We designed Canada's cities for cars, not people – and the people are dying - <AUTHOR> https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/jun/14/canada-toronto-cycling-pedestrian-deaths-cars <comment><USER2> Worth noting the author, Jennifer Keesmaat, has announced she's running for mayor since this was published.

<comment><USER3> She would also like to commit to building 100k affordable homes.

I've been following her on Twitter for a while because she tweets interesting things about city design, but I find this implausible. I did ask for specific how to info to make that happen. She seems to be out campaigning or something. I'm still semi hoping that she will actually reply to me at some point because I would like useful info to apply to my small American town. But I'm not holding my breath here. I will be quite surprised if I get any reply at all from anyone at all. I think most people don't really know how to foster more affordable housing.

<comment><USER2> I don't think her plan for Toronto would apply to a small town. A detached home anywhere near the core starts at about $1.3M, so "affordable" housing is relative. Adding 100k units will make the entire market more affordable, the challenge is where to put them. As the former chief planner, she's highly qualified to tackle this; she has been pushing plans for adding density in smart ways for years.

<comment><USER3> I hope you are right that she's highly qualified. I've certainly enjoyed some of her tweets on city design type stuff.

I sometimes talk to professional planners. One recently said to me that affordable housing was _a tough nut to crack._ This part of where I get the idea that most people have no idea how to solve it.

As I have the time and energy, I'm trying to do my own research. I still hope to find viable answers.

<comment><USER4> Affordable housing is easy, increase the amount of available housing to allow for an increase in supply to drive down demand. If you do not increase available housing because of NIMBYISM, landlords wanting to keep supply limited, ridiculous rules for supply creation (San Francisco's rules and regulations for permit application are a great example), historic districts (forcing creators to adhere to maintain old and outdated buildings that require significant investment to meet codes), and politicians who would like to avoid having to figure out a new voter base, then you will never see houses that make financial sense to maintain.

As a thought experiment, how many more people could live in San Francisco city limits if you added three stories to the current limit (which is three I believe). You double the available supply, reduce / address demand and increase the opportunity for transit usage. However, if you proposed this idea, you do not have to worry about re election.

The politicians will say it is difficult, then use public funds to add 1,000 affordable homes, which is a drop in the bucket to addressing the supply issue. Do note, that when the affordable housing allotted to the skyscraper in New York City, the affordable housing facilities were given out by the city and conveniently, if I recall, a city counselor's relative got one of the homes.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The article asserts that lowering the speed limit dramatically reduces deaths, and provides a link, and also suggests lowering speed limits as a safety measure. However, the link shows that lower collision speed dramatically reduces death, not _lower speed limits_. Mostly, I have seen that drivers don't tend to obey artificially low speed limits, for example, [https://www.roadandtrack.com/car-culture/a14463672/how- lower...](https://www.roadandtrack.com/car-culture/a14463672/how-lowering-the- speed-limit-can-actually-hurt-pedestrians/)

<comment><USER2> The source might not have used the best link, but there are studies to support that claim. Vision Zero in NYC has been studied extensively and has had a huge proven impact.

I wouldn't say a opinion piece from Road and Track would be a better source, especially considering it's just quoting untested theories on the cause of a single city's issue.

<comment><USER2> Oh, the people who implemented Vision Zero replied to the cited article here [https://www.roadandtrack.com/car-culture/a14500765/new- york-...](https://www.roadandtrack.com/car-culture/a14500765/new-york-city- vision-zero/)

They call the cited article "dangerous if believed by your driving readership". They provide several points of evidence (full studies available to those interested).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I've had more near misses with cyclists than with cars in Toronto. While I'm a huge fan of tolling the QEW to encourage more transit - Toronto roads are already pretty hostile to vehicles. Driving downtown is a high stress activity, and I don't see how increasing that even more will lead to fewer road deaths.

Increases in GO service are having an impact, we need to double down there and add congestion tolls to make it even more attractive.

<comment><USER2> This is the attitude discussed in the article. Driver's feel ownership of the road and unfairly blame cyclists and pedestrians for conflicts. This needs to change. Several studies have shown that drivers are at fault in the majority of car/bike collisions.

It's concerning that you've had more near misses with cyclists than cars; those easily turn into deaths. Getting cars to slow down and and share the road on dense urban streets isn't being hostile to cars, it's trying to stop avoidable deaths though good design.

