Test your server for the Heartbleed bug - <AUTHOR> http://filippo.io/Heartbleed/ <comment><USER2> Very cool! Tested my site before and after a patch, and it recognized the fix. A quick UI tip: you should give some indicator while the test is running. I couldn't tell anything was happening while I waited. Even just a spinner gif of some kind.

</comment><comment><USER3> Here's a tool I wrote to test locally: [https://github.com/titanous/heartbleeder](https://github.com/titanous/heartbleeder)

<comment><USER4> I get these errors: /usr/lib/go/src/pkg/github.com/titanous/heartbleeder/tls/cipher_suites.go:66: undefined: cipher.AEAD /usr/lib/go/src/pkg/github.com/titanous/heartbleeder/tls/cipher_suites.go:133: undefined: cipher.AEAD /usr/lib/go/src/pkg/github.com/titanous/heartbleeder/tls/cipher_suites.go:149: undefined: cipher.AEAD /usr/lib/go/src/pkg/github.com/titanous/heartbleeder/tls/handshake_server.go:556: undefined: crypto.PublicKey /usr/lib/go/src/pkg/github.com/titanous/heartbleeder/tls/tls.go:93: undefined: net.Dialer

Am I missing something?

<comment><USER3> You need to use Go version >= 1.2.

<comment><USER4> aah! Okay, thanks man.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> FYI, I tested herokuapp.com's SSL support. It reports as vulnerable. :(

On the bright side, since such servers are Heroku's inbound load-balancers, individual app dyno secrets in RAM probably aren't at risk. But, impersonating herokuapp.com, decoding its sessions, or viewing fragments of arbitrary other traffic through the same server may all be possible.

Heroku reports they're aware and working on it: [http://status.heroku.com](http://status.heroku.com)

</comment><comment><USER6> I thought it was broken since nothing happened when I clicked. Then I looked again and had a result.

I'm also getting this error:

        Error: not well-formed
        Source File: http://heartbleed.filippo.io/bleed/foo.com
        Line: 1, Column: 1
        Source Code:
        {"code": 1, "data": ""}

<comment><USER7> Yeah, I had the same issue. A spinning wheel while it's waiting would be helpful.

Other than that, great work @ars!

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I hope you're saving the results so we can shame companies who don't revoke their certs.

Also caching the results should also lighten the load on your server significantly since many people are probably checking common websites.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Ok, deployed on a m1.xlarge! You should see the site responsive now.

<comment><AUTHOR> Still down, going for a Load Balancer. Should have optimized this more :(

<comment><USER9> If you want to offer up the code on Github I'm sure plenty of people would be happy to put up some mirrors to spread the fun/pain.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> It looks like Amazon ELB + HTTPS come back as vulnerable with their newest default cipher suite. That's fun.

<comment><USER11> Does the bug have anything to do with ciphersuites? The heartbeat protocol happens at the record layer, above encryption.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Red Hat rocks. CVE submitted 2014-04-07, errata release 2014-04-07. Nice.

</comment><comment><USER13> Here's another as the site is getting hammered:

[http://possible.lv/tools/hb/](http://possible.lv/tools/hb/)

<comment><USER14> Not quite as good though. The above will let just know whether you have the extension, but not whether you have the patched version, which can also be done from the CLI by using: echo -e "quit\n" | openssl s_client -connect server.com:443 -tlsextdebug 2>&1 | grep heartbeat

(as suggested someone in another thread here). That will answer Yes to a patched OpenSSL.

The OP's site actually attempts a (mild?) exploit of this.

<comment><USER13> Fair enough, thanks for the explanation. :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Awesome, thanks for this.

Any chance you would open source this?

<comment><USER16> I'm going to say.... not to do this just yet.

I mentioned in another thread today that perhaps having the source code for script-kiddies to start attacking everything might not be the best thing to do at this time. I think it's great to just have a website like this to test the vulnerability. It would also be nice if someone like Google could host the page so it won't get knocked down by too many requests as I'm sure will be happening for the next few days.

<comment><USER17> Sure, because letting one central source get to compile a list of all the vulnerable sites sure sounds like a fantastic idea...

<comment><USER16> I'll take my chances with one site having the list rather than open-sourcing it and having every script-kiddie dumping RAM out of all the sensitive systems of the interwebz.

(Sidenote: Bitcoin exchanges, please for the love of all that is good... don't start getting owned by this. UPDATE NOW)

<comment><USER17> What, you mean like this?

[https://gist.github.com/hlein/10121981](https://gist.github.com/hlein/10121981)

What, praytell, is a script kiddie going to do with that, other than oogle at the word "vulnerable"?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> GitHub.com is vulnerable, FYI.

<comment><USER8> They appear to be patched now.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> I have a bunch of servers on Ubuntu 12.04LTS. Did the test. Came back as vulnerable. Then did an apt-get upgrade, which upgraded a bunch of SSL services. Did the test again. Still vulnerable.

What else should I do?

<comment><USER19> On Ubuntu 12.04LTS you need to upgrade both 'libssl1.0.0' and 'openssl' \- I'd check that the version of both is: 1.0.1-4ubuntu5.12

And then restart everything that comes back from a

         sudo lsof -n | grep ssl | grep DEL

<comment><USER18> Excellent! That did the trick. It was nginx and percona that also had to be restarted.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Found some Facebook servers that are vulnerable for the bug: [http://pastebin.com/dmYYpx2y](http://pastebin.com/dmYYpx2y)

</comment><comment><USER21> Good stuff. I forgot to patch a server of mine...</comment>


Jitsi Server droplet on DigitalOcean in one click - <AUTHOR> https://marketplace.digitalocean.com/apps/jitsi-server <comment><USER2> how many users can participate & how long the meeting can be in a "Jitsi meeting hosted on a droplet"?

They seems to suggest minimum 4gb ram, so $40/mo package. What about the $5/mo package? Can it be used for meeting of few people? If yes, how many & how long?

<comment><AUTHOR> Meetings can be as long as you'd like. No limit with the selfhosted version.

I guess DO is suggested 4gb ram to upsell and ensure good performance but official reqirements are 1gb. Though people on HN have posted that it's not all that resource hungry.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22760850](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22760850)</comment></comment>


Study: people who grow up poor have a harder time regulating their food intake - <AUTHOR> https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2016/02/12/the-crippling-thing-about-growing-up-poor-that-stays-with-you-forever/ <comment><USER2> Over the many years of assisting people seeking treatment for excess body weight, I'm constantly amazed by the endless complexity of the condition, not surprising given the crucial importance of energy intake and regulation for biological survival.

Unfortunately the research full report is behind a paywall, and the abstract/summary leaves out a lot of info. However the findings are interesting in linking the dysregulated eating behavior to childhood SES. The details of the full report are needed to clarify some questions, like the demographic composition of the sample populations.

It's been observed for a long time that some minority groups (e.g., black and Hispanic) have higher rates of obesity. The fact that these groups are also over-represented in lower SES population segments could be a factor in the results. It's not clear how such variables were accounted for.

Perhaps a key was the last experiment discussed in the article, where there was reduced response to blood glucose level. Ordinarily increased glucose acts as a feedback signal of nutrient status turning off the drive to keep eating.

Problems with satiety (sense of fullness) are common in obesity, though how it works is incredibly intricate and poorly understood. There are dozens of genetic elements and a vast array of hormones and other body messenger systems implicated, ultimately it involves most every part of the body. No wonder theorizing about causes of eating/metabolic disturbances is frustrating and unsatisfying.

