual data).

4\. I'm not sure if anyone's currently working on their admin UI. I submitted a pull request to their admin UI to sort shards by ID because currently it randomizes the order on every load (I presume because of golang's randomized map iteration). It's sat there since January. The last PR they merged into that repo was in May of 2014.

I really want influxdb to be successful. Every organization I've worked for in the last few years has serious graphite scaling issues and influxdb is well positioned to fix those. I think even in it's current state it's a better option than graphite (and the influxdb-graphite plugin gives you all the graphite features).

<comment><USER3> Hi Shane, thanks for the encouragement and sorry you're having a few problems with the current 0.8.8 release.

We're heads down working on 0.9.0 and won't be doing any more releases in the 0.8.x line (except to create a migration path to 0.9.0). So we are merging PRs, but only those that apply to 0.9.0 (which includes the admin UI).

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Another InfluxDB user here. I'd done some evaluations with OpenTSDB and the Graphite suite, and while I had some concerns with stability and maturity the main things that sold me on it were:

* No dependencies. Compare this with setting up HDFS/HBase and Graphite which is a real pain in the neck to manage, especially since my tsdb has to run on an arbitrary machine pool in a sandbox.

* Active development. This is a big one. Releases have been coming steadily and Paul & co. do a good job of having a real roadmap and chipping away at it; this is probably my tipping point over Graphite.

* Clustering. Maybe it's not there yet, but see above. Most tools in this space are not elastic at all.

* Grafana integration - seems like there is a good bit of momentum in that project in general which is promising.

PS Reading this it almost sounds like an ad, no I'm not affiliated with influx.

PPS logfile configuration for rotation/cleanup would be a nice-to-have enhancement ;)

<comment><USER3> Thanks, we're working hard on getting the clustering features complete so we have a real answer for HA, failover, and scalability (up to a point based on current design).

For logfile rotation our recommended solution is to use logrotate. We'll be updating the install to include a config. See [https://github.com/influxdb/influxdb/issues/1943](https://github.com/influxdb/influxdb/issues/1943)

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Incidently I wrote a blog on it last week: [http://grisha.org/blog/2015/03/20/influxdb- data/](http://grisha.org/blog/2015/03/20/influxdb-data/)

The site says "production ready in March" \- it seemed to me like there's at least 3 months of work there given that most of the clustering features (e.g. how to rebuild a fialed node, how to expand the cluster, distributed queries) are not there.

My other concern with InfluxDB is that it doesn't follow the fate of FoundationDB - get acquired by a giant corporation and disappear.

<comment><USER3> Hi Grisha, I saw that post, thanks for writing it! The coming features you're talking about are the work we're focused on for finishing this release. The three you mention should drop in an RC within two weeks.

The distributed queries part isn't a large amount of work beccause of how we've designed things. Under the covers the query engine already represents each query as a MapReduce job to be run.

For cluster expansion, work is starting on that today. Again it's just a matter of wiring some things up. Node replacement is also starting today.

We may miss the March goal but it won't be by anything close to 3 months. Glad you're paying attention to the project though :)

For the Foundation problem, I thought they were never open source. Just free for 5 nodes or less, no?

I think the key to avoiding this fate is to build an active community of contributors outside the company. Luckily we have people submitting PRs every week. We'll be trying to document more of the code and make it easier for outsiders to get involved as we go along.

That way if the worst happens, at least the community can fork and keep the project going forward. I'd love nothing more than for Influx to become bigger than this company.

<comment><USER5> Thanks Paul! So you're saying it's all a SMOP :)

Another thing that I think might be a critical (or at least interesting) characteristic is back-filling optimization, i.e. when you need to load a trillion data points of historical data - this y/t explains it pretty well and talks about how OpenTSDB addresses it: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SgD3RD2Shg4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SgD3RD2Shg4)

Anyhow - keep up the good work, I very much believe that in the next couple of years "Time Series" is going to become a resume-must-include buzzword :)

<comment><USER3> Cool, I'll have to take a look at that talk. We've had people ask about backfilling large amounts of data so it's something we'll have to figure out.

<comment><USER5> Another thing I was curious about is why not do all the clustering/distributed stuff at the db level, i.e. have some sort of a distributed BoltDB-like/Raft as a separate layer or even entirely separate project, and then InfluxDB would be a much thinner/simpler thing. I think that in general the approach of OpenTSDB and similar things is right, it's just that HBase/Hadoop is a such a pain to set up and maintain (and so is Cassandra, if perhaps a little less).

<comment><USER3> One of the key goals of the project is to be able to aggregate and downsample from raw high precision data. That means we want a framework in which we ship the code to where the data lives, not the other way around.

The abstractions I've seen that have the database layer and then some services on top all miss this. They transport all of the raw data over the network and then run the computations and return the summary ticks back to the user.

Our framework lets us compute the summary ticks locally and send only those back (is many cases, but not all).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I am using InfluxDB in my research, to analyze resource utilizations of running applications and it has been very useful to me since, but I think it was supposed to be production ready this March. There are some bugs that occurs sometimes.

<comment><USER3> We're busy at work on the production ready version. We're targeting March, but we won't release until it's ready (even if that means slipping our target).

Remember, in software development there are lies, damn lies, and delivery estimates.

We'll get it out as quickly as possible, sorry for any delays.

<comment><USER7> can you say something about the upgrade path, will that be possible to do live?

<comment><USER3> We haven't built the migration tool yet, but mostly likely it will involve running a new version in parallel with the old version while the upgrade runs.

For a guide on how to design your schema for a clean migration see here: [http://influxdb.com/docs/v0.8/advanced_topics/schema_design....](http://influxdb.com/docs/v0.8/advanced_topics/schema_design.html#migration- to-0.9.0)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Great product and smart pivot, I hope they do well. Them blowing up would be another win for the NYC tech scene (indirectly).

<comment><USER3> Thanks Eric!

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Denver office? Sounds like someone recruited a few Pivotal Labs alumni :)

<comment><USER3> We have, but sadly not in Denver... yet ;)

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Any comparisons with KairosDB or OpenTSDB?

<comment><USER11> KairosDB is less popular, smaller, but with different limitations and is more flexible. It was inspired by the OpenTSDB design but then took a different path.

OpenTSDB relies on HBase, KairosDB has configurable and pluggable datastore - but the only production-ready so far is using Cassandra.

OpenTSDB always does interpolation of values for aggregation (which I found to be an hazardous decision), KairosDB does not really do proper series "vertical" aggregation (by vertical I mean not downsampling).

OpenTSDB is GPL, KairosDB is Apache 2.0 (that counts for closed-source integrations).

OpenTSDB supports only numerical data but supports annotations, KairosDB supports Strings and numerical in baseline but is compatible with any data type, it does not have annotations (but you may use string for that).

On their baseline OpenTSDB produces graphs on the server, KairosDB produces graphs on the client.

Both are integrated with Grafana time series dashboard, OpenTSDB has more side projects, KairosDB is the only time series database I know for being integrated with a reporting tool (BIRT).

OpenTSDB requires to create the metrics in advance using a special tool (needs to lock the cluster to allocate a new ID), KairosDB can have any kind of new metric on the fly.

If you need something modular for building custom features I strongly recommend KairosDB. Look at the code, it's really nicely crafted.

Otherwise, they both have goods, I found that KairosDB is also much less limited on the cornersides (while having less side-projects), and we now use kairosDB intensively.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Congrats Paul!

Mike (BMark Admin)

<comment><USER3> thanks Mike!</comment></comment>


Show HN: A Web app for assessing sleep deprivation - <AUTHOR> http://pvt.luketurner.org

<comment><AUTHOR> I worked on this project during my free time in August as an experiment in 100% client-side Web development. Built using Angular (with ui-router), Bootstrap, and Chart.js. Source available at [http://github.com/luketurner/PersonalPVT](http://github.com/luketurner/PersonalPVT)</comment>


Is there a line between web apps and web sites? - <AUTHOR> http://css-tricks.com/new-poll-line-web-apps-web-sites/

<comment><USER2> This is a trivial, verging on meaningless, distinction. Comparing web applications and web sites is like comparing houses with their physical settings.</comment>


NoSQL with MySQL in Ruby - Friendly - <AUTHOR> http://friendlyorm.com/ <comment><USER2> This seems to be a pretty good implementation of FriendFeed's schema-less MySQL ( <http://bret.appspot.com/entry/how-friendfeed-uses-mysql> ) and this option would probably beat most of the simple key-value stores in terms of perfomance, backup and replication.

One should note thought that more modern NoSQL databases aren't only key-value stores. For example, Redis offers KEYS command which can scan the store by a pattern. Tokyo Tyrant (another "key-value" store) offers Lua scripting.

<comment><USER3> > this option would probably beat most of the simple key-value stores in terms > of performance, backup and replication.

I wonder why do you think so? Here's a sample test of plain and memcached mysql vs tokyo tyrant ([http://www.mysqlperformanceblog.com/2009/10/19/mysql_memcach...](http://www.mysqlperformanceblog.com/2009/10/19/mysql_memcached_tyrant_part3/)) It was done without the additional inserts for the index table... I don't see how it can be anywhere close to the TT's performance for example. While mysql's replication is very easy, TT's replication is trivial. Backup is probably comparable - just flush and snapshot...