<comment><USER7> As someone who lives in Toronto, there are some very aggressive cyclists here who do not follow the rules. They run through red lights and stop signs without stopping, weave in and out of traffic, try to bike by cars on the shoulder and freak out on drivers if they happen to have not left enough room for a cyclist to zip past. Not all cyclists in Toronto are like this of course, but I've seen a lot of cyclists who just do whatever they want on the road and get upset when the cars can't anticipate their actions.

With all that said I think it would be a good idea to lower speed limits and install some speeding cameras. I feel there has been an uptick in the number of cyclists on the streets in the past few years and we should keep them safe. Police should also be ticketing the unsafe cyclists as it is clear that they really have no interest in sharing the road with cars. Perhaps police are already ticketing these people at a good rate, but if they are, I've never heard about it. I feel these aggressive cyclists are probably the main contributers to the anti-cyclist sentiment you see among many drivers in Toronto. Showing cyclists and drivers that we aren't going to tolerate that level of irresponsibility would probably help shift public opinion on cyclists in Toronto.

<comment><USER2> As someone who lives in Toronto, there are some very aggressive drivers here who do not follow the rules. 4 days ago I was clipped by a driver that ran a red light and drove straight into the bike lane without stopping or looking. He then gave me the finger and took off. Not all drivers are like this of course, but I've almost been killed by quite a few.

That being said, I think we should keep anecdotal evidence and personal biases out of the discussion about how to save lives, and stick to the stats, which are abundant and clear.

<comment><USER7> And this sort of response is why we can never have a real conversation about this topic in Toronto. Not once did I ever say that there aren't terrible drivers in Toronto putting cyclists in danger. I thought this was a pretty clear conclusion just from reading the article. I agree we should change things to make things safer for cyclists. I just wanted to offer my own perspective on where the anti-cyclist sentiment may be coming from in the first place, given how many people I know have complained about aggressive cyclists. The reason these people all hate aggressive cyclists is because they don't want to hurt or kill someone with their car, not because they hate bikes.

<comment><USER2> I literally gave you the other point of view in the exact format you presented your ideas. If you find that an unreasonable format (and you should), that's on you.

And related: the reason these people all hate aggressive drivers is because they are literally killing scores of people.

<comment><USER7> I don't really see why the format is unreasonable (when either you or I used it) and I don't disagree with your points on aggressive drivers killing people. That is obviously part of what is happening. I feel we should be implementing rules that make everyone safer. I was only offering another side to the story that the article omitted as it seemed to be slanted against drivers.

<comment><USER2> You criticized me for using it. It seems you think something about my response is unreasonable.

If you need it spelled out, the disturbing thing about your response if you used anecdotal examples to perpetuate and justify a negative sentiment towards a marginalized group that's being killed. It was in response to an article discussing how anti-cyclist sentiment is dangerous, and how it is killing people. Further, you generalized an entire population based on the actions of a few.

It's a common tactic to pivot every conversation about cyclist and pedestrian deaths into a conversation about how they are aggressive and don't follow rules. This tactic is one of the things preventing a real reduction in deaths in our streets. It's especially frustrating when that's been disproved repeated by studies.

<comment><USER7> I didn't criticize the format. I was criticizing the fact you're taking a side on the issue, when clearly the issue is more complicated and we need to address both sides if the city is going to come to a solution that is viable. I don't see how anecdotes are off the table for a discussion forum. Maybe if we were using this discussion to draft legislation, sure, let's do some controlled studies. But we are not drafting legislation here. We're talking about peoples opinions: the anti-cyclist sentiment in the city of Toronto. This sentiment is entirely based on the collective personal anecdotes of people who drive in Toronto. I shared a small subset of those anecdotes.

Cyclists are hardly marginalized in Toronto. To be marginalized is to be treated as insignificant. I'm pretty sure no one in Toronto, both drivers and non-drivers, could agree with that statement given the amount of attention cyclists have got over the years in Toronto press and city council.

I also made a point of not generalizing the entire population on the actions of a few. I specifically said, "not all cyclists in Toronto are like this".

There is no tactic being deployed here. I'm on the side of making things safer for everyone, including cyclists, and I feel that means lowering speed limits for drivers and coming down on unsafe cyclists. You want to turn this in to a victim-oppressor type situation when it is clearly not. And this is the problem I have with this whole conversation about cyclists in Toronto.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Toronto was designed for cars, not Canada's cities. Toronto just happens to be one of them.

<comment><USER9> Actually Toronto is one of the most transit-friendly cities in North America. Or so I've been told by a friend that lived there.