I'll take a stab at it anyway. IMHO nutritional factors should be a major suspect. A big change in diet over the last few decades has been the substantially increased intake of sugars put into processed/convenience foods. Fructose in foods has increased the most and thought to play a prominent role in higher rates of obesity. It's conceivable that early life exposure to high levels of sugars could bring about enduring abnormalities in body systems responsible for metabolic regulation.

<comment><USER3> I think you can find the article for free, hosted by one of the authors, at this link: [http://personal.tcu.edu/sehill/Hill_Prokosch_PsySci_2016.pdf](http://personal.tcu.edu/sehill/Hill_Prokosch_PsySci_2016.pdf)

A version with the paper which seems to have supplemental information at the end is available at this link: [http://personal.tcu.edu/sehill/SES_Hunger_4_Nov_15.pdf](http://personal.tcu.edu/sehill/SES_Hunger_4_Nov_15.pdf)

<comment><USER2> Thank you! I'll take advantage of the author's generosity, making it available is a good thing to do.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> A bit missing from these studies are my parents' generation. My father grew up in hard times during the Depression, my mother grew up in WW2 ravaged Europe and spent some years with severe food shortages. Neither had any sort of obsessive relationship with food.

Ok, 2 people is not data. But this happened to tens of millions of people. As I understand it, that generation was less obese than later generations.

<comment><USER5> Interesting, same here but my parents are likely your generation. Grew up in 70s-80s communist Eastern Europe, lots of food shortages from government obsession with self-sufficiency. Stories of waiting in line for 3 hours for a maybe loaf of bread.

No sort of unusual relationship with food, especially compared to mine—I grew up with all the food I wanted and I stuff my face with pointless garbage every 30 seconds.

<comment><USER6> I think your folks may have these issues if healthy food was "expensive" but sugary processed foods would be "cheap" and plentiful. By expensive/cheap, you can substitute waiting in line for price.

<comment> barry-cotter Rice and beans are a complete diet. Potatoes and milk are a complete diet. Frozen vegetables fried with spices are tasty, nutritious and very fast to prepare. Porridge, aka oats with milk or water is also dirt cheap and nutritious.

I spent an unfortunate length of time watching my pennies when it came to my foodbudget, in a western country. Being poor sucks but healthy food isn't expensive unless you mean prepared, ready to eat expensive food.

<comment><USER7> Will power consumes mental energy. Fighting the urge not to consume the cheap sugary food all around you is not something many people have the resources to do - especially the poor, who are under stress and therefore have fewer cognitive resources to devote to willpower. Drop the politics and think about things logically - then reintroduce your emotion. If you manage it you will be outraged at the disgusting setup of modern society.

<comment><USER8> If one is very poor, one cannot afford money to get prepared food and forced to prepare food themselves no matter how weak is the will power. And that will be much healthier. The problem is that in Westen societies such extreme poverty is rare and people can afford junk food and advertisements heavily inclines them to get it.

<comment><USER9> The problem is also that it is easy to buy some cheap bad food while not saving up for rent/car/school payment. In other words, even though we can't afford our lifestyle, food dolllars are the first dollars, and we go into debt for the rest. So we can over spend on convenient food while still being broke.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> From my experience in addiction therapy, one thing has become very clear to me and that is much of the compulsive behavior caused by faulty brain wiring began during early childhood.

In my case, I was abandoned by my biological parents for a three month period as an infant and was mistreated by Aunts and Uncles. I still have fleeting horrible memories of this event.

Eating without regards to health or other consequences is simply a form of addiction, as you are doing it for emotional reasons and not because of hunger.

All sorts of emotional traumas happen to infants and young children in poverty that are far less likely to happen to those in a more financially and, lets face it, emotionally stable environments. Poverty, of course, stresses everyone involved in it.

I am not sure how groundbreaking this research is as it has been well-known for many years that seriously stressing infants causes the brain's reward system to change.

<comment><USER11> The emotional part is huge.. Children are like sponges and soak up everything. If anxiety and depression are not genetic I definitely learned it from one of my parents.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> From [https://www.facebook.com/yudkowsky/posts/10154144677734228](https://www.facebook.com/yudkowsky/posts/10154144677734228):

> "Hill singles out childhood poverty, because she and her team asked > participants not only for their socioeconomic statuses as children, but also > their current socioeconomic statuses as adults, and, rather incredibly, the > abnormal eating patterns only correlated with the former."

What a ridiculous and bizarre taboo it is that causes people to only ever consider _psychological_ explanations of eating behavior and obesity. Could it maybe be that growing up poor changed something to do with adipose tissue or insulin regulation or God knows what? Obviously not, because obesity can only ever be caused by the Sin of Gluttony, which by basic just-world theory must ultimately reduce to a personal choice in some way, even if we pat you on the head forgivingly and talk about your traumatic childhood.

I would ordinarily wonder if the researchers were really this stupid or if it was the journalist, but unfortunately so far as I know most-not-all of academia is also still running on the rule that causal explanations for obesity must be somewhere intermediated by the Sin of Gluttony.

<comment><USER13> When did it become acceptable on Hacker News to post someone else's comments wholesale without any other contribution? I usually only see this with Yudkowsky or Scott Alexander quotes, so is it something from the LessWrong community?

<comment><USER12> I see this as similar to submitting links on HN.

This is not related to LessWrong. A lot of top-level comments here are just that: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3078128](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3078128)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Shouldn't there be a control group, with a task not involving food, to see if the issue is food-related, or generally with impulse control? Maybe ask them to do some boring task they were told was important, but have Facebook, TV,sports or some other distraction immediately available too. I suspect the same people who had trouble with controlling food intake would also have trouble with other self control or delayed gratification tasks.

</comment><comment><USER15> The explanation that first leapt into my mind (as someone who grew up poor and is now not-poor BTW) didn't seem to be considered. For some kids, snacks are a luxury. For others, they're an unremarkable part of the background. This is going to make a huge difference in people's responses, but not as a matter of hunger vs. satiety. There's a whole different part of the brain associated with status and self-image; I'll bet that's the part that lights up differently for the once-poor vs. never-poor. An fMRI should shed some good light on the matter.

</comment><comment><USER16> Why would it still surprise anyone that being poor frequently leads to emotional and health issues of all kinds?! Good food is more expensive. Sugar is cheap (and causes huge problems when overused). Good veggies, fruit, meat, fish, olive oil and spices (just some random examples) are simply inaccessible to billions of people.

Emotional traumas mentioned by other commenters here may or may not be more prevalent in poorer social circles, but multi-faceted support systems definitely are less prevalent (money=resources of all kinds, especially health services and broader social support through extended connections). What would be really interesting is research on specific methods to fight emotional behaviors resulting from such life experience (i.e. what specific things you can do to [learn how to] regulate your food intake)... Because if there are millions of people with that problem, then actual source of that problem is unimportant at the moment.. unless nobody knows of a way to change thigns for the better and the only hope seems to be in uncovering the actual reasons.

</comment><comment> awinter-py Fascinating.

No surprise that stress has a major developmental effect.

Mouse models have shown various kinds of stress (including food stress) causing epigenetic changes that are passed down more than one generation. And in reptiles, temperature conditions (a form of stress) control the male-female split of offspring.

</comment><comment><USER17> I wonder if there's a general theme here. Parental love, relationships, food, money, shelter, if you don't have access to those as you develop then you end up having a rather unhealthy relationship towards them in adulthood that might never be fixed without therapy.