Unless you're comparing it to mysql+MC. Then yes - mysql's performance at 99.8% hits to MC can be ignored. We're left comparing MC with something else. Things might change dramatically if you have a write-heavy application. Or when you have more data than ram. Author's benchmarks will always show great results - let's wait for some real-world data.

<comment><USER4> My data is from a real-world application. One that gets plenty of traffic. Friendly has served almost 50 million hits since we put it in to production two weeks ago.

It actually happens to be quite a write-intensive workload. We have definitely seen a slow down on writes, but the speed up on reads has more than compensated for it.

We do have more data than RAM. But, most of the data that actually gets read is fresh, so it's hot in cache.

Of course Friendly isn't going to be right for everybody. But, I just want to make it clear that my data isn't from synthetic benchmarks. It's from production.

<comment><USER3> I didn't mean to imply that those benchmarks are synthetic. What I had in mind is that when you write some software, you will improve it to solve _your_ problem better than other software (why would you do it otherwise ;) ). I meant real-world as in -- from various sources and applications -- just so that we can see how useful it is and in what situations it's better / worse.

<comment><USER4> Totally fair.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Neat - I just tried it. I am fairly much "in like" with both activerecord and datamapper, but Friendly is cool. I wonder how much work it would take to support PostgreSQL.

Friendly looks especially good in MySQL shops - otherwise I would suggest taking a good look at MongoDB (or Redis, CouchDB, Cassandra, etc.)

<comment><USER4> It already works with Postgres. Just set :adapter => "postgres" when you call Friendly.configure.

<comment><USER5> Cool, thanks for the tip.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Sounds like active record.

<comment><USER7> The difference is that it's schema-less on the backend. It's using MySQL to store JSON (I assume), so schema changes happen at the code level, not at the database level. Like a NoSQL approach that uses MySQL as the backend.

<comment><USER8> Yes, it's the converse.</comment></comment></comment>


ROM sites are falling, but a legal loophole could save game emulation - <AUTHOR> https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2018/08/can-a-digital-lending-library-solve-classic-gamings-piracy-problem/ <comment><USER2> I'm not an American, and the very idea that copyright can last so long and be this pervasive is shocking. It's nothing short of disgusting unethical behaviour from everyone involved.

</comment><comment><USER3> Torrents will save game emulation, if nothing else will. Entire game libraries for various consoles are available via this method. Even if not everyone that wants to emulate games takes this route, it at least means the archive/library is preserved by whatever individuals decide to obtain them.

I don't see how Console Classix can scale, if they have to tie every single ROM to a physical cartridge. What if 10,000 people want to play Super Mario Bros?</comment>


Sony Sees Next Big Hit at 1,000 Photos a Second - <AUTHOR> http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-09-04/why-sony-sees-its-next-big-hit-at-1-000-photos-a-second

<comment><USER2> Isn't one of the big challenges of hi-speed video how to collect enough photons in such a short time? Super-bright lights are often used to illuminate the subject

'Shooting at a frame rate of 1000fps requires 5.25 times more light than at 24 or 25 fps' [[http://www.lovehighspeed.com/lighting-for-high- speed/](http://www.lovehighspeed.com/lighting-for-high-speed/)]

<comment><USER3> AFAIK the problem with the old sensors was that they were manufactured at 100s of nm which was really bad for low light. As Sony is now pushing sensor manufacturing down to CPU-level, the sensitivity increases significantly. Once they hit the current cutting edge 14nm process, we can expect significant low- light gains as well.

<comment><USER4> Isn't it exactly the opposite? The smaller the area, the less photons land on it in the given time, so the sensors with the bigger pixels can capture more light, and the less nm features measure the more of noise and less of signal.

That's why if you want good pictures in low light you need a camera with as big sensor as you can get.

[http://www.dpreview.com/articles/5496399487/canon-multi- purp...](http://www.dpreview.com/articles/5496399487/canon-multi-purpose- me20f-sh-camera-reaches-iso-4-million)

"At the core of the ME20F-SH is a 2.26 megapixel CMOS sensor, originally announced in 2013, which has pixels measuring 19μm - 5.5X larger than what's found on high-end DSLRs. This allows for 1080/60p/30p/24p (and PAL equivalent) video capture in light levels as low as 0.0005 lux at a maximum gain setting of 75 Db, which is equivalent to over ISO 4,000,000."

Note: the pixel is _larger_ and therefore the sensor more sensitive. Canon made the _full frame_ sensor with only 2 megapixels and obtained the higher sensitivity.

Comparing with the cameras in phones, the area of the whole sensor in iPhone 6 is 50 times smaller than the area of the full frame sensor.

<comment><USER5> Yes, if you make the pixels smaller, the sensor will get less light sensitive. But for most applications, the sensor size is given (e.g. 35mm cameras) and smaller process sizes would mean, that more of the per-pixel area is taken for light recording and less for the electronic elements on each pixel.

<comment><USER4> Looking at the sensor under microscope the amount of photons received is determined more by the area of the pixel than the size of the features under that area:

[http://petapixel.com/2013/02/12/what-a-dslrs-cmos-sensor- loo...](http://petapixel.com/2013/02/12/what-a-dslrs-cmos-sensor-looks-like- under-a-microscope/)

I'd still like to get a link in support of the claim of significant benefit of lithography process improvement to the sensor sensitivity, unless it's about the smallest sensors (as in mobile phones or smaller) and very high pixel count.

<comment><USER6> From what I've watched about CMOS sensors and I could be mistaken, the comparison could be similar to making your CPU registers smaller but ramping the frequency of how often you access hit them (which is akin to increased framerate). So the net amount of captured light is the same, but you have many more frames now.

With sophisticated software (or onboard hardware) this can be reassembled to the same picture as well. And you are looking at this a bit wrong way. On mobile devices - your bottleneck is lens size, so you have to have smaller pixels.

Now if your pixels are large, the register (I think they are called wells on CMOS sensors) has to pull in much more information at higher power requirements which introduces noise which you have to "mask" with even more photon energy? Again, I could be getting this totally wrong and of course it's best to have big lens with lots of pixels.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> semi-extrinsic When a Gopro 4 (that's been on the market for a year now) can do 240 fps at 720p resolution, I think it's a bit misleading to say the current state of the art is 60 fps. And it's fair to assume next year's Gopro 5 will have a significant increase on that again.

<comment><USER7> What I really want, from go pro or Sony is a global shutter. Rolling shutter needs to die.

<comment> semi-extrinsic AFAIK, you can have global shutter on cameras today if you sacrifice low-light performance and high framerates. You need a CCD sensor instead of a CMOS (generally speaking), like you find e.g. on most cameras in the Canon PowerShot line, which do feature global shutters.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Is there a less blogspammy version of this? The article mentions a YouTube channel but doesn't give us the URL.

Edit: Did a bunch of digging and found it: [https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCaq5dRB_CnZDC- eQcsv7nZg](https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCaq5dRB_CnZDC-eQcsv7nZg)

</comment><comment><USER9> That's nice, how about 14 bit depth raw images in your pro series cameras though?

I mean, the 12+7 images look fine most of the time, but when you're paying close to $3,000 for a body, there should be no compromises in terms of IQ.

</comment><comment><USER10> Sony owns image sensors atm. They are probably 3-4 years ahead of the competition. They already have consumer 960fs pocket camera out in the market - [http://www.sony.net/Products/di/en- us/products/f5kd/](http://www.sony.net/Products/di/en-us/products/f5kd/)

<comment><USER11> Is 1000fps the next big thing, though? Probably not. (Never heard of the above pocket camera, for example)

<comment><USER12> I wonder if there are interesting applications of being able to capture images at this kind of speed at high resolution. For example, using image analysis between frames to get some kind of depth map, based on subtle differences between each frame due to slight hand movements.

<comment><USER13> I was thinking along the same lines. Another specific example would be single- shot HDR or true post-shot-adjustable exposure. E.g. if the optimum exposure for a conventional camera is 1/60th of a second, then instead capture 10-20 exposures whose total time adds up to 1/60th of a second, and sum various numbers of the exposures in software.

Right now that's not practical because DSLRs don't have the hardware capacity to pull that much data off of the sensor and store it quickly enough.

Seems like the additional data would also be very useful for removing motion blur, automatically removing moving objects from e.g. architectural/landscape shots, etc.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Americans Are Dying Younger, Saving Corporations Billions - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-08-08/americans-are-dying-younger-saving-corporations-billions <comment><USER3> I've been saying that for years. Here in europe, the reason the life expectancy is high is that it's based on people who die today at ripe old age, many of them having been retired 30 years, sometimes more... They are 85+, and they drag the mean age of death thru the roof.

When THAT lucky generation is gone, I think statisticians will realise that their children are /nowhere/ near as lucky, and I'm pretty sure the life expectancy number will fall off a cliff.

I don't have anything to back it up mind you, but raising the age of retirement, more stress related to job stability, whatever, you name it; it's just empirical but I've seen a lot of people in my environment die in their 60's -- many of them who had a perfectly 'sane' way of life. I know what you are thinking, many more people will die at 60 then will die at 90, but I'm still pretty sure there's some underlying pattern here.