That doesn't mean it's bike-friendly though. Or that it should be. Biking in Toronto will probably be miserable half the year, probably a lot more than Netherlands too. It should be safe though.

<comment><USER10> Well, it has a subway, which by definition puts it on the list of transit- friendly cities, as only a handful of North American cities do. One issue though is the 1998 amalgamation. Toronto used to be just the actual dense city part, well covered by transit, and now it includes many former suburbs which are far less dense and are almost entirely car-based.</comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: ChatGrape – team chat that autocompletes your company data while typing - <AUTHOR> http://chatgrape.com

<comment><USER2> So at first glance, how is this better than e.g. Slack?

<comment><AUTHOR> The biggest differentiator is that ChatGrape integrates (and attaches) all your issues, files and documents automatically as you type. We call this Deep Service Integration. This way, you'll never again lose time searching for documents or issues you're trying to reference ;)</comment></comment>


Show HN: Props, whats happening at your company on the office TVs - <AUTHOR> http://www.propsboard.com/ <comment><AUTHOR> We are launching today and are doing well on Product Hunt. Any feedback is greatly appreciated.

We started on Props 11 months ago. Here is our story so far: [http://www.propsboard.com/2016/04/28/your-office-tvs-suck- pr...](http://www.propsboard.com/2016/04/28/your-office-tvs-suck-props-can- help/)

</comment><comment><USER2> I'm just not understanding why a business would pay 200 bucks a month for this. Even at the cheaper price point this just seems a tad silly to me.

<comment><USER3> I'm struggling to understand why it's a 'service' at all, as opposed an app that can be purchased, like say [http://panic.com/statusboard/](http://panic.com/statusboard/)

<comment><AUTHOR> Interesting thought. It would be complicated to pack this into something that you just purchase. Props integrates into Slack, Salesforce, Zendesk, etc.

Maybe we are not communicating the product well on the site.

<comment><USER3> Oh I'm sorry, I forgot that provider API's are magical, mythical beasts that must be tamed from an intermediary server, never from a client.

It's OK to say "we don't think enough people will pay enough for a one-time purchase to cover development costs". You don't have to invent some kind of technical reason for it to be a service.

But having said that, I cannot believe that companies would pay the amount you're asking for a service either.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: Elixir/Unix style pipe operations in Ruby - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/LendingHome/pipe_operator <comment><USER2> I quote one of the examples

        "https://api.github.com/repos/ruby/ruby".pipe do
          URI.parse
          Net::HTTP.get
          JSON.parse.fetch("stargazers_count")
          yield_self { |n| "Ruby has #{n} stars" }
          Kernel.puts
        end
        #=> Ruby has 15115 stars

Not having to type the |> like in Elixir is two shift keys less, which is good. I'm not sure about readability, because one has to spot the .pipe at the beginning of the block, but it shouldn't be a problem.

Now, if we only had pattern matching with the exact syntax of Elixir and not some monstrosity I saw around in proposals and other languages...

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for your feedback!

Check out this other proof of concept demonstrating ES6 style object destructuring in Ruby:

[https://github.com/lendingHome/destruct](https://github.com/lendingHome/destruct)

I think this same type of concept could be applied to port Elixir style pattern matching as well e.g.

        data = {
          name: "John Smith",
          age: 35,
          prefs: {
            lang: "en",
            tz: "UTC",
          }
        }

        User = Pattern { name age prefs[lang] }

        user = User =~ data
        user.name
        user.age
        user.lang

        [data].map(&User)

        case object
        when Pattern { some attrs[:nested][real][deep, fields] }
          Pattern!.some
          Pattern!.real
          Pattern!.deep
          Pattern!.fields
          Pattern!.nested #=> NoMethodError
        end

        # or define "locals" by defining temporary methods on
        # the block receiver when the "then" block is evaluated
        case object
        when Pattern { some nested[data] }.then do
          puts some
          puts data
        end

<comment><USER2> Thanks. Destructuring is nice and I'll check your link.

I'm using Elixir's pattern matching also in function definitions, to do without ifs and switches. A trivial example with Elixir syntax (hopefully correct).

       def div(a, 0), do: {:error, "can't divide by 0"}
       def div(a, 1), do: {:ok, a}
       def div(0, b), do: {:ok, 0}
       def div(a, b), do: {:ok, a/b}

I'd like to have a pattern matching like that in Ruby as well. A more real world example:

       def something(%{"a" => %{"b" => b, "c" => c}}), do {:ok, b + c}
       def something(_), do {:error, "a didn't contain b and c"}

Much more readable than having to write ifs inside the function/method.