</comment><comment><USER18> I knew a guy who grew up poor and as a result he didn't have much to eat growing up. So whenever he had free food he'd eat/steal as much as he can because he'd never know when his next meal might be.

</comment><comment><USER19> _She also says that just because the pattern exists, doesn 't mean it's not something we can change. "There's no reason to think we can't help them override this."_

</comment><comment><USER20> Et tu, WaPo?

We changed the title to a representative sentence from the article.

<comment><USER21> Thanks for this. These clickbait headlines are getting out of control.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Fair article, but definitely suffers from ethnocentrism. I'm pretty sure they'd find very different results in India, China, Egypt, etc.

</comment><comment><USER23> One of the amazing things about the US is that poorest 15% of the population (by gross household income) is also the FATTEST segment of the population.

In developing countries where the poorest 15% are truly living a bare existence lifestyle (Pakistan, India, Bangladesh) you would never see a poor obese person.

<comment><USER24> Of the 0.2% of the population that is homeless, few are fat. Their level of poverty is closer to the poverty in developing countries.

<comment><USER25> Surely you're not serious. [http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1925022/](http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1925022/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Yes, I learned about this behavior in Introduction to Psychology; ever since I find myself learning more from people's behavior than ever before; after all that is psychology, the study of mental processes and behavior. The article is spot on. . .Overall, I think more emphasis should be put on the aspect of nature and nurture side of science to the application of understanding the people around with inclusion of holistic treatment for individuals; that is if one grew up poor can we than maybe attribute the cause of obesity to the psychological aspect and if they did not grow up poor then maybe we can attribute obesity and over consumption to sedentary lifestyle and relaxed selective pressure and mal-adaptation to the new environment. . . that is thrifty hypothesis. . .

</comment><comment><USER27> The cause could be that people with poor SES still have worse nutrition (lack of some nutrients) and thus the urge to consume. (I mean, in addition to the urge caused by malnutrition in childhood.)

<comment><USER28> Except in the study they found that people who were in higher socioeconomic status now still had the issue. This wouldn't apply most likely, as they most likely more healthy and well nourished now

<comment><USER29> Not necessarily, wealth alone may not be enough to change established habits. The overeating could be related to "bluff food" that tastes like it would supply much of a given nutrient which it actually lacks. In that case, the direct cause would be the body trying to compensate a low level of that nutrient by eating more of the food that tastes like it would contain it. And while wealth might help to not even start with that bluff food trap, getting wealthy after establishing a habit for it will just allow to buy more.

<comment><USER30> I've been idly thinking about bluff food as well, thanks for putting a name on it. Is there evidence for the concept, do we crave bluff food that corresponds to our deficiencies?

What are the most common kinds of bluff food and do you think anything could be done about it?

<comment><USER29> Sorry, no citable sources, just reading between the lines of "processed food is bad" and the dissatisfying explanations usually given in that context.

What we do know is that animals and humans have a natural ability to balance their diet (by developing seemingly random cravings?) and that this ability is increasingly breaking down in "western civilisation". It is a small jump from that to the idea that market driven "yummy engineering" could be the perfect setup to find the fault lines in our diet balancing instincts.

<comment><USER30> There seems to be a known link between cravings, especially for ice or soil, and iron deficiency.

[http://archinte.jamanetwork.com/article.aspx?articleid=57792...](http://archinte.jamanetwork.com/article.aspx?articleid=577928)

[http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/08880010590896486](http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/08880010590896486)

[http://www.samj.org.za/index.php/samj/article/viewFile/358/3...](http://www.samj.org.za/index.php/samj/article/viewFile/358/317)

[http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/00029343829...](http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/0002934382908026)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> A twin study to look for a potential common cause between poverty and poor food selection might yield interesting results.

<comment><USER28> It's not so much poor food selection as poor access to quality and affordable food. You can eat for a lot longer on $10 if you're buying things on the McDonald's dollar menu than if you're buying fresh produce at Safeway or giant.

<comment><USER32> Pasta costs $1 a pound (if you price watch just a little).

Potatoes often cost less than $0.50 a pound.

I think those are very valid comparisons, potatoes are even more nutritious than anything McDonald's sells.

Sure, you have to cook them both for 10 or 15 minutes, which means you have to have a working stove top, but McDonald's is not more affordable than the grocery store, especially if you are buying things that are only comparably nutritious (rather than for flavor or better nutrition or whatever).

<comment><USER33> Assuming of course that you have a grocery store in your neighborhood.

<comment><USER32> It would be an interesting map, to see how many people lived substantially closer to a McDonald's than to a place that sold pasta for reasonable prices. I guess you might have to toss in Subway.

Here, the decent groceries are a bit over a mile away, two are a bit closer than the McDonald's, one is a bit further. 2 Subways beat them all.

I guess such a map would have uninteresting regions where it was more of a choice (rural residential lots).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> Ironically, I couldn't read this article because I was too poor to pay the Washington Post for a subscription.

<comment><USER35> Strange, I'm not subscribe and I can see it no problem... Maybe it's a country thing?

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> I think the article pretty much answered its question about why people growing up poor have hard time regulating their food intake -- it's because their parents weren't smart and/or because these kids weren't taught about sugar overuse and calorie counting.

I'm not sure why the following psychological reasons were offered: formerly poor people lose ability to understand when they are not hungry anymore or that these people have to keep eating because of psychological disorders.

I think really it comes down to this -- people growing up poor (and becoming better off because of better economic conditions) as a group were not taught or concerned about proper nutrition.

What I'd really like to know if the participants knew how to do counting (calorie counting) and how many guys were part of the study. Having only female participants in the first 2 studies is kind of picking very narrow and unrepresentative pool. And females these days count their calories a lot, so it's not surprising they refused to drink soda and instead went for water.

PS: the final study did include men, although didn't state how many.

</comment><comment><USER37> >higher socioeconomic households

What does this mean, is it a standard definition in the field? Do they just mean "rich" or something else?

</comment><comment><USER38> This study is dumb. I grew up in upper middle class and have no problem controlling my food intake (I almost have a six pack).

However, whenever there is an abundance of snacks out for eating without any limits, I will go crazy and consume upwards of 2000 calories. I surely would have not been able to regulate my food intake during this experiment, even though I can in general at home.

</comment><comment><USER39> One reason why we need [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_income](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_income) FTW

</comment><comment><USER40> The timing of the poor people getting fatter seems to coincide with the timing of high fructose corn syrup being introduced.

We had 2 fat kids in my school class.... look around now

</comment><comment><USER41> Can we get a mod practice to rewrite WaPo's clickbait titles into proper summary headlines?

<comment><USER20> Absolutely. That's the practice universally (i.e. not for just one publication, but all).

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11516590](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11516590)

It just takes a while for us to see them sometimes. You can always email email@example.com if there's one we haven't seen yet.

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> My theory is that many poor families have a lack of self-control/discipline and they pass these habits onto their kids. It's difficult to break out of a family culture when you get older. Especially if this is what you have known your entire life and you have pressure to stay that way.

Just like with money, it takes a ton of discipline to make continued long-term minded decisions rather than short-term emotional ones that make you feel good.

Of course, this doesn't apply to everyone. Humans are complicated.

<comment><USER15> > poor families have a lack of self-control/discipline

I know you said that was just a theory, but it's a variation on a too-common theme that I - and many others - find offensive. The experiment specifically involved people who have the same current socioeconomic status. Some had been affluent all their lives, while others had become affluent from poorer beginnings. If self-discipline is what allows some to become richer than others, don't you think those who became wealthy by their own efforts might know a bit more about it than those who had their wealth handed to them? Why, then, would they _still_ exhibit this distinct reaction to offers of food? I don't think your theory has any explanatory power at all.