Also, I do have a vague impression that making access to the NHS more difficult PLUS raising age of retirement EQUAL MOAR PROFITS for someone, somewhere.

<comment><USER4> Are you sure retiring early leads to a long life expectancy? I would expect the opposite. My father still works and he is very healthy for an 88 year old. Anecdote is not data, but people in my family seem to stay healthy by working or staying very active.

I think part of the point is to find a avocation that is not stressful, you enjoy, and can do a long time. That may be worth more than money.

<comment><USER5> > My father still works and he is very healthy for an 88 year old.

This is usually related to the kind of job you are doing.

My mother was cleaning schools and that is a killer for the back. Being retired, she takes long walks and keeps herself active and healthy.

But when I was studying I saw quite old teachers still active, and happy. But that's a different kind of job with different effects on your health.

> I think part of the point is to find a [a]vocation that is not stressful, > you enjoy, and can do a long time.

I agree. If you are lucky enough to get a job that fulfills you, then continuing working can be a good thing. That's why we can't just delay retirement age, but we need to take into account personal circumstances.

A not stressful and enjoyable work also helps you to keep your good health for longer, so you get in better shape to old age.

<comment><USER6> Great point. I wonder, if everyone should, in their middle ages, really think this through. And perhaps make a career change if their work requires something they wouldn't be comfortable doing later in life.

One of the best professions I can think of retiring in is probably academia... I've worked/studied/socialized with professors very much older than me, and they seem to continue to enjoy teaching/talking to students despite their age.

<comment><USER7> I sometimes wonder if a lot of the freshly educated programmers I hire really know what they are in for.

In 25 years they'll still have 25-30 years of work left in their lives, and by then most of them won't have received any significant reschooling, and they will still be competing in a tech world, where 10 years ago there wasn't a thing called smartphones.

Some of them will do just fine. I know a lot of old programmers, but I also know a lot of former older IT employees who are spending their 60ies in the unemployment lines.

<comment><USER8> > In 25 years they'll still have 25-30 years of work left in their lives

If you don't care about having a wife or kids you can easily retire forever after 10-15 years of work in SV or NYC.

<comment><USER9> You can't, really. Not in the US. There's no way you can budget health care for that many years.

<comment><USER10> Yes you can.

1\. mrmoneymustache.com 2\. earlyretirementextreme.com 3\. gocurrycracker.com 4\. madfientist.com 5\. thepowerofthrift.com (I could go on for a while here)

It's not only perfectly possible, it's not particularly difficult.

<comment><USER9> No, that doesn't address the problem at all. If you retire thirty years before you qualify for medicare, you have no idea what your medical expenses will be. None. They could amount to millions of dollars over those three decades, depending on your particular issues, and you're never going to close that gap by minimizing expenses.

<comment><USER10> It does. Just because _you_ aren't comfortable with that risk doesn't mean it's impossible. It just means your risk tolerance is lower than the aforementioned people who did retire 30 years early.

<comment><USER9> Well, if you're willing to be homeless you can retire any time you'd like.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I have this theory that in a couple decades or three most of the developed world will enter a health crisis, as everyone will suddenly realize that we've been eating and drinking like shit for a long time. Almost 3/4 of what you can find in your average grocery store today has unnecessary amounts of sugar, salt and/or chemicals added and no one seems to care. Someday we'll look at the food we eat now like the way we see tobacco today.

<comment><USER12> >and no one seems to care

I'd have to disagree with that. There are lots of people who care and have tried to be good stewards to the public. The problem is that you also have corporations with major amounts of cash and influence that actively discredit anyone who speaks out. These are facts.

For example, whether or not GMO issues are horseshit or not doesn't matter when anyone who speaks out is given a gag order or when we find leaked documents showing that companies know of damage and our systems are so fucked we aren't even allowed to ask about it without getting sued into oblivion.

People care, but caring isn't enough anymore.

<comment><USER13> Could you elaborate? I myself haven't seen much compelling evidence against GMOs.

<comment><USER14> Aren't those that are making extraordinary claims supposed to bring the evidence?

The idea that, given these premises:

a) we who don't understand even 10% of how the ecological ecosystem works

b) we don't understand even 10% of genes and how they interplay

c) we don't understand even 10% of second order effects of such changes

d) we don't yet have explanation for tons of interactions and functionality in the body (from what triggers cancers to all kinds of lesser stuff)

e) we can't even have a decent dietary advice from medical bodies that is not revised completely every 10-20 years

f) corporations will even put plutonium to kids milk if there's profit in it (and then lie about it)

g) all kinds of industry-sponsored research has been shown to be paid lies

... GMOs are perfectly safe.

It's more like changing various bits in working computer memory, with a ho-hum printout of parts of the program's in-memory structure and a crappy flow-chart of what it does, and wishing that the running program (and OS and such) will continue to play just fine...

<comment><USER15> Given the above, why do you think anything is safe? Common grapefruit was created by putting a radiation source in an orchard and seeing what happened - most of it was bad (as in trees died), but one grapefruit turns out to taste good. That grapefruit was grafted again and again until it is dominate. We have no idea which genes were changed and never did any study to see if the mutations were safe, we just eat it.

For hundreds of years farmers have been saving seeds from the plants that produced better. As a result the random mutations that farmers like have been selected for with no study on if those are safe mutations.

By Contrast with GMO we know which gene we change and why, and have done studies to prove safety. Maybe biases studies, and maybe not enough of them, but we have done them. That is more than you can say about anything not GMO.

<comment><USER16> This. We've been creating GMOs since the dawn of agriculture. Doing it in a petrie dish changes nothing. I'm less concerned about GMOs than I am about them changing them to spray worse and worse weedkiller on them before I eat it.

<comment><USER14> > _We 've been creating GMOs since the dawn of agriculture. Doing it in a > petrie dish changes nothing._

Yeah, if breadth and scale doesn't mean anything.

It's like saying: "We have been blowing things up since the advent of gunpowder by the Chinese a millennium ago. Doing it with atomic bombs changes nothing".

Traditional "GMOs" were already closely related, and the modifications that could emerge were very constrained. Not so much with GMOs that allow for arbitrary outputs.

<comment><USER15> The breadth and scale is much smaller with GMO and random chance. A farmer several thousand years ago is responsible for as much genetic mutation of the human race as all the genetic manipulation that has made it to market. (though this will change quickly if we start making approval for GMO easy)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Reminds me of this article from The Atlantic last year:

> For the last several months, social scientists have been debating the > striking findings of a study by the economists Anne Case and Angus Deaton. > Between 1998 and 2013, Case and Deaton argue, white Americans across > multiple age groups experienced large spikes in suicide and fatalities > related to alcohol and drug abuse—spikes that were so large that, for whites > aged 45 to 54, they overwhelmed the dependable modern trend of steadily > improving life expectancy. While critics have challenged the magnitude and > timing of the rise in middle-age deaths (particularly for men), they and the > study's authors alike seem to agree on some basic points: Problems of mental > health and addiction have taken a terrible toll on whites in America—though > seemingly not in other wealthy nations—and the least educated among them > have fared the worst.

[https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2016/01/white-w...](https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2016/01/white- working-class-poverty/424341/)

</comment><comment><USER18> But wait, there's good news: If you don't die quickly enough, they'll help!

Taking too long to die: Some 'terminal' patients can lose hospice benefits: [http://www.news-press.com/story/news/2017/07/28/too-long- die...](http://www.news-press.com/story/news/2017/07/28/too-long-die-some- terminal-patients-lose-medicare-hospice-benefits/435340001/)

<comment><USER19> Yes, it makes sense. Hospice is for end of life care. They literally pump you full of pain medication as it is more humane than dying in agony. If your condition is not continually getting worse while under hospice and there is a chance you are getting better than you should be under a different treatment.

Hospice is not healthcare it is where you go to die.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> The absurdity is that life insurance/pension companies assume live expectancy is actually rising.

The company providing my pension fund estimates my life expectancy to 114 years - a fantasy number, albeit one that /increases/ my monthly payment and /decreases/ my expected pension.

<comment><USER21> Another reason why term coverage, not whole life/universal, is a better choice.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Now I'm imagining our economy like some cruel volcano god, demanding blood in exchange for temporary safety. "People's lives are getting worse, look how much money that's making us!"

It's as if people exist only to make money, actually making people's lives better be damned. I doubt people will tolerate such a vampiric system for much longer, especially if it doesn't feel the need to conceal it's fangs anymore, and what comes afterward keeps me up at night.

<comment><USER23> Yesterday I heard on the tv or radio I heard the metric "€/vote" as if a vote was product.

<comment><USER24> I read on another HN thread that the top 25% pays 90% of taxes. Made me grok why governments will never really care about the poor pretty clearly.

It's harsh, but for cities or even countries the bottom xx% is a net drain.

<comment><USER25> But the bottom 90% do the labor that earns that top 1% all the money.

<comment><USER26> But the top 1% provide the jobs. Unless the bottom 90% collectively strike, or you "nationalize" everything (that works really well /s), what ya gonna do about it?

<comment><USER25> Do they really "provide the jobs" the companies they own provide them. VERY few of those people are critical to the companies they own.