All considered, I find Ruby a more pleasant language than Elixir because of syntax, verbosity, state keeping (probably unfair, because OO is made for that vs GenServers), deployment story. I'd like to keep using it for applications that can scale by adding processes, but pattern matching is a killer feature.

Pipelines are important in Elixir because it's functional. It would be a pain to code without them. Object oriented languages can somewhat pipeline by calling methods on results of previous methods, provided a consistent design of classes (each.map.uniq.sort). It seems that in Ruby it could remove lots of useless variables. A lot less head scratching to find sensible variable names, faster programming. I hope it gets into the language or that this gem gets popular.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! Agreed it feels like a good fit for Ruby as well!

RE the pattern matching stuff I think the destructuring concept could be applied to look something like:

        def div(*args)
          case args
          when Pattern{[a, 0]} then [:error, "can't divide by 0"]
          when Pattern{[a, 1]} then [:ok, Pattern.last.a]
          when Pattern{[0, b]} then [:ok, 0]
          when Pattern{[a, b]} then [:ok, Pattern.last.a / Pattern.last.b]
          end
        end

        def something(object)
          case object
          when Pattern{a[b, c]} then [:ok, Pattern.last.b + Pattern.last.c]
          else [:error, "a didn't contain b and c"]
          end
        end

Some shorthand to access `Pattern.last` e.g. "$~" for regex would make things even nicer!</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Studies Shoot Down Tech's Harmful Effects on Kids – So Now What? - <AUTHOR> http://nautil.us//blog/studies-shoot-down-techs-harmful-effects-on-kidsso-now-what <comment><USER2> I'm reminded of this South Park quote:

"Well, Stan, the truth is marijuana probably isn't gonna make you kill people, and it most likely isn't gonna fund terrorism, but… well, son, pot makes you feel fine with being bored. And it's when you're bored that you should be learning some new skill or discovering some new science or being creative. If you smoke pot you may grow up to find out that you aren't good at anything."

An endless stream of Facebook or Twitch or YouTube probably won't do acute harm, but it fills a void that might have otherwise been filled with something more nurturing.

But... I have a cousin who spent an insane amount of time watching YouTube. She loves all the usual personalities. And one day something clicked in her and she wanted to do it too. She spent an incredible amount of her free time bashing her head against creative tools, learning how to animate and draw and make video.

She's 13 and can use illustrator and a Wacom and publish animations to YouTube. All self taught. I'm jealous. My parents had the best interests in mind but still did the, "get off the X and go play outside." My cousin has parental figures who noticed and nurtured her passion, even though it looked a whole lot like her YouTube addiction. Buying her a tablet and whatnot.

So like all important issues I'm left with "balance" being probably the safest approach.

<comment><USER3> I work with kids in tech (including "at-risk youth" with limited means), and their abilities these days are downright frightening.

When I was 11 I was riding a skateboard around until I got into coding and by 13 I had Hello World and an OpenGL triangle and felt so empowered.

Some of these kids though are pumping out small 3D games about whatever interests them with their own custom shaders and models. Part of that is access to information / better tools, but also I feel part of it is being tuned to absorb, find, and filter information through these mediums. If they are into something they will grasp it at astounding rates.

I haven't come across any education system currently that outright targets exploring the interest space or doing a good job of offering to kids why they should be interested in something that isn't immediately obviously very cool or fun or feeling attainable. And for a lot of them this is exactly what they need, if not all they need if there's a lot of easy to absorb information online.

<comment><USER4> Don't feel too bad, part of it is the tools are better, you can make 3d animations now without having to do as much of it from scratch.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> > _It looks like grownups can disregard the fear-mongering about the ill > effects of digital media on kids. A 2017 study in Child Development found > "little or no support for harmful links between digital screen use and young > people's psychological well-being."_

Someone might come out of reading this article with the idea: "so, there's no harmful link between digital screen use and young people's psychological well- being".

Whereas the full story is:

a) A random 2017 study said that.

b) We aren't shown the criticisms from other studies done later on this one (e.g. for its methodology, etc)

c) We aren't told that scientific papers have a huge reproducibility crisis

d) We aren't told that papers in soft-sciences like psychology have even worse crisis

e) We aren't told that what "well being" is fuzzy and depends on one's definition. The article implies that some PhDs doing a study can determine generally, and across cultures and worldviews, what "well being" is. Which would be very convenient, but hardly realistic -- instead they just take their culture's current biases for wellbeing as a universal default (or measure some trivial aspects of it, e.g. the kids don't end up having worse health stats).