<comment><USER42> Self-discipline isn't binary, it's fluid. Some people that obtain their own wealth lose the edge they once had that got them there in the first place...and end up poor again.

It also isn't a guarantee of success (nothing is). It's a way of stacking the deck in your favor. It's really one of the only things you can do if you want to move to a better socioeconomic status.

Frankly, I'm tired of this new pervasive idea that the system will always be against anyone that isn't rich and there's no point in even trying if you are poor. Ironically, this victim menality will continue to keep many people in poverty

We now live in an age of free information. There is free Internet access in almost every library in the country and you can learn many new skills from free video tutorials, college courses, and web pages. There are no more excuses.

<comment><USER15> You didn't answer the question. Instead, you made up something about the "pervasive idea" that "there's no point" etc., which nobody here even remotely hinted at. It's a _huge_ strawman. The "age of free information" blather is even worse. The US is not all of the world. In much of that world, there is no free internet access in almost every library. Even in the US, it's less pervasive and often less truly free than you seem to think, and learning those many new skills requires a certain baseline education that many do not have. Someone would have to be _really_ deep in a privilege bubble to be so totally oblivious to how life is for the truly poor.

But that's not even the point, really. The point is that, even if I were inclined to blame the poor for their own situation as you do, your theory would _still_ have no explanatory value when comparing the previously-poor to the never-poor. Your "theory" is simply counterfactual and illogical. The fact that it's also offensive is just the icing on the cake.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> Here's a thought: this pattern probably applies to other natural human needs as well. That is, developmental scarcity leading to brain re-wiring that compels overcompensation.

It almost sounds Freudian (probably is), but people who lacked love early in life probably tend to try and get more of it later on, and have a harder time being on their own, often feeling more lonely.

</comment><comment><USER44> It's an interesting connection. Too bad the article veers off into fantasy land so they can posit vastly complicated triggers for the observation.

<comment><USER45> Isn't making sense of data by proposing possible explanatory frameworks the essence of scientific theory? Are you just anxious to see evidence that could possibly support or deny their theories? Or are you categorically opposed to thinking beyond the most literal interpretation of data?

Where do ideas for experiments come from if not somone's unsupported fantasies?

<comment><USER46> > Where do ideas for experiments come from if not somone's unsupported > fantasies?

They come from small, modest guesses in accordance with Occam's razor. You have got to be able to distinguish between (1) reasonable hypothesis generation and (2) unhinged fantasies with a thousand moving parts unsupported by data.

<comment><USER45> The fact that a single experiment needs to be an attempt to test a modest guess doesn't mean that this is how every scientist experiences the process of coming up with ideas for experiments. There is nothing about doing science that requires you to refuse to fantasize about the big picture, even if the big picture has a million moving parts (which it always does in social science).

<comment><USER46> As a physicist, sometimes I sit in my bathtub and fantasize about the possibility that the entire observable universe is a big simulation run by aliens. But I don't publish it in the Washington Post.

The social sciences do not have a good track record when it comes to their unhinged theorizing.

<comment><USER47> You may not, but other people do.

\---

Bostrom goes so far as to say that unless we rule out the possibility that a machine could create a simulation of a human existence, we should assume that it is overwhelmingly likely that we are living in such a simulation.

"I'm not sure that I'm not already in a machine," he said calmly. [http://www.washingtonpost.com/sf/national/2015/12/27/aianxie...](http://www.washingtonpost.com/sf/national/2015/12/27/aianxiety/)

\---

<comment><USER48> > unless we rule out the possibility that a machine could create a simulation > of a human existence

Even if we rule that out, doesn't the possibility that we are in a simulation still exist? Maybe the creators of the simulation exist in an n-dimensional space, and the reality we experience is a gross simplification of that.

TBH, I find the idea comforting in a weird sort of way, as it gives a structure to everything (e.g. Of course quantum states only collapse when observed - why bother simulating something no one is looking at?).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER49> Maybe it's just the snacks</comment>


Scientists discover the first brainless animal that sleeps - <AUTHOR> https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/speaking-of-science/wp/2017/09/21/scientists-just-discovered-the-first-animal-without-a-brain-that-sleeps/ <comment><USER2> Somewhere I've heard a cool idea that sleep might be the "default" state of the living organisms. Most of the time you want to rest and conserve energy, so sleeping is just how we are, it's waking up to get food and procreate is the "strange" thing we do.

No idea if this makes sense scientifically, but it's fun to think about.

Or maybe animals that walk around during the time when there's no light just get themselves into trouble more often and end up dying out of the gene pool. Might as well shut down during the dangerous time and use it for repair.

<comment><USER3> The only issue with this idea is that it really ... doesn't tie in with evolution. Because ultimately, the default state of any organism should be to be attempting to reproduce. But I stress "ultimately", because there's nothing which impels us to think that needs to be the case at all times. Idling can be a successful short-term strategy, even if not in perpetuity.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> So what this may be telling us is that sleep is required for beings with nerve cells, rather than solely for those with concentrated and clearly defined brains. This would make sense. All animals with brains sleep, but diversity of brain configuration and design exhibited across all of these different animal species would indicate that there's no single aspect of a brain that demands sleep, and therefore sleep is not an emergent property of collections of neurons forming brains but something the neurons themselves demand in order to function.

<comment><USER5> Possible. Or it could just be light as a confounding signal -- they get energy from it, after all, and animals with brains and eyes will spend energy more efficiently during the day.

A much older article on jellyfish sleep suggests this proposed advantage, at least: [https://search.proquest.com/openview/c958b584511e462a64623c5...](https://search.proquest.com/openview/c958b584511e462a64623c59b7a6bd0a/1?pq- origsite=gscholar&cbl=40810)

<comment><USER4> Well I was thinking that light could impact the availability of their food source and so what the researchers interpret as sleep is just some other form of energy conservation, but the 'groggy' behavior of the jellyfish in their one experiment made me think that their energy conserving state does involve their neurons and so at that point it's hard to distinguish energy conservation from sleep.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Title is technically correct (the best kind of correct) but jellies do have a nervous system. Its a net if a few hundred neurons.

Here's to hoping this research helps is discover why we evolved to sleep.

<comment><USER7> Isn't the latest thought that it's to take the brain down for maintenance to flush out debris from processing done during the day? (citation needed)

<comment><USER8> But why didn't our brain evolve to take the debris out _while_ it s working?

<comment><USER7> Unqualified anonymous internet answer: it's probably too busy.

I believe the brain actually shrinks slightly and channels expand to aid in the flushing.

Anectdata: note how when you're really tired you can't think clearly? Also, how (apparently) if one goes without sleep for too long then the brain suffers irreparable damage.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> What is even more interesting is why exactly do they "sleep" at night? Do they have some sort of circadian rhythm? They are filter feeders, so the time of the day should not be that important, after all they can filter feed at night? Maybe it is a byproduct of being in lab? Since they are fed during the daytime, they might have "adjusted" to the lab schedule? They need light though, for their photosynthesizing symbionts.

<comment><USER10> They ([http://travelnq.com/australian-box- jellyfish/](http://travelnq.com/australian-box-jellyfish/)) or their food ([https://www.nature.com/scitable/blog/saltwater- science/what_...](https://www.nature.com/scitable/blog/saltwater- science/what_makes_plankton_migrate)) might move vertically between day and night, with the jellyfish being unable to follow their food on part of their depth range. For example, jellyfish might get sunburn at low depths.