<comment><USER26> I agree, at least once the company is well established, but they do own them. If you nationalize them, or somehow make it so the company "serves the greater good", rather than the interests of it's owners, the results are disasterous. It's playing out in Venezuela now.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> I don't get it. The article does _not_ say that life expectancies are decreasing. It says that they are still increasing, just not as fast as they were a few years ago. But the article (and most of the comments) seem to think it means that people are dying younger. That's not what the data is saying.

<comment><USER28> our media is a wonderful thing

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> It's difficult to predict mortality rates. Advanced healthcare techniques (e.g. CRISPR) could completely eradicate entire classes of diseases (kind of like how anti-biotics and vaccinations changed healthcare completely), or they could lead to nothing.

So we might find that the average age of death jumps up by 20+ years in the next 50-60 years (just like it did after WW2).

Nuclear war aside we almost certainly won't see a drop in the average age.

<comment><USER29> The problem is the cost of those techniques. Will it be low enough so that it has an impact on the average (or even better, the median) life expectancy?

<comment><USER28> Probably, vaccines were very expensive when first produced, as were anti- biotics.

Given we are potentially entering the age of unlimited power (i.e. via solar/battery tech), we should be able to grow ever more food. Combined with global population growth declining we will see basic quality of life becoming almost gauranteed universally. Then we'll have more and more people + AI working on advancing tech (as they don't have to work on manual things) so production costs should drop dramatically.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> This headline is mindbogglingly dystopic and crass

<comment><USER31> The bright neoliberal future is here!

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> Good news, everyone.

<comment><USER33> Did you mean for me to read that in Professor Farnsworth's voice?

Because I did.

<comment><USER34> _Good news, everyone! people are dying earlier, and you 're one of them!_

Yep, definitely a Farnsworth quote.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> How does the pension system in USA work? Do the companies pay you a small salary after you retire? It reads like that. In that case, what about the place you worked until you were 40, are they still on the hook? What if the company closes down?

<comment><USER36> Very few companies offer pensions now - mostly the government.

<comment><USER37> > Very few companies offer pensions now

All professional jobs offer pensions, I'm sure. Including all the major tech companies.

<comment><USER38> Haha, nope.

You have the "opportunity" to contribute to a 401k, and if you use the company's (poorly run) 401k option, they may decide to match _up to_ a percentage of your contribution.

For instance, I contribute 10% of my paycheck towards the 401k, my employer matches 4% of that. That's it. And I work in IT for a Fortune 500 company.

<comment><USER39> Just to make sure I am correct, your 401k gets matched with 0.004 of your total pay? Thanks

<comment><USER40> No. The way it usually works is you can contribute up to X% of your pay tax advantaged (with a hard dollar cap) to your 401k. The company can match up to Y% pay.

What he is suggesting is that he can contribute 10%. Everything he contributes up to 4% is matched by his company (ie a 4% pay increase). Usually its a little more complicated than that. Like they'll match 1:1 the first 2% and then 1:2 the next 2% for a total of 3% matching funds.

<comment><USER35> What are typical matches?

In Norway there are no matches. The company just have to pay 2-7% of your salary to your fund each year. For tech jobs it's mostly at the top of the range.

<comment><USER40> Its fairly variant. As far as I can tell (and I'm no expert) the max is either non-existent or so high that i've never encountered it in the wild. Between 2-5% seems common in my experience.

The companies do not _have_ to do this. It is purely optional, though there is a tax advantage I believe. Most "professionals" have the option at their company.

A bigger problem is that the 401k offerings are fairly bad usually. The people picking them are HR staffers who frequently don't have experience in finance, so the plans frequently have murderously high expense ratios. Even to the point where some companies repackage Vanguard funds that you can get on the open market for 10x less.

<comment><USER33> There is a maximum total contribution.

[https://www.irs.gov/retirement-plans/401k-plans-deferrals- an...](https://www.irs.gov/retirement-plans/401k-plans-deferrals-and-matching- when-compensation-exceeds-the-annual-limit)

total employee and employer contributions (including forfeitures) - the lesser of 100% of an employee's compensation or $54,000 for 2017 ($53,000 for 2015 and 2016 not including "catch-up" elective deferrals of $6,000 in 2015 - <USER2> for employees age 50 or older) (IRC section 415(c))

So the max is basically 200% match of the individual's contribution, which is maxed out at $18,000 for an individual under 50.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> I never understood why everyone is against smoking if it saves those corps money in the long run.

<comment><USER42> Slowly dying from cancer is expensive. Dying from a sudden stroke induced by a lifetime of lethargy isn't.

<comment><USER43> I believe even smokers who die early from disease are cheaper in the long run compared to those who end up dying much later in life.

I think the same idea holds true for the obese because they tend to die early, as well.

Being old and sick is incredibly expensive. Living healthily enough to get to be old and sick is a monetary drain from insurance companies' perspectives.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> Its not hard to see _why_ exactly Americans are dying younger. Hell, just look at the headline here.

When you have increased wealth concentration flowing upwards and more involvement of profit machines in people's lives (healthcare, correctional facilities, food, environment), people on average are working harder for less pay with increased cost of living. This means less recreational time to blow stress off, less time for doctor visits (not to mention the fun games our federal government is playing with healthcare), and less time/money/emphasis to treat yourself spiritually/psychologically. I am hardly surprised this equates to higher mortality rates.

America has a huge problem spending money on the betterment of its citizens, and it is starting to show.

<comment><USER45> > Its not hard to see why exactly Americans are dying younger

American's aren't dying younger, life expectancies are still increasing... The headline is a lie.

</comment></comment><comment><USER46> purely anecdotal, but when my Doctor tells me he cannot tell fat people to diet because bad surveys affect the reviews of Doctors and their hospital; surveys from both government and insurance companies; it should be a clear indicator we are doing something wrong. He cannot connect their diabetes to their weight, only suggest what foods would help manage their diabetes without crossing the line into mentioning weight management.

what are people's actual expectations for how long they should or can live? I am at the age where I am not seeing relatives who I grew up learning from passing on, I am even having coworkers pass on. Perhaps I notice it more when people younger than I go.

<comment><USER47> Interesting. I was never asked to do any reviews of my doctors or other healthcare providers.

As for your second question, I semi-jokingly tell my kids that my consciousness will be uploaded to the cloud and I will be posting dad jokes to their twitter long after I am dead. Just need to make sure I pay for hosting in advance.

</comment></comment><comment><USER48> Looking at the chart, it seems like they're reading an awful lot into 1 or 2 data points. It's very noisy data.

</comment><comment><USER49> The list of municipal and state governments that are trending towards bankruptcy due to underfunded pensions is longer than a rich kid's Christmas list. A shortening life expectancy benefits them most.

That's the news here, if there is any.

</comment><comment><USER50> Personal opinion: Life expectancy gains will actually reverse over the new 20 years, given how little is being done to combat extremely poor health choices many Americans make.

Then it will skyrocket due to medical innovations like CRISPR.

</comment><comment><USER51> But our healthcare is the best in the world...at least I pay like it is...

<comment><USER52> US healthcare is far lower value for money than other developed nations, at least using average life expectancy as the metric:

[http://2oqz471sa19h3vbwa53m33yj.wpengine.netdna- cdn.com/wp-c...](http://2oqz471sa19h3vbwa53m33yj.wpengine.netdna-cdn.com/wp- content/uploads/2016/08/us-healthcare-system.jpg)

<comment><USER53> Life expectancy is a terrible measure for quality of health care. The best health care in the world won't change how much overeating and a sedentary lifestyle contribute to heart disease (the #1 cause of death in the US), stroke (#5), and diabetes (#7).

Life expectancy can vary dramatically by county, even when there are no differences at all in health care policy. [1]

That's not to say we aren't paying too much and getting too little. We are. It's just life expectancy isn't the way to measure it.

[1] [http://www.nbcnews.com/health/health-news/who-lives- longer-s...](http://www.nbcnews.com/health/health-news/who-lives-longer-study- finds-colorado-wins-20-years-n756471)

<comment><USER52> > _Life expectancy is a terrible measure for quality of health care..._

Depends how you define health care. If you include preventative medicine, education, etc. then things look a bit different.

Note sure what happens in the US, but countries that practice what you might call "socialized medicine" do a lot of that.

<comment><USER53> Far and away, lifestyle is the biggest contributor. The very source I linked above claims it accounts for 74% of differences, and "access to health care accounted for much of the rest of the difference, the team found."

I'm open to contrary claims, but if you're making one at all it's a pretty loose one.

<comment><USER52> You seem to have missed my point, and keep focusing on overly narrow health intervention. Going back to my previous comment, education (through direct communication and through schools) is a channel through which lifestyle and hence health outcomes can be improved. Similarly, the UK we have a forthcoming sugar tax, as do many other countries. Cycle infrastructure. etc.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER54> Sure, also understand that the productive segment is also be affected in turn impacting future GDP calculations. It's a net loss in the long run..

<comment><USER55> Are you sure about that? Don't most people stop being productive long before they die?

<comment><USER54> The article states that there are higher deaths of despair which affects younger population disproportionately. This impacts productivity and GDP calculations.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER56> Always nice to see a perverse incentive. But thankfully, in America we work for corporations, not the other way around.

<comment><USER57> I'm trying to understand what this comment means.