<comment><USER6> > We aren't told that what "well being" is fuzzy and depends on one's > definition.

Right. I strongly suspect there's a correlation (and in fact causation) between lots of video watching and lower reading level.

I don't know if there are low-level brain effects, but I think once a child realizes that one can watch a movie _or_ read the same book, the easier and more visual option is going to look more attractive. Reading is fairly hard work at first...

<comment><USER7> As for low-level brain effects I'm reminded of [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18385536](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18385536)

"Learning to Read in Your 30s Profoundly Transforms the Brain"

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Tendentious language.

Who actually worries about children's "well-being" (in the short term) being impaired by too much iDevices?

I'm concerned about interference with learning and development needed to interact with actual people and the physical world. The kids themselves may not be particularly _unhappy_ about losing those skills as long as mummy and daddy earn the money, serve the meals and drive them to daycare, but long term it's a major blow to their lives as independent individuals and the vitality of society, if the risk proves to realize itself to actual problems.

Weird stance to effectively advocate unfettered full-scale testing at high stakes just because the "has never been conclusive evidence that screens are a direct cause of harm".

<comment><USER8> "I'm concerned about interference with learning and development needed to interact with actual people and the physical world"

Books would cause the same withdrawal from actual people and the physical world, yet I haven't seen anybody warn of too much reading in quite a while.

<comment><USER7> > Books would cause the same withdrawal from actual people and the physical > world

No. "Also", but not "the same". And certainly not in the same way.

rimliu made a similar point earlier [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19074971](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19074971)

In my opinion the analogy is basically valid, but it's not clear that they are comparable.

<comment><USER8> It doesn't seem fair to compare reading books to the worst possible things you can do on a screen device. And the argument made was about physical exercise and engagement with real people.

I think that's a problem of all those studies actually. After all, reading books is a subset of things you could do on a tablet device.

No question there are harmful apps and movies, optimized to increase addiction. Few people you should simply hand kids these devices and never check what they are doing.

And presumably, harmful books also do exist. It probably makes a difference what kind of books you read.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> "Well being." This is tobacco industry grade nonsense.

haha Try looking at language acquisition or physical development and screen time. Many studies linked here:

[https://theswaddle.com/effects-of-screen-time-on- children/](https://theswaddle.com/effects-of-screen-time-on-children/)

<comment><USER10> Exactly. The methodology of the study _solely_ involved telephone interviews to caregivers about screen time (which itself is likely to be inaccurate) and questions related to children's "well being" (also likely to be inaccurate). At no point was screen time actually measured, nor children's well-being independently assessed. The whole study is bunk.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I think that like everything, there's a balance to be struck. I want my kid to develop skills of interacting with the physical world and with physical people. But I also want her prepared to enter a world of technology with full fluency. And there are a lot of things that are actually well learned via screen media. I think about how valuable video games were to my development and how little enthusiasm my parents had for my interest in them.

For the past several generations, each generation has encountered entirely new forms of media and technology that revolutionize social and economic processes. Each preceding generation confronts that change with full-scale freak out. Everything in moderation. It'll all probably be okay.

<comment><USER12> > I want my kid to develop skills of interacting with the physical world and > with physical people.

I came across a fascinating BBC article on treating ADHD with music [0]

> "The ability to time, to synchronise with others underlies all face to face > communication," says Khalil. "People imagine that synchronizing is doing > something simultaneously. But synchronizing actually means processing time > together - perceiving time together in such a way that we have this common > understanding of how time is passing."

[0]: [https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-21661689](https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-21661689)

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> I have questions about this article.

The stated issues the article lists ("well being") is not the primary concern that most people I have discussed this with - or at least, does not appear to be on the surface.

The fear is long term effects of sustained screen time for long periods that supplant all other forms of play may essentially stunt some forms of social or physical development and at a later age have significant negative effects on their ability to cope and/or function in terms of social ability, attention span etc.

Well-being is not clearly enough defined for me to take a proper conclusion out of this article, and the studies I clicked through to (albeit, quickly) I could not access.

Also, to make a sweeping conclusion about "Tech's harmful effects on kids" from that measurement seems as foolhardy as thinking that technology is also extremely damaging to children - it's just one measurement, and does not apply to a whole range of other potential issues.