(Aside: that first link, from 2014, already states that box jellyfish sleep, so this doesn't seem to be as new as this article claims it to be. What (I guesstimate) is new is that they did pharmacological work to show that the jellyfish didn't simply 'not move')

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Not an expert on jellyfish physiology, but might there be a distinction between "a sleep-like state" and being plain "tired"? After doing some physical activity animals tend to need some rest. Exhaustion is much less of an exciting phenomenon than sleep is.

<comment><USER9> Sleep is typically defined by the brain waves activities, delta waves, theta waves, etc., each corresponding to a specific sleep stage. These are physiological markers of sleep. There are also states of "quiet wakefulness" that share behavioral characteristics of sleep, like immobility, for example, but are not sleep per se.

Many "simple animals" like a fly, or a caterpillar or a bee have periods of inactivity that could be an example of rest. But sleep and rest are not the same. If we put brain waves aside, we are left with the behavioral definition of sleep: it is a state of reduced awareness of the surroundings, there will be some latency in arousal, it is reversable, and it is associated either with immobility or at least reduced activity. This study obviously used this definition, so it is not exactly being "tired".

<comment><USER11> Thank you for articulating the difference between the two. Can it not be the case with exhaustion also, that awareness and/or reaction times are reduced? Cognition certainly is affected after strain in higher order animals and muscle cells need to replenish ATP.

Removing brain waves from the equation, it seems like the whole question of what attests for sleep gets blurry.

<comment><USER9> Sleep is not just "reduced" cognition, it is an entirely different state all together. In sleep thalamus becomes a gatekeeper that makes sure that stimuli cannot get through (although the important ones still do, like a baby cry will nearly always awaken a mother, even a faint cry will do). So, again, it is more radical than "quiet wakefulness" due to exhaustion.

Now, with "lower" animals it gets tricky, because all we have is a behavioral definition of sleep. But still, it makes a distinction of reduced awareness, arousal latency. Can we call it "sleep" in these animals, jellies included? Maybe not, maybe it is some sort of proto-sleep state?

<comment><USER12> I'm not convinced because your answer doesn't address the nervous activity of these lower animals. Maybe they don't exhibit any at all in that state, but there's no reason to preclude this diffuse, sparse network from exhibiting patterns exhibiting precursors to sleep comparable to at least one of the human sleep phases.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> The researchers lost sleep to research sleep.

A follow-up question I'd like to see researched is jet lag. Why do the jellyfish sleep during those hours? Can they adjust their circadian rhythm to a different time zone?

</comment><comment><USER14> Maybe sleep is linked to neurons? I did read a comment about plants sleeping but i haven't researched it yet.

</comment><comment><USER15> In my humble opinion every animal consistent of multiple cells alive on this planet developed sleep for just one reason: the very same reason plants sleep. Our planet has a night phase and without sun little energy is left. So as a consequence the best one can do is to clean up internal processes or go into some sort of energy saving mode. Ofc this is heretic to some individuals...

But Ockham's razor tells me I'm right.

<comment><USER16> This makes sense for plants and cold-blooded animals, which rely on light/heat respectively in order to function well.

This doesn't explain the huge number of nocturnal animals that sleep during the day and are active at night.

<comment><USER17> If your life (hunting, mating) happens at night, why would you waste energy staying active during the day?

<comment><USER18> whynotboth.gif

Seriously though, the existence of nocturnal animals kinda puts that argument to bed. While there might be selection pressure to specialise within day _or_ night cycles, it's simply not plausible that _no_ animal, in the vastness of the biospehere, has not generalised to do both, without some critical and fundamental flaw.

<comment><USER12> there might be a differential equation that describes a small part of beings (not a "huge number") benefitting from the free energy that diurnal animals might be at night. There's an equilibrium that's clearly preferential to daylight animals.

Point in case, bats as my primary example seem to be pretty archaic, with highly developed specializations, but nothing really highly developed. Which I see as an expression of the low entropy in the dark (the signal to noise ratio for sound is rather good at night though). Deep see animals are mostly outliers inhabiting a niche, as well. Whereas people as the highest developed species, if I may say so myself, don't even quite get along with crossing the day-night boundaries, I don't see your argument at all. You are rather proving the point.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> > "When you start working on something totally crazy, it's good to get data > before you tell anybody," Abrams said.

It's too bad that this seems to be the environment that our up-and-coming generation of scientists operate in.

</comment><comment><USER20> Moderators: the title should be changed to the actual article title, which is:

"Scientists just discovered the first brainless animal that sleeps"

The submitted title, "Scientists just discovered the first animal without a brain that sleeps", is ambiguous. In addition to the correct meaning, it could also have meant the first animal whoe brain does not sleep.

<comment><USER21> Are there animals who sleep but whose brains don't sleep?

Are there animals who don't sleep but whose brains sleep?

While ambiguous from a purely grammatical point of view, it does not seem ambiguous from a "common sense" point of view.

<comment><USER22> It seems that a variety of animals exhibit at least phases of sleep where one hemisphere or part of a brain is asleep while the other is awake:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unihemispheric_slow- wave_sleep](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unihemispheric_slow-wave_sleep)

<comment><USER23> Not to mention the fact that the article is literally about finding the _first_ animal that did something, so using past data is pretty useless.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> They only found out now about teenagers?

</comment><comment><USER25> spoiler: it's merely the avatar of a 4th dimensional eldritch horror and is actually studying the scientists before treating our realm as a cheap buffet.</comment>


US military to send cyber soldiers to the battlefield - <AUTHOR> https://www.yahoo.com/news/us-military-send-cyber-soldiers-battlefield-000640927.html <comment><AUTHOR> how does the US compare to Russia and China in terms of cyber offense/defense? thoughts?</comment>


42 - <AUTHOR> http://johncarlosbaez.wordpress.com/2013/05/25/42/ <comment><USER2> Obviously the article is written for fun, but for those interested Douglas Adams' answer to why 42 was:

"The answer to this is very simple. It was a joke. It had to be a number, an ordinary, smallish number, and I chose that one. Binary representations, base thirteen, Tibetan monks are all complete nonsense. I sat at my desk, stared into the garden and thought '42 will do'. I typed it out. End of story."

<comment><USER3> It's a bit silly he had to say this-- this is made very explicit in the books. I feel like a lot of people missed the point of the whole exercise.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I always thought that this was interesting...

I am sure that many of you are familiar with Dr. Feynman's 7-part lecture series entitled _The Character of Physical Law_ , which were part of the "Messenger Lectures" [1], given at Cornell University in 1964.

In the first lecture, _Law of Gravitation - An Example of Physical Law_ , Feynman states the following:

"Question: what is the ratio of the gravitational force to the electrical force? That is illustrated on the next slide.

The ratio of the gravitational attraction to the electrical repulsion is given by a number with 42 digits, and goes off here: all this is written very carefully out, so that's 42 digits.

Now, therein lies a very deep mystery: where could such a tremendous number come from? That means if you ever had a theory from which both of these things are to come, how could they come in such disproportion? From what equation has a solution which has for one, two kinds of forces, an attraction and a repulsion with that fantastic ratio? People have looked for such a large ratio in other places.

They're looking for a large number.

They hope, for example, that there's another large number.

And if you want a large number why not take the diameter of the universe to the diameter of a proton.