</comment></comment><comment><USER58> wonder how the influx of "corporate wellness" plans affect this. It seems more and more that your lifestyle can be adjusted/improved via your workplace rather than personal drive.

Could that be an input into insurance? potentially...

</comment><comment><USER59> cue sardonic grin

([https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/in-brief- aug-09/](https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/in-brief-aug-09/))

</comment><comment><USER60> This kind of reads a little like sensationalist journalism, imo.

Seems to me that our technology may actually just be hitting a wall in regards to life expectancy.

That, and the proliferation of sugar in our every-day diets has long-term consequences (who knew? /s)

<comment><USER51> It's culture not technology:

"The USA has the highest child and maternal mortality, homicide rate, and body-mass index of any high-income country, and was the first of high-income countries to experience a halt or possibly reversal of increase in height in adulthood, which is associated with higher longevity," wrote the study authors.

[http://fortune.com/2017/02/23/us-life-expectancy- projections...](http://fortune.com/2017/02/23/us-life-expectancy-projections/)

<comment><USER61> The maternal deaths statistic is not that straightforward. The Economist just had an article about this [1]. It appears that differences in measurements can explain that higher risk.

[1] [https://www.economist.com/news/united- states/21725832-questi...](https://www.economist.com/news/united- states/21725832-question-harder-answer-you-might-think-pregnancy-america-much- deadlier)

<comment><USER62> CDC methodology vs UK methodology doesn't explain why California has a rate of 7.3 maternal deaths per 100,000 compared with 22.0 for the US as a whole. Or why the rate in California is falling (like other developed countries) while the rate for the entire US is rising year on year [1].

The author just threw out data (with no explanation of their methodology) until they got the American rate similar to the UK rate and then stopped so they could assert that there's absolutely nothing wrong with the US health industry. The author would have been fully aware of the regional differences in the US because the Economist article is a response to the various articles this summer about maternal deaths in the US which have generally focused heavily on the California Maternal Quality Care Collaborative and the improvements California has made compared to other states[2][3].

Not that I'd take the 21 year old interns writing without bylines in The Economist very seriously on health matters (or anything else for that matter).

[1] [https://archive.cdph.ca.gov/programs/mcah/Documents/MCAH%20B...](https://archive.cdph.ca.gov/programs/mcah/Documents/MCAH%20Bulletin_MMR%20Decline_May2015_v2.pdf) [2] [https://www.vox.com/science-and- health/2017/6/29/15830970/wo...](https://www.vox.com/science-and- health/2017/6/29/15830970/women-health-care-maternal-mortality-rate) [3] [http://www.npr.org/2017/05/12/527806002/focus-on-infants- dur...](http://www.npr.org/2017/05/12/527806002/focus-on-infants-during- childbirth-leaves-u-s-moms-in-danger)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER63> Finally, some good news! /s

</comment><comment><USER64> Every cloud, huh.

</comment><comment><USER65> So we've reached Peak Human?

</comment><comment><USER66> People still get pensions?

</comment><comment><USER67> Buy every retiree a high-performance motor cycle. They'll have some fun, and when they die you won't need expensive end-of-life care; you'll just need a mop and a body-bag. It'll save billions.

<comment><USER68> Not really, assuming every gets a $15,000 bike. it's about $20b more than we spent last year on Medicare.

But, It really depends on the bike you're suggesting. Supply and demand for 46.2M units will surely raise the price as well.

46.2M Americans over the age of 65 (retirement age) * $15,000 a bike (conservative, since we're talking "high-performance motor cycle") = $693B.

[http://www.kff.org/medicare/issue-brief/the-facts-on- medicar...](http://www.kff.org/medicare/issue-brief/the-facts-on-medicare- spending-and-financing/)

<comment><USER69> It is an amortized cost. The NYT claims Medicare costs the government roughly $6,000/person/year. So the question is whether the motorcycles reduce an average of 3 years of life per person. (Ignoring price shocks from giving them out.)

But... 2015 data says ~5,000 cyclists died out of a total population of 8,600,000, making for .05% of cyclists dying per year. Assuming a grant at 65 and a life expectancy of 85, that's an average of .01 years of life lost in the first year. (And this assumes everyone rides them as much as people who choose to buy motorcycles!) The years lost decline as people age, of course, but even raw multiplication only gets us an average of .2 years of life lost per person over the course of the project.

Obviously this doesn't adjust for varying risk profiles compared to normal motorcycle riders, but we'd be talking about being more than 15 times as likely to die as most motorcyclists to make this math add up.

All moral issues aside, it looks like the math just doesn't back this one.

[https://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/23/upshot/medicaid-gives- the...](https://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/23/upshot/medicaid-gives-the-poor-a- reason-to-say-no-thanks.html)

[http://www.iii.org/issue-update/motorcycle-crashes](http://www.iii.org/issue- update/motorcycle-crashes)

edit: taking bike price down to $8k doesn't really change this logic, especially given the "not actually riding" issue I didn't factor in.

<comment><USER67> But you don't need to buy a new bike for every senior every year. Bikes last. In steady state, you only need to buy one for whoever retires that year, which is maybe 3 million per year. So the cost is roughly $45 billion per year, and that's assuming all retirees participate.

As for cost, I expect mass production on a vast scale would ultimately drive the price down. Every damn vehicle manufacturer is going to want a piece of the GLR* contract. They'll knife each other in the streets for it. $10K per unit seems like a workable target.

[*] Let me just say, in my official capacity, that the initials do not stand for Granny's Last Ride. They stand for, uh, something else.

<comment><USER70> > Bikes last.

Not when used in this manner...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER71> Behold, the wonders of the Scientific Utopia of "Progress". GMOs, Big Pharma, Health (Sick) care system, Compulsory Medicine, outlawing of Natural/traditional "unproven" health care, etc.

Is it time to begin discussing the desirability/effectiveness of certain policies, institutions, & popular beliefs?

<comment><USER72> Sorry, but without GMOs, Big Pharma, Health (Sick) care system, Compulsory Medicine people would be dying even faster.

I hate Bigpharma as much as the next guy but just look at the statistics of children deaths in the early 1900 it's clear something changed and medicine and vaccines are among it.

Completelly inflamatory statement...

<comment><USER73> I'm unfortunately on mobile and can't write much - however, my understanding is that there is still some debate about the benefits of medication vs sanitation _in overall mortality in Western countries_. While this doesn't necessarily hold true for children, I thought I'd link to a discussion of this debate. (Can't find the reference I wanted...)

 _Here 's a figure for death from infectious disease by the CDC - note that antibiotics don't appreciably change the rate in decline_

[https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/mm4829a1.htm#fig1](https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/mm4829a1.htm#fig1)

 _just a random find - this paper from 1902 mentions the debate, too, with some descriptions of 'natural experiments'_ [https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2401255/?page=1](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2401255/?page=1)

Also, I am not saying that antibiotics and medications don't work - just that the story actually is more interesting than one might initially guess.

Lastly, these data discuss Western populations - I've heard the opposite may be true in poor countries.

<comment><USER15> Amazing how sanitation caused polio to drop rapidly for years without having an effect on measles, then suddenly measles starting dropping. Or we can just notice how the drop occurs right after the introduction of the vaccine.

<comment><USER73> I did not mean to be belligerent in my response and I'm sorry if I offended you.

As I said above, in the Western world, sanitation and other interventions both contributed to our current state of health. As the graph I linked to shows, antibiotics haven't appreciably changed the rate of decline of infectious disease. This is no way means that antibiotics and/or vaccines are ineffective. As you point out, looking at specific diseases shows that these interventions are helpful.

Here's the data for measles if folks are interested - there was indeed a remarkable drop after the institution of the vaccine[1].

1\. [https://www.quackwatch.com/03HealthPromotion/immu/immu01.htm...](https://www.quackwatch.com/03HealthPromotion/immu/immu01.html)

<comment><USER73> I think I'm outside the edit window for my comment. As a coda, it looks like mortality due to measles may have been declining before the incidence of measles began to decline; this further supports a role for other societal developments in decreasing death from infectious disease.

This is purportedly related to the use of antibiotics to decrease bacterial sequelae of measles. I saw an academic reference to this effect but I can't find it again - here's a popular article. You'll note that this commentator ascribes some of the decrease in measles-related death to sanitation.

1\. [http://www.iayork.com/MysteryRays/2009/09/02/measles- deaths-...](http://www.iayork.com/MysteryRays/2009/09/02/measles-deaths-pre- vaccine/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER74> Meanwhile Europeans are working older, to the same effect. The boomers enjoyed a nice work life balance across the classes for the first time in human history, but the ruling class managed to get us back in our place.

<comment><USER75> Other than the classical whataboutism, it's blatantly not true. US is mostly a developing country regarding most social and health standards, from general health to lifespan.

<comment><USER74> you mean it's lagging behind most indicators from other comparable countries, including equality index, healthcare quality and average lifespan.</comment></comment></comment>


Mongodb 1.3.0 unstable released - <AUTHOR> http://groups.google.com/group/mongodb-user/browse_thread/thread/70170dc79b2a0cc6

<comment><AUTHOR> has read concurrency, bulk delete concurrency, and more. great way to end the year!</comment>


Why ice cream cones are shaped the way they are - <AUTHOR> http://www.datagenetics.com/blog/july42014/index.html

<comment><USER2> That's pretty funny. Like the author said, it may not be true, but it's a fun piece of analysis.