Not a fan of this title. The article itself appears to mostly be arguing that screens are a useful tool for children to utilise and are not damaging as such compared with other methods of play, which is a fair argument, but the title and the common complaints don't marry up.

</comment><comment><USER14> I don't need a scientific study to tell me that focusing purely on your own self interests for extended periods of time (doesn't matter the activity) is _not_ conducive to either long term happiness or a successful life in multiple measures.

Any study that says being selfish as a way of life is not "harmful" is flawed in the most fundamental manner.

<comment><USER15> > Any study that says being selfish as a way of life is not "harmful" is > flawed in the most fundamental manner.

Ironically, you just disregarded other opinions to focus purely on your own interests

<comment><USER14> My "own interests" are to be a good example to my kids, so they themselves don't become selfish people. There's a dichotomy here, self interest working side by side with interests for others. You simply cannot help others if you don't do what is right for yourself.

The trick is to find the things that are right for both/multiple parties, not _only_ yourself. There's possibly no such things a pure selflessness. Even an act of giving provides a benefit to the giver, even if it's only an emotional one.

And, I am allowed to disregard everyone else's opinions, it's a fundamental right of every living being.

More importantly, if we only rely (or somehow over value) science instead of common sense, then all it takes is another counter argument from "science" to change our minds. This is being blown around by the wind instead of thinking for yourself.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> So parents have to make a crucial decision vis-a-vis the environment and the brain development of their children?

Good luck making your decision giving too much weight to recent studies, which will probably be validated 20 years from now; if.

Children growing up without screen time have stood the test of time (think robustness); I'm not so certain the ones growing up with iPads will.

<comment><USER17> Anecdotally, but I'm already seeing it in high school age kids. These kids haven't really grown up without access to a smartphone, and you can tell the difference in how they interact with each other. There's a lot less social talking, and they don't understand emotions or empathy very well at all. And heaven forbid you try to get them to put down the damn phone and take notes or do something.

"Why do I need to learn this when photomath does it for me?" was often heard, or they'd just Google the answers because they're there. They work a lot less hard to try to get stuff, and it hurts their discipline and focus, for sure. And I'm going to stop my rant there, because I could continue on with it forever.

<comment><USER16> I think I've heard it in an interview with the physician Gabor Maté, that the prefontal cortex is responsible – among other things – for empathy, and he was making the case that in the modern age, the conditions for the proper development of the prefrontal cortex are not sufficiently met, because kids nowadays are exposed too much to social media and too little to physical interactions with other kids and other adults. Thus, the newer generations will most likely be deficient in the empathy department; and empathy is very important as it allows one to see things from another person's perspective and understand other people's emotions, which is crucial for effective communication.

<comment><USER18> This is also the kind of skills that helps again social conflicts and things like wars. This is worrying indeed.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Isn't this just the latest - "Think of the children!" We've had Reefer madness, Elvis' hips, satanic rock and roll played backwards, video-nasties, murder-simulator computer games - and all the rest of it. Every set of parents seems to look at what their children seem to mysteriously like - and determine it's harmful (accompanied by mixed scientific evidence).

By no means am I simply saying that this means that there can't be an issue with screen-time - Simply that older generations have a long and ignoble history of "this type of stuff".

<comment><USER19> Or to look at it another way. I can't think of an example where we've greeted change with open arms. I presume somewhere back in history there's a parent monitoring their childs harpsichord time, or telling them to stop drawing on the cave walls and get out there to kill a real mammoth.

<comment><USER20> That's actually hilarious! Too much cave wall time

<comment><USER21> Kids these days, with their _fire_ don't know how good they have it.

In my day, if it was cold, and it was _always_ cold, you just beat something warm to death with your bare hands and ate your way inside. Built character.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Kids can't resist addiction as well as adults. Screens are easily the thing that get the most compulsive reactions from my 4yo. My feeling is that too much video stimulates him enough that he will end up repeating phrases and songs rather than invent stories and playact. Not sure how any of this would show up in a survey like the one in the article, but I'm pretty convinced that our daily quota of one hour of screen time is a good idea.

<comment><USER23> Mine is 3 and we do zero screen time. Once every few months I watch something with him and he gets obsessive when it's over. we read books, he knows the stories, he memorizes lots and lots of songs and speaks 3 languages daily. iPad turns him into a whiney addict right away.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Well, can't argue with "studies," folks. Wrap it up and proceed with the ipad babies.