Amazingly enough, it also is a number with 42 digits." [2]

[1] <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Messenger_Lectures>

[2] <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j3mhkYbznBk#t=48m11s>

<comment><USER5> 42 digits in base 10 though, and base 10 is just an arbitrary convention. It can be more or less in other equally valid bases.

<comment><USER6> Yes, but within that base it's significant. Just as within other bases the corresponding number would be significant.

This is important because if you operate a system universally with the same base, the significant number begins to take on an objective importance _intra- system._

Stated another way, it's mathematical semantics, the same as arguing an idea is not significant because you can express it in a multitude of different languages, each having an arbitrary words.

Developing via Django (Python) or Rails (Ruby) is similarly predisposed to making one think it's all relative, but when you look closely, the framework doesn't matter at all - there are universal abstractions inherent in web development.

The representation is arbitrary and insignificant, what is significant is what the number or word represents, and what you can do by unraveling it.

<comment><USER7> "Just as within other bases the corresponding number would be significant."

Numbers are independent from any base. You may mean the numeral in another base, which would have a different number of digits.

But what is more important, note that not necessarily the two ratios from the quote will have the same number of digits in another base.

<comment><USER6> Yes, the numeral representation of the number is exactly what I mean, you clarified my comment perfectly. Numbers are independent from any base.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Hurwitz's automorphisms theorem always astounds me. 84 is such a weird number to see in it. Fun fact: a group for which the maximum of 84(g-1) is reached is called a Hurwitz group. The Monster Group a Hurwitz group. So there is a Reimann surface of genus 9619255057077534236743570297163223297687552000000001 whose group of automorphisms (via orientation-preserving conformal mappings) is the Monster group. I don't even want to start trying to imagine that surface.

For more unlikely Monster Group fun, there's also <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monstrous_moonshine>.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monster_group> [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hurwitz%27s_automorphisms_theor...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hurwitz%27s_automorphisms_theorem)

<comment><USER9> The Monster made me a Platonist. Group classification is damn alien stuff. It's like discovering Moby Dick except a million times larger and scarier, buried in the dark depths between science and philosophy.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> > But why is this stuff the answer to the ultimate question of life, the > universe, and everything? I'm not sure, but I have a crazy theory. Maybe all > matter and forces are made of tiny little strings!

Come now, be serious!

</comment><comment><USER11> Handy reminder: All natural numbers are interesting.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interesting_number_paradox>

</comment><comment><USER12> This is where I point out that the answer was wrong.

In HHGTG, a massive computer was built to answer the Question. The computer spent millions of years calculating, and arrived at the answer "42". The problem, it said, was that the Question had never been formulated. The computer then designed another computer to calculate the Question. After millions of years of calculation, this computer was inadvertently destroyed. The last remnants of the computer were only able to provide the question "What is six times nine?"

Also, knowing the answer without knowing the question is Jeopardy!

</comment><comment><USER13> The number on HN lately seems to be 300,000.

</comment><comment><USER14> Fascinating read. He did say what the question was though: "What is six times nine?"

[http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=6%20times%209...](http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=6%20times%209&defid=1303817)

<comment><USER3> But note that that isn't the "real" question, just the incorrect result of the Earth experiment.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Wow all these numbers put me into an endorphine rush, I love these kind of posts!! Keep them coming, it's no as theoretical as you may expect, it's applications are endless.

        42, (Endo-)Fullerenes, the Omega Particle.

Do you remember the Star-Trek series that was about the Omega Particle? Isn't it crazy that they were right?!

They actually exist. <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fullerene> <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=454uu96gFzU>

</comment><comment><USER16> Good stuff.

Also,

        The picture of Klein's quartic curve was made by Greg Egan, and you should also check out his page on Klein's quartic curve.

For anyone curious, Greg Egan writes interesting hard scifi. A particularly interesting and hardcore piece of scifi which rests on a significant pile of graph theory et al. is his novel "Schild's Ladder." [1] (one of these days, one of these days I am bound to attempt to finish it..)

[1] <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schild%27s_Ladder>

<comment><USER17> wow, that schild's latter book sounds very interesting. Is there any more similar kind of books like it (that deals with hardcore scifi themes)?

<comment><USER16> I'd ditto the question ;)

Semi-recent thread with some interesting-looking suggestions, not sure of 'hard' scifi label though: [http://www.reddit.com/r/printSF/comments/1eyt3b/is_there_any...](http://www.reddit.com/r/printSF/comments/1eyt3b/is_there_any_sf_book_that_gets_orbital_mechanics/)

I'd recommend other books by Greg Egan, though. _Permutation City_ (<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permutation_City>) is particularly interesting and makes some very interesting conjectures dealing with computation, cognition, 'quantum ontology', etc. Character development is somewhat poor, but eh! (there's also a FAQ on the author's website: [http://gregegan.customer.netspace.net.au/PERMUTATION/FAQ/FAQ...](http://gregegan.customer.netspace.net.au/PERMUTATION/FAQ/FAQ.html))

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I'm not a math guy, but I was thinking about a number series the other day, and 42 popped up. Do the numbers 1,806; 3,263,442; and/or 10,650,056,950,806 happen to have any significance as well?

<comment><USER19> That sequence is called "Sylvester's sequence":

<http://oeis.org/A000058>

The Online Encyclopedia of Integer Sequences is one of the coolest things on the net.

<comment><USER18> Thanks! Interesting that mine's off by one...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> The explanation that I liked the most was:

42

For-tea-two

Tea for two

<comment><USER21> I was never quite sure whether the number (42) or the decimal representation thereof (4*10 + 2) was relevant. Your interpretation would tend to the latter…

<comment><USER22> I believe I read this in _The Salmon of Doubt_ , where Douglas Adams explained he pretty much chose it arbitrarily. "42 will do", were his words, IIRC.

<comment><USER23> I second that: I definitely remember reading something in which Douglas Adams explained that he chose 42 arbitrarily. And I think he was surprised at and amused with everyone's theories of the significance of the number.

<comment><USER24> What if it turns out that 42 really is the answer? :)

<comment><USER25> Then "The Simpsons" would be right about the one true religion being a mix of an amazon tribe belief and Mormons... and we are all going to hell...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Is this guy a, genius?

<comment><USER27> Every number has special properties :)

Edit: In fact, I'd be astounded to encounter a number that did not exhibit any special properties. Until, of course, one makes "having no special properties" a special property. In that case, I would no longer be astounded.

<comment><USER8> We proceed by induction. Clearly _n_ =1 is special, as it divides every integer. Assume _k_ is special. If _k_ +1 is not special, then it is special, as it is the first non-special number to come after a special number. This is a contradiction; then _k_ +1 is special. ■

<comment><USER28> Can you categorize the next non-special number in the same way? Now _k+1_ is no longer non-special, but the reason why it is special still exists, so you can't use it a second time.

<comment><USER27> I think it was meant to be in jest.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> This article is making me hungry for mathematically perfect hyper donuts.

</comment><comment><USER30> See the Strong Law of Small Numbers, of which 42 is one.

</comment><comment><USER31> it's also the Jackie Robinson number

</comment><comment><USER32> 42 is the age after which women can not be expected (without the help of 21st century technology) to produce children.