I can almost remember doing math like this at school.

</comment><comment><USER3> Thanks for kind comments. Yes, it was meant as a little light hearted fun. I've been writing a series of articles about solids inscribed inside others, and this seemed a (stretched) way of giving the article a different spin.

</comment><comment><USER4> Actually Δ ADE is not a right triangle. (Unless A is infinitely far away from D and E.)

Edit: thanks TheLoneWolfling, I was looking at the wrong angle.

<comment><AUTHOR> Err, are you sure about that? It touches at one point, so that makes it a tangent, so it's perpendicular to the circle. I think it it a right angle.

(This is the internet, so I'm sure there will shortly be lots of posts of: Yes it is, no it isn't, and we'll find out for sure).</comment></comment>


3 Tips for Effective Stand-Up Meetings - <AUTHOR> https://www.blossom.io/blog/2012/09/17/3-tips-for-quick-effective-stand-up-meetings.html <comment><USER2> I've watched a lot of teams do standups. Very interesting to see how different folks handle it.

One thing that strikes me as unusual is that the benefit of the stand-up is not always visible to those participating in it! So I'll see people with lots of Scrum or Agile experience say "We're a mature team. We don't need no stinking stand-up" -- then make a bone-headed mistake that would have been caught by simply talking more to each other.

Maybe my sample size is small (100-200 teams), but to me stand-ups are like brushing your teeth: you don't want to take all day with it, it doesn't really seem to do much while you're doing it, and it pays off in a big way over time.

<comment><USER3> As I mentioned in another comment, they likely forgot the purpose of the daily stand-up, which is to have everyone be on the same page everyday. If they're doing that without a daily stand-up, then fine, but it's usually quite difficult to do in teams larger than 2-3 people, which may explain why they lost the value when they stopped doing it.

It's not hard to do the daily stand-up and there can be many ways to make it more of a team building experience. I use Improv with the teams I work with (see: <http://ow.ly/dOmJJ>)

<comment><USER3> Sorry, original owly link was broken, try: <http://ow.ly/dOqfI>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Here's another great tip:

Only do your standups 4 days a week. That way you get a weekly reminder of what you miss when you don't do daily standups and a weekly reminder of what you're giving up to do them.

I really think that it helps keep things moving faster on the 4 days that we do the standups. Our workplace has no-standup Mondays and work-from-home Fridays (with a telephone standup). I recommend both practices.

<comment><USER5> Hey Brian,

great tip. Haven't thought about that yet. It sounds like a brilliant concept for reality-checking the value of the Stand-Up and winning buy-in from people who (rightfully) question the benefit of doing Stand-Ups in comparison to what you give up (n minutes * participants). I'll definitely keep this in mind for the future.

Exactly what I hoped for when writing the blog post, I'm learning so much right now just by hearing insights from people like you.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Step 1 says to brew tea and shows people sitting down. In most cases, this to me is a stand-up antipattern. The reason it's called a "stand-up" is because everyone does actually stand up, which encourages everyone to make it finish as quickly as possible.

Sitting down and brewing tea might work for people well versed in agile, but for most places "doing agile", it smells of Agile Theatre.

Standup meeting: Do a quick daily check, offline any conversations that need to happen between individuals, and get on with the job.

<comment><USER7> If it works for them then they're doing "Agile" perfectly. The point is optimizing value and that's individual to every team/company.

Ironically, this dogma is what the founders of Agile were trying to avoid.

<comment><USER3> "If it works for them then they're doing "Agile" perfectly." is a very dangerous statement. By that logic than doing anything is doing Agile and we know this is not true. If it were true, you could do waterfall and if that works for you, then it's Agile. Which is just silly.

This is not to say that the stand-up must be exactly as described in Scrum or elsewhere, but the key is that you have the Agile mindset and understand why you're doing the thing you're doing.

For example, the stand-up is a short and focused meeting where teams co- ordinate and get on the same page (which means it's NOT a status meeting).

We stand to keep the meeting short and focused. If you keep the meeting short and focused, then it doesn't matter if you're standing or sitting. Far too often, teams choose not to stand, lose sight of keeping the meeting short and focused, and transition to having long, boring, status meetings that aren't very useful.

If you choose to have tea before your stand-up, then have a short and focused meeting where everyone gets on the same page, then you're fine. If you're having wandering conversations that go nowhere or on wild tangents and never really seem to accomplish much of anything, then you've probably missed the point.

I have a video course dedicated entirely to the daily stand-up, good and bad habits, and how you can use Improv to get everyone focused, energized, and listening before the meeting. You can check it out here: <http://ow.ly/dOmJJ>

<comment><USER3> Sorry, original owly link was broken. Try: <http://ow.ly/dOqfI>

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Hey Guys, Completley off topic but I really like your product. One thing I think you can improve on your home page is you have a-lot of images but none of them are clickable to maximize/get more details. Think you could make your homepage more interactive check out the simple.com homepage for an idea of what I mean. Hope you find this feedback helpful. :)

<comment><USER5> Hey :)

thanks a lot for the recommendation. Definitely very helpful feedback. We're currently retinafying the public pages and the app itself, landing page overhaul is coming.

Communicating about the look and feel of our product is a thing that we definitely can do better on and I also observe many other technical-founder teams not spending enough time on. Probably because you see your product every day and know it inside out.

Thanks for the heads-up and the simple.com example!

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> TL;DR: Kanban is neat. So is daily, habitual team-building. Not a ton that hasn't been hashed out before.

Hey, whatever works for you! My team loves planned socializing, but to make it daily would seem like overkill. Some of us would object to spending time unproductively, especially since we already try to streamline our standups.

</comment><comment><USER10> I question the idea of having a meeting every day whether you need it or not.

I have used stand-ups in the past, but found there was a lot of information being shared that not everyone cared about or benefited from knowing.

I like the idea of keeping everyone up to date about what's going on, but I am not sure stand-up meetings are the solution.

<comment><USER11> We had daily stand-up meeting. But I did not attend it any more after talking to manager.

I told manager that at the daily stand-up meeting, people just say \- what I did yesterday \- what I am doing currently

Most of the time, each one of us does not care about what other people did yesterday or is doing what today.

Only manager care.

Though manager get pissed off I still do not want waste my time on it.

<comment><USER3> I would suggest in that case, that you have a daily status meeting and not a daily stand-up then.

It also sounds like you may not have a team either. A group of people sitting together working on tasks unrelated to each other do not make a team.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> In my experience, daily stand-up meetings work best when:

-The team is new, or starting on a new project.

-The product is approaching a big deadline.

With the former, it helps the team build momentum early-on if there is a chance to sync-up and trade knowledge every day. With the latter, it pays to do a daily triage of new issues and re-evaluate existing priorities, so that there are no last-minute surprises.

Generally, when the team is working in full swing, daily meetings become less productive. One way of mitigating this is to just be aware of this fact and keep the meetings as short as possible. Stand-up is not the time to evaluate each member's performance, so nobody should feel pressured to explain everything they are working on in detail. A general overview should suffice (one or two bullet points), with clarifications should anyone need to know more.

<comment><USER13> I've also seen these meetings used as a way for people to "prove" that they have been working.

The main problem I have with mandatory meetings is that they often impair one's ability to get work done. Some people work best when uninterrupted by a meeting. Some people work best when they get an entire morning without interruption. These meetings seem to be mostly sitting waiting for the last person to arrive, or for the cat wrangler to get started with proceedings.

<comment><USER3> Remember, it's more important to build the right thing than it is to build lots of stuff.

It's better to have the daily stand-up, interrupt your productivity a little bit and discover what you're working on shouldn't be worked on at all, than it is to work for days on something only to have to throw it out and start all over again because you didn't know that something changed.

Far too many organizations focus too much on individual productivity and far too little on delivering things that are actually valuable to their customers.

That's not to say individuals shouldn't be productive, just that writing code all the time doesn't necessarily mean you will be successful as a business.

If the start time is a problem, bring it up at your retrospective and see how the rest of the team feels about it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> This was a relevant post regarding any meeting for a tight-knit team with a focused objective. Which is to say, the one undeniable benefit is uninterrupted, distraction-free communication.

That said, if you're a resource to multiple teams/projects, many meetings just seem to become a sick joke where you talk about everything and do nothing.

P.S. I'm probably just being cynical, but I dislike when I can't tell where the helpfulness stops and the PR starts in these type of posts (company with stake in topic.) No disrespect intended to the OP...

<comment><USER5> Hey squarecat,

thanks a lot for chiming in. I don't think you're cynical. I try to write about useful stuff but of course producing content is a form of content marketing.

That said I try to be conscious about not being spammy and I think there is a way to pull it off :) Any feedback highly appreciated. I plan to write much more in the future and definitely don't want to come across spammy.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> My team is split up across two locations with 9 people in one office and two in another. How have people handled remote standups? Do you get the remote guys on speaker phone? Have a separate meeting with them? Are there any tips/suggestions for making standups with remote employees work well?

<comment><USER16> My team consists of four people, two of which are remote, spread across three adjacent timezones. We find that a regular three-way conference call is sufficient. This arrangement has worked well for three years.