</comment><comment><USER25> I can't agree with the primary message that gives tech a pass as virtually harmless towards kids' development.

I've yet to see anything that is used in excess that is harmless. The use of tech these days reminds me of television watching in the past. It has been impossible to determine TV's impact on society but it has had an impact but we can't tell if it's been good or bad.

I also think that one study can't possibly test the whole impact of tech on kids' development.

A generation from now there will be an impact but we won't know whether it's been good or bad. What I do know is that there is an opportunity cost by tech on a whole generation. Time that could have been used on other activities but yet it would have been used on apps.

I think it's up to parents to make sure their kids use their time effectively and it's not lost in front of a useless app.

<comment><USER26> The definition of "in excess" _is_ that it's harmful, so you're kind of begging the question here.

Why _must_ there be a problem with screen use? Why can't you live in a world where screen use is neutral?

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> When talking about such things, we should always remember how resistant some people were to new technologies (like electricity, the bicycle, mass schooling, the radio, the TV, the walkman, mainframes, gaming PCs, chatrooms etc). Most of those fears turned out to be overexaggerated. My favrite is the fear that hearing one sound pattern (multiple times, for example one song played from tape, instead of a live performance, will somehow make us go crazy.

</comment><comment><USER28> Just like any tech, business as usual. Like we stopped using coal derived products when the damage gets out of control. Or when we stopped massive animal husbandry when we realized it's a huge black swan of killer germs? We try to regulate the nth order effects, fix holes while new ones pop out.

No one has a scientific approach to allowing new inventions anywhere. So many chemicals being used everywhere until sometime in the future the damage is known and visible.

</comment><comment><USER29> If there are doing useful and constructive things with tech some of the time it's good. I used to play 50% video games, 50% programming and I turned out good enough IMO.

<comment><USER19> I mysteriously never got the computer I wanted for Christmas for years. Only eventually turned up when I'd saved up pocket money for over a year to contribute half the cost. Turned out my grandmother "didn't like them" (not that she'd ever used one) - and she'd been a teacher. I think I turned out 'OK'

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> Try another study until you get the result you want?

<comment><USER31> Are there any web sites that summarize studies by topic like this? It does seem like anyone can cite a study to prove anything but there is no layman equivalent of the meta study. Even better if the studies were weighted by things like sample size and reproducability.

<comment><USER32> This topic is a very good example of the risks inherent in trying to do science by consensus. The study [1] this article references had a huge sample size (19,957) and is also probably very replicable. It's also complete trash. The methodology was to call and survey parents of 2-5 year olds asking questions such as on a (1/never to 5/always) 'How would you rate your child's interest and curiosity in learning new things' or 'How would your child's laughing and smiling tendencies'?

They then proceed to massage the data in a bunch of different ways, in no small part because they acknowledge that their variables ended up providing no decent mapping of reliability - in the study's words, "these variables were not combined into a composite well‐being measure because the reliability of these items was relatively low." And after this massaging and subjective "normalizing" they conclude that TV and video games are just awesome for 2-5 year olds.

Ultimately on complex topics that cannot be objectively and meaningfully tested you can generally prove whatever you want to prove. To actually have something vaguely resembling meaning here you'd need to take a random sampling of children and then require that one group provide no access to digitech, another provide 1-2 hours of digitech, and the final group 5+ hours or whatever. Do this for years and then compare the children using objective measurements determined by a blind third party or examination. The random factor there is also required. If you just survey households that chose to allow their children e.g. 0 or 5+ hours of digitech per day, then you're going to get some severe environmental and perhaps genetic confounding variables in your results. In any case no study like this is ever going to happen in modern times.

And granted even that sort of study would have a million possible flaws, but studies such as the one this article are just jokes. And they are very much the rule rather than the exception. We tend to attribute quality to something with a doctorate or two behind it, but _publish or perish_ alongside let's say 'motivated' research is increasingly distorting science.

[1] - [https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/cdev.13007](https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/cdev.13007)

<comment><USER31> > This topic is a very good example of the risks inherent in trying to do > science by consensus.

Just to be clear, I'm not talking about doing science but communicating it. Even just cataloging the various studies and assigning some sort of label for reliability like you just did would be valuable.

As you acknowledge, there is an awful lot of noise, but as a layman I have no way of separating the signal from the noise.