And thus is exposed the meaning of the life the universe, and everything: "eat, stay alive, and produce more units that do the same". It is not your responsibility to decide what the meaning of life is, it is the universe's and physics responsibility to decide which loops are best at creating more eaters/stay-alivers/reproducers.</comment>


Nickel.js: An expressjs inspired web framework for Rust - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/nickel-org/nickel.rs

<comment><USER2> *.rs</comment>


You probably don't need a single page app - <AUTHOR> https://plausible.io/blog/you-probably-dont-need-a-single-page-app <comment><USER2> The contention between these two schools of thought seems to elude to a bigger problem that right now both options kinda suck.

The old old school mode of serving static HTML pages is totally fine. I have basically no issue with it. You can't do very much but if your site is a series of interlinked but self-contained documents then it's the gold standard. Once you start having a lot of dynamic content there's a lot of waste since each page is it's own little application.

The 'classic' model of multi-page web design which boils down to templating HTML pages is _awful_. Truly ungodly awful. I don't care how many layers of DSL you pile on top of it to make it feel less like you're building an application with C preprocessor macros it doesn't make it any better or less brittle.

The SPA model is "more correct" way to do dynamic content since we're back to serving static pages but still ends up terrible since now every single page has emulate browser semantics poorly and deal with the nightmare that is using the browser as a rendering target.

There's got to be some middle ground. I want the browser to be my application router. Give be a site-global place to stick my JS send me an event with what page I need to render.

<comment><USER3> > The SPA model is "more correct" way to do dynamic content since we're back > to serving static pages

The contention is that we cannot even agree on basic words. An SPA is anything but "static", it's as dynamic as a website can ever be with all the untrusted JavaScript code that my browser has to execute (hence why browsers are as complex as they are today). A server-side application serving static HTML and CSS ("static" as in "no JS") is much easier to trust.

<comment><USER2> When I say static I mean that your web server distributes a fixed artifact without any server-side templating.

Your usage of 'static' conflicts with the usage of 'static site generator' where fixed payloads are generated that can be uploaded to any web server. Such sites can have no JS, be full blown SPAs, or anywhere in between.

Some people use "static content" for this but often sites serving static content are still enhanced by JS in some form. Just that the main page content doesn't have any interactivity.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> One of these "You probably don't need [popular technology x]" articles comes out pretty often now. I understand what the message is (don't use tech just because it's popular, but pick the right tool for the job). But I always wondered why these types of articles are titled to be dismissive ("you probably don't need x") rather than representative of their actual content ("here's when to use x").

<comment><USER5> Because the standard "everything is bad nowadays" headlines always get clicks and upvotes

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> You need to ask yourself if you need a website or a web app. Sometimes your project can be split into both. The homepage, login, billing, privacy policy, and other static pages can be a traditional server-side rendered website. More complex sections, like a file browser or text messenger, can be apps.

<comment><USER7> Why do you need server-side rendering for static pages? They are static pages - let them be static html and send the file. Pages like that get millions of times more reads than writes.

<comment><USER8> Often "static" pages aren't 100% static. It might display the user's login name, etc.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> If you need an "app," then yes, you should probably do a SPA. In the same way that an app on your phone is a chunk of pre-loaded client-side code that accesses a server's API in a minimal way, with mostly metadata being exchanged, I'm of the mind an "app" ought to minimize server load in this way.

If, on the other hand, you need a "site" (which will be relatively static), and you can handle a few extra processor cycles on your webserver, server-side rendering is probably fine. Still, I retain a distaste for it that I can't fully explain.

</comment><comment><USER10> Does anyone have a good example of something that's made as a single page app that shouldn't be one? The reasons described for choosing a single page app, real time functionality and rich ui interactions etcetera, seem like core parts of just about every new startup's web service offering as all these formerly offline desktop programs become online SAAS subscriptions and so on. What wouldn't need a single page app?

<comment><USER11> I believe that the new TechCrunch website is a SPA.

<comment><USER12> Your right! Now there is a good example of a site that doesn't need to be a SPA!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Good luck building my application [https://gif.com.ai](https://gif.com.ai) as a non SPA. This is an app as much as photoshop is an app so this is a good case for a SPA as the author suggests. If over 85 percent of your app logic is on the front end then you might need a SPA.

</comment><comment><USER13> No, unfortunately you need. If you want to build a Progressive Web App (PWA) and have just one source for your site and your mobile app, you need a SPA. The mobile ecosystem is nowadays more important than the web.

<comment><USER14> You can of course just use the website on mobile too though, apps aren't needed and often they're just annoying marketing ploys designed to keep you in a walled garden. I much prefer accessing the website of services than their apps while using mobile

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> In the hybrid approach, would you implement a full framework like Vue or would you just use jQuery?</comment>


Ask HN: What are You Doing to Prepare for a Possible U.S. Default?  - <AUTHOR>

A U.S. default is sometimes depicted as unimaginable, but as the debate between Republicans and Democrats intensifies regarding how to raise the U.S. debt ceiling, it becomes obvious that the two parties have a certain ego and are unwilling to make concessions to each other. A default may, after all, be possible...
Therefore, what are you doing, as an individual, to prepare for such a scenario? Are you looking to diversify your dollar-based assets into other assets? Evaluating potential risks to your company? Stockpiling food? Or nothing? <comment><USER2> Lets stop conflating "default" and "cutting spending". The US government has sufficient income to pay off it's interest and debt. It does not have sufficient income to pay for the spending it is currently planning.

I'm in default if I don't pay my mortgage. I'm not in default if I plan a trip to Vegas but can't come up with the money to make it happen.

</comment><comment><USER3> It's exceedingly unlikely that any sort of survivalist scenarios will come to pass, so stockpiling is sort of pointless here. About the only thing that might make sense would be to diversify your investments to include some denominated in other currencies; but that's a good idea in these times in any case, regardless of default likelihood. In the (imho still unlikely) event of a default, though, the dollar crash will be relatively gentle, because China will not let the US dollar crash too fast or too deeply since we're still their main market.

<comment><AUTHOR> I agree, it is unlikely a survivalist scenario will come to pass.

I have only considered one aspect of the crisis, the financial one. Fortunately I have no family to support. I do not particularly depend on any financial aid from the government (virtually zero medical bills, for now!). My wealth is already well distributed evenly between hard assets, Euro-based assets, stocks in multi-national companies, and Bitcoin. I would consider moving back to Europe or any foreign country if the job economy worsen too much in the US.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Nothing. I don't rely on the government's debt for income. The world is not going to fall into anarchy. The dollar is not going to crash. We're not at a stalemate or a standoff. All we have is a game of progressive chicken. Each party is going to get as much as they can from the other and then pass a deal to raise the debt ceiling.

</comment><comment><USER5> Buying Bitcoins.

Haha, but seriously. Not much, and if/when it happens, it's not like the world will implode, or the value of US dollars will go to zero overnight. If it _really_ looks like it's all going to go up in flames, there's more than enough at-hand to barter with to leave the country. My laptop is worth a short plane flight.

</comment><comment><USER6> I've been pricing local real estate, so I can move some money across from my AUD assets and buy up some cheap property just in case the US dollar gets _really_ low.

I'm neither an optimist or a pessimist. If I have a bias, it's the belief that the future will look way more like the past than you think it will -- i.e. things pass.

</comment><comment><USER7> Howard Kunstler writes and talks about this kind of stuff. Check out his book The Long Emergency and his excellent podcast at <http://kunstlercast.com>

</comment><comment><USER8> It's a bit late to be wondering this at this point. A better question would be "What preparations did you make starting 10 years ago when you saw this year's events were inevitable." For me that answer is that it's been a lot of things. Among these are learning to grow my own food, how do canning, how to hunt and skin an animal, having a well dug, and drastically cutting my dependency on electricity and petroleum.