The idea of using Skype has surfaced once or twice but we've gotten by without it. I doubt we'll ever need it.

As for advice…

* I would suggest everyone place their call from a suitably quiet room. Someone doing dishes, making tea, or wrestling with a dog is extremely distracting.

* Hold the standup meeting on time and don't delay more than five minutes. If you don't, you're effectively chaining people to their phones for an indefinite amount of time.

* Two or more people in a room together should remember to speak to the phone and not each other. It's amazing how much of a statement or conversation can be lost over the phone when co-located people use gestures and glances to communicate.</comment></comment>


Show HN: Comparing 176,077 tech salaries to median household income - <AUTHOR> https://swizec.github.io/h1b-software-salaries/#*-*-engineer <comment><USER2> Friendly note: these are H1B salaries, so it's probably not quite the same as all tech salaries.

<comment><USER3> I would be incredibly interested in data for all tech salaries.</comment></comment>


Prime Number Visualization Simulation Spiral - <AUTHOR> http://www.numbersimulation.com/ <comment><USER2> It's an interesting visualization, but it doesn't really seem to highlight anything new about the way prime numbers are structured. It's difficult to make connections between the spiral and the prime numbers, because the red pieces don't generally stand out strongly against the white pieces (at least not in any obvious pattern. There are cool things you can notice if you think about it long enough, but you notice these things without the help from the spiral too).

<comment><USER3> Visualizations aren't meant to highlight anything new, but rather to bring to light and visualize what is already known.

<comment><USER4> I disagree with that. The entire point of data visualization is to highlight patterns in data to make the data easier to understand. Highlighting what's already known is a waste of time. A good visualization will help uncover something new.

I feel bad saying this, because it probably took a lot of work to make, but this prime number spiral is kind of pointless. What is it showing me? If I let the painfully slow animation run for a while, and look at the bigger picture, what insight will I gain about prime numbers? Probably nothing.

It's even a bit misleading, because to the best of my knowledge, there's no connection between spirals and prime numbers.

If I'm just being dense and not getting it, I'd love for somebody to explain it to me.

<comment><USER3> "there's no connection between spirals and prime numbers"

You just shot yourself in the foot :( Yes, there is a connection. If you add up the total distance each line makes in a tick, its equivalent to the harmonic series, which is a special case of the zeta function. This is where the spiral comes from. Its a dirct consequence of the fact that each number has period 1/n. The spiral emerges naturally, its not programmed or forced into that shape.

<comment><USER4> If that's the concept the visualization was trying to get across, then it failed pretty bad.

It may look neat, but it doesn't make any of those connections apparent.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Another great visualization of the primes is the famous Ulam spiral:

[http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/69/Ulam_1.pn...](http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/69/Ulam_1.png)

</comment><comment><USER6> Nice job. - I would suggest re-labling the btm controls to say "Left/RIght for Slower/Faster"

</comment><comment><USER7> It's a very beautiful visualization. I particularly enjoy seeing the period of each block correspond with the representative number. If only there were more visualizations like this for other mathematical concepts!

</comment><comment><USER8> Here's another prime number circle/visualization: <http://www.flickr.com/photos/michaelpaukner/3977033600>

The creator of that one links to a Geocities page (which doesn't exist anymore, of course), but I think that page probably moved here: [http://www.magic- squares.net/moreprimes.htm#A%20Prime%20Circ...](http://www.magic- squares.net/moreprimes.htm#A%20Prime%20Circle)

</comment><comment><USER9> I love it. And as sad as it is that I have to point this out specifically: This site works awesome from this guy's couch on an Android device.

</comment><comment><USER10> A while ago I recreated the visualization of the Sieve of Eratosthenes from Wikipedia (<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sieve_of_Eratosthenes>) in Javascript: <http://codepen.io/FWeinb/full/tmwnf>

</comment><comment><USER11> I found this to be a great visual. I stared at it for quiet some time looking for the patterns. I thought it would be cool to put some music to it... <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hnHhRtHmiCc>

Edit: I will go back and fine tune the video so it syncs to the music.

</comment><comment><USER12> Another Prime Number Pattern Visualization by Jason Davies which was posted on HN sometime back.

<http://www.jasondavies.com/primos/>

</comment><comment><USER13> I wasn't aware of this. Thank you. I understand better what people mean when they say primes are fractal now

</comment><comment><USER14> Very cool! Too bad it's not possible to rewind though.

<comment><USER15> It is possible. Hit the "backward" button at the top.

<comment><USER14> Woah, that did not exist yet when I made my comment. Thanks.</comment></comment></comment>


Productizing Twilio Applications - <AUTHOR> http://www.kalzumeus.com/2011/12/19/productizing-twilio-applications/ <comment><USER2> That's a superb article re: real-world Twilio. We did a head to-head with twilio and tropo and twilio won hands down in terms of actual "production- worthiness" despite tropo having "more" features including speech reco. [http://pardner.com/2011/04/tropo-not-ready-for-prime-time- we...](http://pardner.com/2011/04/tropo-not-ready-for-prime-time-went-with- twilio/)

<comment><USER3> > We did a head to-head with twilio and tropo and twilio won hands down in > terms of actual "production-worthiness" despite tropo having "more" features > including speech reco.

Had the same head-to-head, and Tropo won for us. Tropo has substandard docs and higher prices, but the tech and API is top notch. We also needed the international coverage. Regardless, they are both great products and great companies. You can't go wrong with either, unless you have very particular needs.

<comment><USER2> Don't disagree. Tropo does some extremely cool stuff... having a single app handle IM, SMS, tweets, voice is kinda magical. Seems to have better local number availability as well. The lack of any rate limiting handshaking for handling sms blasts was a deal killer for my app however... imo if you try to push sms faster that they can send it they should either queue the messages (as twilio does) or provide handshaking that says "can't send that message" instead of silently discarding the message.

That said, our app uses a mashup of both tropo and twilio now, we use tropo to handle "tweet" dialog with consumers.

<comment><USER3> > imo if you try to push sms faster that they can send it they should either > queue the messages (as twilio does)

Absolutely! I simply don't understand that decision. I mean, I can create my own internal queue to get around the problem, but that burden shouldn't be on me.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4>
       Additionally, Twilio is the nascent, embryonic form of the first Internet that a
       billion people are going to have access to, because Twilio turns every phone
       into a smartphone.

So the total potential market for Twillio apps is the amount of mobile phones in circulation which are not smartphones. Will this number not be shrinking in a few years, even if the predominance of non-smartphones in developing countries is causing it to increase on the short term?

<comment><USER5> For _arbitrary_ businesses reaching out to mass-market clients, it'll be a decade at least before "customer is extremely likely to be carrying true smartphone" will translate to "exploitable assumption". Local businesses do not as a rule write cross-platform phone apps. If you want to be the company that e.g. gets rid of those stupid flashing pager things that restaurants give people waiting for tables, it helps you very little to know that 1/3rd of restaurant customers will be holding an iPhone.

On the other hand, that application is more or less "hello world" with Twilio, and presents a fine customer experience even to people with iPhones.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I've been looking at Twilio on and off for more than an year and would really like to make use of it and do something interesting. But they're still mostly US-centric that makes it kinda difficult for anyone not targeting a US market to use efficiently (I don't blame them - I'm sure the paperwork itself to run something like this in each country must be a nightmare)

<comment><USER7> We just added full support for SMS in Canada[0], have local voice-enabled numbers in the UK, many more European countries on the way[1] and international SMS in beta[2]. If we're not where you need us, most likely we're working hard to be there as soon as it's possible.

If you have a phone number you want to use to make calls from in a country we don't offer local numbers, you can verify it to use as a caller ID then call to any of our supported countries[3].

[0] <http://www.twilio.com/CA/pricing> [1] <http://www.twilio.com/eu-beta- signup> [2] <http://www.twilio.com/faq/international> [3] <http://www.twilio.com/pricing/international-calling-rates>

<comment><USER6> Thanks. For what it's worth, I'm in India - I know the bureaucracy around here will make it tedious - but on the other hand, _everyone_ has a mobile phone and sms is very popular (and cheap) - the market for phone-based apps is potentially very huge.

<comment><USER8> We haven't announced any formal plans for expansion to Asia, but we are committed to serving developers worldwide. We'll make sure to let everyone know when we have plans we can share.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I would like to do something with Twillio, unfortunatelly I cant find a idea...

<comment><USER10> Write an app that reminds people to take their medicine x times daily.

<comment><USER11> Shameless self plug here: my iPhone app JustRemindIt just does that - <http://justremindit.com>. Give it a try! It's based on Twilio only.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Good write up. I had a distantly similar problem last year. Needed a poor man's transactional email and newsletter blaster. I wanted to leverage my ruby app code and make calls to a mail delivery engine. Problem is, things fail, and you don't want to send the same email under the same conditions twice. I ended up with a brute force failsafe by logging a "signature" of each message send to a mongodb collection and do a look up as a safety check prior to each send (or batch). Its not efficient, but works and when my mailer fails, which it does often, I simply restart it and don't worry about ticking off my user base. I end up with a rather large mongodb collection, but every few months, I prune it by removing log items that I know won't happen again.

</comment><comment><USER13> I ♥ this throwaway line:

 _The end-game for Zynga's take-over-the-world vision is the human race slaved to artificial dopamine treadmills._

Continuing that off-topic digression, I highly recommend the recent 'Black Mirror' episode (from the UK's channel 4), "15 Million Merits": [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z_c_Kf8NtOg&feature=resul...](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z_c_Kf8NtOg&feature=results_main&playnext=1&list=PL1EA093A50CE23E88)

</comment><comment><USER14> That was like 30 straight minutes full of extremely useful information. Wow.

That voicemail deletion "bug" is awesome.

<comment><USER15> Thanks, that puts a smile on my face.</comment></comment>


Our Lean Startup - <AUTHOR> http://blog.page.ly/2011/02/our-lean-startup/

<comment><USER2> I think you built a very nice business, but 'Lean Startup' as the term everyone is using reflects some guidelines and principles a project should follow - like customer development, learning cycle etc. Lean does not mean 'cheap' or 'without money' - it means lean as an athlete running fast to the finish line.

</comment><comment><USER3>
      Act as if we will never hire anyone, ever.

We have been running on 'don't hire anyone' mode for a while. But this engaged us in maintenance tasks rather than focusing on growth. I am still reluctant to hire full time employees, I prefer to hire freelancers and contractors than full time employees.

For certain tasks like web designing and copywriting, freelancers usually perform better than full time employees.

<comment><USER4> I think the most underutilized resource is undergrad interns.

I don't know exactly how competitive it is in the Valley, etc, but we have interns knocking down our doors to work with us at <http://gorankem.com>

we're one of the sexy opportunities in town, and the students are eager to boost their resume and get any experience they can.

and possibly the best part: they'd rather work for us for FREE than stuffing cabinets like some of their friends. it's a win-win :)

<comment><USER3> I had best experience working with undergrad interns. They are awesome to work with and hungry to learn.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This is wonderful. I wish they would go into more details about the various systems they developed for everything.

</comment><comment><USER6> enjoyed this post a lot. great tips on what's worth your time & resources using the lean startup methodology.</comment>


Ask HN: What scientific breakthroughs are you most excited for in 2013? - <AUTHOR> Hi HN!<p>I am just wondering what areas of research we can expect to make large strides in 2013? What are some exciting opportunities? Are there any really exciting scientists and researchers to watch out for? <comment><USER2> Some of the hi tech food science investments made by Khosla Ventures could be interesting. Especially into sweets and also non-meat.

By changing the way we produce food we become much more self reliant rather than using up natural resources that are destructive.

</comment><comment><USER3> The evidence for neutralinos as the primary contribution to dark matter is stacking up, this may solidify in 2013 which would be quite exciting.

And we should get a big batch of new planet detections from Kepler, which should include a fair number of planets in more Earth-like orbits.

</comment><comment><USER4> The Higgs Boson story will be very interesting to follow. What new physics can it generate and will string theory be able to adapt to it? Then we have Shinichi Mochizuki's claimed proof of the ABC conjecture that mathematicians will try to verify.

</comment><comment><USER5> Not exactly a scientific breakthrough, but I am really interested in the progress of Curiosity in Mars.</comment>


Ask HN: Can you fix the page expired nuisance  - <AUTHOR>

Yeah, can you fix that. I love browsing, but it is frustrating when I go back to HN after reading a nice article and hitting the next page and seeing the page expired page.<p>Save the clicks! <comment><USER2> But then how would you know you have been reading Hacker News for too long?

</comment><comment><USER3> This has been a known issue for a long time. See PG's responses in this thread:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3098756>

Additional threads about the same topic:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3623268>

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2760187>

<comment><USER4> Knowing why it happens (and as a person who posted in some of those previous years-old threads, I'm familiar with the issue) doesn't make it any less annoying when it does.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> It is embarrassing that a site visited primarily by technologists has such an amateur bug.

<comment><USER6> It's not amateur, it's over-engineered.

UX > Code-fu, PG.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> The chrome extension is pretty useful, the auto page scroll reduces the annoyance.

</comment><comment><USER8> Please.</comment>


Japanese architects who treated buildings like living organisms - <AUTHOR> https://www.artsy.net/article/artsy-editorial-japanese-architects-treated-buildings-living-organisms <comment><USER2> The title immediately reminded me of Alexander's "Nature of Order" [1]; HN audience might know him as the proto-father of software patterns who, allegedly, inspired GoF (although he himself is an architect).

First part of Gabriel's book [2] offers an interesting perspective on that matter, from software engineering point of view.

[1]: [http://www.natureoforder.com/overview.htm](http://www.natureoforder.com/overview.htm)

[2]: [http://dreamsongs.com/Files/PatternsOfSoftware.pdf](http://dreamsongs.com/Files/PatternsOfSoftware.pdf)

<comment><USER3> First thing I thought of as well as I know one of the projects that Alexander wrote an entire book chronicling was the Eishin campus ([http://www.livingneighborhoods.org/ht-0/eishincampus.htm](http://www.livingneighborhoods.org/ht-0/eishincampus.htm)). These architects don't seem to have the same values as Alexander, though, for anyone hoping to find similar work.

<comment><USER2> He covers Eishin campus at great length in 2nd volume IIRC. And indeed, metabolists are on the opposite side of the spectrum.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I talked with an architect years ago, as they photographed a newly completed space for their portfolio. They said they didn't like visiting their work once it was in use, because people were never using it the way they had envisioned. Architecture as sculptural staged photography.

<comment><USER5> This is a problem that architects are aware of. It's bad to build with photography and media exposure in mind. But I'm not sure the architect you met was guilty of that. New buildings tend to be documented and published in an unoccupied state. It's the same for most products like cars or furnishings, and you could also argue that the way clothes are advertised has nothing to do with "use".

There's not much architects can do about what happens to buildings after completion. They no longer have a role in the life of the building. I don't think it's necessarily a very bad sign that they sometimes express disappointment or frustration or indifference about the way the building actually ends up being used. They aren't responsible for maintaining it, unlike the authors of software. It is out of their hands.

Every sane architect is OK with the fact that users will adapt their work.

"You know, it is life that is right and the architect who is wrong"—Le Corbusier.

<comment><USER6> That seems like the best approach.

I recall reading about some large business that commissioned an office tower on a large plaza. The architect (and presumably someone with approval power) instead went with two office towers at opposite corners of the plaza, which meant visiting a coworker often meant a long journey down to the ground, across the plaza, and back up. The surrounding structures funneled powerful winds across the plaza, and this was in a cold climate.

People were unhappy, obviously. When informed, the architect was angry that they didn't appreciate his vision. I was irrationally annoyed about that. I love beautiful architecture, but if you put anything _above_ functionality, you have no business designing functional buildings.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Stewart Brand's book seems related: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_Buildings_Learn](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_Buildings_Learn)

<comment><USER8> That's a SUPER book. Everyone in software should read it. The primary expense in software is long-term maintenance, not initial construction.

Stewart Brand also made a video series: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AvEqfg2sIH0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AvEqfg2sIH0)

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> We need to genetically engineer trees and the like to produce houses. We should be living with life rather than a cancer against it.

<comment><USER10> I agree with you to an extent but genetically engineering life to suit us doesn't strike me as any less cancerous.

<comment><USER11> To provide what I feel is a more accurate analogy than the one given by GP:

We currently have a destructive parasitic relationship with our ecosystem in which we consume resources without replenishing them, whereas the goal GP described is to pursue a more symbiotic parasitic relationship in which we give back resources that allow for the continuation of the ecosystem, even if in an altered form.

Depending on your interpretation of 'symbiotic' the proposal by the GP may better be described as 'disadvantageous' as by engineering our environment we put it in a relatively inferior state compared to its' natural one.

<comment><USER12> For more on this topic, I can't recommend this book more highly: [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cradle_to_Cradle:_Remaking_t...](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cradle_to_Cradle:_Remaking_the_Way_We_Make_Things)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I rent one of the capsules in Nakagin Capsule Tower. I love it. Perfect size for focusing (10m2).

<comment><USER14> If not too personal, can you show us the interior in a 360 or wide angle? Feel free to censor anything, just interested in the structure, eg. ceiling height, built-in features, position of window relative to floor, any window sill, etc. Are they all the same? I admit to feeling reviled when reading about the presumed artifice of using a Japanese teahouse dimension as an arbitrarily attested design aesthetic.

<comment><USER13> Not going into Nakagin today after all so will share these images, which give a sense of the interior space.

[https://duckduckgo.com/?q=nakagin+capsule+tower+interior&iar...](https://duckduckgo.com/?q=nakagin+capsule+tower+interior&iar=images&ia=images&iax=images)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Super cool</comment>


Navigators To Truth - <AUTHOR> http://messel.typepad.com/my_weblog/2009/04/navigators-to-truth.html# <comment><AUTHOR> Every once in a while we are lucky enough to have a good friend recommend we pay attention to some notable find they discovered. In this case the path was a perfect example of navigators to truth. The short collection of individuals helped steer me to something that I found incredibly valuable. My hope from this post is that it serves as a reminder for you to share your pearl discoveries with all of us.</comment>


Tera: An Internet-Scale Database Inspired by Google Bigtable - <AUTHOR> http://www.github.com/baidu/tera <comment><USER2> What's the difference between tera and HBase?</comment>