</comment><comment><USER9> Uh...making myself essential at my day job and working on my technology based startup concept at night. Unless it's TEOTWAKI, not seeing those fundamental needs being reduced.

Candidly, if it is the TEOTWAKI in the US, what makes you think the rest of the world will be much better?

(I'm thinking of Gremlins II - "we're advising our clients to go long canned food and shotguns")

</comment><comment><USER10> Absolutely nothing.

</comment><comment><USER11> Buying Canadian dollars and gold. Big disclaimer: I live in Canada.</comment>


GPL not good enough for Google AJAX Library API - <AUTHOR>

In an interesting decision, Google decided not to host the Extjs framework as part of their Google AJAX Libraries API service, a CDN and loading architecture for popular open source js frameworks.
"For now this will be a no-fix due to licensing issues.  All libraries that we host on the Google AJAX Libraries API
are offered free of charge with very liberal licenses.  EXT, however, requires a fee for users wishing to use it
commercially.  We like to keep the libraries consistent so that we don't put our users in a dangerous situation
where they might be liable without knowing it." (http://code.google.com/p/google-ajax-apis/issues/detail?id=50#c44)
What's interesting is that Extjs is available under GPL v3.  A commercial option is available if you don't want to release your code under open source (http://extjs.com/products/license.php).
Clearly, Google can support whatever it wants, but from the viewpoint of at least one team at Google, GPL is not liberal enough to be considered true open source.  "Open source" is when a commercial company can use code without a fee. <comment><USER2> It's an issue because the GPL is viral, and AJAX libraries are like any other DLL in practice. You can't link with DLLs that are GPL without requiring your own program to be GPL too -- that's why the LGPL was invented.

The GPL license would effectively require your own app's javascript to be placed under GPL too.

</comment><comment><USER3> Google is under no obligation to host any particular library, I think in this case due to the ExtJS split licensing they made the correct decision.

Also consider that by offering this code on their CDN it would be possible to argue that Google itself was deriving a commercial benefit from the code in question and therefore should purchase a license.

</comment><comment><USER4> I don't blame them. GPL'ing libraries is obnoxious, especially when its something as general as ExtJS.</comment>


The long and tangled history of Alfred E. Neuman - <AUTHOR> http://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2016/03/03/a-boy-with-no-birthday-turns-sixty/ <comment><USER2> _The Stanford chemist Carl Djerassi swore that he had seen the face in Vienna after the Anschluss, with the caption "Tod den Juden" ("Kill the Jews")._

Djerassi's essay is quite interesting [PDF]: [http://www.garfield.library.upenn.edu/essays/v12p162y1989.pd...](http://www.garfield.library.upenn.edu/essays/v12p162y1989.pdf)

EDIT: fixed link.

<comment><USER3> That was a great read. Thanks</comment></comment>


The Year in Biology - <AUTHOR> https://www.quantamagazine.org/quantas-year-in-biology-2019-20191223/ <comment><USER2> Interesting!

</comment><comment><USER3> The biggest thing to happen in Biology, happened in field botany, and it was this [https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC3CBOpT2-NRvoc2ecFMDCsA](https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC3CBOpT2-NRvoc2ecFMDCsA)

gfyb</comment>


Why So Many People Think Eli Whitney, Cotton Gin Inventor, Was Black - <AUTHOR> http://www.slate.com/blogs/the_slatest/2017/02/02/eli_whitney_inventor_of_the_cotton_gin_wasn_t_black_but_here_s_why_so_many.html <comment><USER2> Unless I'm missing something, the article gives exactly 0 information (or even speculation) on why people think this. It's just a lot of examples of people thinking so.

<comment><USER3> Did you want an opinion piece, or a news article about a phenomenon? Because you got the latter. You got examples presented without narrative or opinion. It's up to the reader to connect the dots.

When I was in grade school, this .pdf helped greatly in improving my reading comprehension [https://www.hand2mind.com/pdf/miriam/grades_1_2.pdf](https://www.hand2mind.com/pdf/miriam/grades_1_2.pdf)

<comment><USER4> > Did you want an opinion piece, or a news article about a phenomenon?

I suspect GP wants a body that goes with the headline: if the headline says the article is going to tell you why an effect occurs, then the article should, in fact, do so. It's fine for an article not to have a conclusion as to the "why", particularly if it's a new article and that's not a question that the facts answer But then the headline should match what the article is.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> TLDR: Eli Whitney is introduced during "black history month" in US schools - thus he's assumed by many students to be black.

</comment><comment><USER6> The article does a fine job of completely failing at answering the question. And how on earth could one believe that? As I remember it, Whitney's machine was responsible for a _greater_ importation of slave labor. Picking it was far less labor intensive than getting the seeds out. But once a machine was made to eliminate the labor-intensive part, one now needs more slave labor to pick it.

So even if Whitney were black, I don't think I'd rank him up there with Fredrick Douglas or MLK, Jr. for doing good things for black people. The fact that Whitney was white makes it even more mystifying...and somewhat moronic.

<comment><USER3> This comment does a fine job of opining on the incompleteness of an article that the commenter has clearly not read in full. This is a great example of irony, I think, because your point about the irony of a black man inventing a machine that increased the desire for slaves, is covered in the third paragraph from the bottom. And here you are, claiming the article as incomplete because it failed to consider the irony. But it did! You just skimmed it. It is in fact _you_ who is incomplete. I think it is fair to describe this scenario as "a state of affairs or an event that seems deliberately contrary to what one expects and is often amusing as a result."

RTFA before opining next time :-)

<comment><USER6> _RTFA before opining next time_

You used up a lot of fancy words, and yet still didn't point out where in the article the question is answered. For all of your "RTFA", you seem unable to address this question any better than the article did. Perhaps you are confused and read an article different from the one I did? If you click on the title at the top, it'll take you right to it.

Despite that, my complaint was not with the article but with folks that would believe such a thing without giving even the most minute bit of thought. Since the article's author seemed unable to answer the question, I thought I'd take a whack at it, and failed because to me the impedance mismatch seemed obvious for the reason I stated.

<comment><USER3> This comment does a fine job of opining on the incompleteness of a comment that the commenter has clearly not read in full. This is a great example of irony, I think, because your point about not pointing out where in the article the question was answered, was covered in the same sentence as this sentence in the previous comment. And here you are, claiming the comment as incomplete because it failed to point out the location of where the question was answered. But it did! You just skimmed it. It is in fact you who is incomplete. I think it is fair to describe this scenario as "a state of affairs or an event that seems deliberately contrary to what one expects and is often amusing as a result."

RTFC before opining next time :-)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Wait a cotton pickin' minute, Sinbad never made a movie called Shazaam?</comment>


Dick Cheney's Webpage Features Raunchy Links - <AUTHOR> http://www.businessinsider.com/dick-cheney-webpage-nearly-naked-woman-2014-4

<comment><USER2> The stories you submitted on AWS-Google price wars and the UCLA medical diagnostics app are better examples of content to submit.

This story is essentially: "Domain expires." And that is still two words too many.</comment>


The Monopolies (Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Microsoft) - <AUTHOR> http://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/the-monopolies <comment><USER2> This article says "The Monopolies" and then names 5 companies that in some way or another compete with each other. I know what they're getting at, but these are not monopolies. Especially weird since using Monopoly in a plural form when talking about the same (or similar) industry completely defeats the purpose of the word.</comment>