<comment><USER32> Of course, but what you're requesting _is_ science. It's a meta-analysis. A work that studies other studies and tries to provide aggregate data while controlling for whatever the meta-analysis creators determine to be relevant. What I was pointing out here is how studies like this would generally be considered high-reliability studies for these meta-analyses. It ticks all the right boxes, probably by design. Yet at the same time when you look at it, it's something I think few would find worthy of basing their decisions on.

But qualifying exactly which studies you should, or should not, give weight to is a task that's ultimately going to also involve substantial bias. If I want to argue that digitech is good for kids, I'm going to be able to create very reasonable sounding criteria that would include studies such as this. If I want to argue that digitech is bad for kids, I'm still going to be able to create very reasonable sounding criteria yet one that would exclude studies such as this. The same problem inherent in the individual studies also ends up emerging in the meta-analyses as well.

Aggregating data in some ways takes you even further away from the truth. Here you can reasonably show that this study is not so great, yet imagine this was part of hundreds of different studies all packed together with a sample size aggregate of hundreds of thousands. It may very well be that that meta- analysis was also loaded with dubious work, such as this, yet it becomes vastly more tedious to illustrate such. And as the rate of publication continues to exponentially increase, then going forward into the future we will eventually be faced with things such as meta-analyses of meta-analyses. Meta-meta-analysis I suppose?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> Smartphone and web apps tend to exploit our habit mechanisms in order to retain users. I severely doubt that forming time consuming non-productive habits early on is beneficial for children, or that they're somehow protected from the effects of reward loops.

</comment><comment><USER34> "Well being", sure, but how about their cardiac well-being and muscular well- being?

</comment><comment><USER35> People are idealistic about their children. The studies consistently show that passive screen time is bad and active screentime can be good or neutral. It applies for anyone past the age of five where it becomes a net benefit to have active screen time.

<comment><USER36> It also depends on what the screen content happens to be... I'd be sure running Horror flicks or Bold and the Beautiful all day for the kids won't give the same outcomes as Sesame Street and Playschool. It's also what are kids missing out on by sitting in the isolated screen environment, not that they feel ok doing so...

The point is always simplified for some broad guidance rule while ignoring the required complexity to properly understand and advice on a 'problem.'

That and people lie/embellish when interviewed on the phone, so that would have a huge margin of error.

<comment><USER37> I dunno.. kids raised on the bold and the beautiful would probably have a wide range of interpersonal skills. They may be narcissists and not nice to their neighbors but I'd bet they'd climb the corporate ladder.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> Let's see if this validates. It's a first salvo against the Haidt et al hypothesis

<comment><USER7> Haven't been following Haidt on this topic. What's the hypothesis?

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> This study is sponsored by who?

</comment><comment><USER40> There is a strong correlation between the increased usage of social media by young people and an increase in suicide rate, that being said the US went through an economic depression at the same time so maybe it has more to do with young peoples guardians economic stability.

<comment><USER36> While that is somewhat true, it's far more complex than that correlation. We must understand why social media is a negative environment and not just state that it is bad as an idea.

Advertising, influencing, addiction, social breakdowns, attachments, medications, wealth, etc, all play a role in what creates a negative environment for young people on the internet.

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> Relevant Scott Alexander's essay: [https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/12/12/beware-the-man-of- one-...](https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/12/12/beware-the-man-of-one-study/)

</comment><comment><USER42> if you're the nyt, you ignore this information as hard as possible</comment>


ARM server market - <AUTHOR> http://perspectives.mvdirona.com/2015/10/arm-server-market/ <comment><USER2> One crucial point when we talk about high core count parts is memory and IO bandwidths. In the end, that'll determine the overall performance of your server. I don't see ARM parts, due to their relatively low single-thread performance, as good for compute-bound workloads, but, with memory and IO channels significantly faster than current x86-based parts, they could be competitive in IO bound ones.

I'd love to see more diversity in the server space, but reality is harsh.

<comment><USER3> This is where IBM cleans shop. POWER is pretty mean when it comes to bandwidth. You pay the tax to be a couple years ahead of the Intel curve if you need it.

<comment><USER2> Indeed, but there is no magic there. If ARM-based servers with high core count can be made with bandwidths in the same league as POWER, IBM's high-margin server business may end up being threatened.

Also, we cannot forget POWER is very good with single threaded performance.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> And finally a standardized platform, so you can just install any commercial Linux distro on any hardware:

[https://www.arm.com/about/newsroom/arm-ecosystem- collaborate...](https://www.arm.com/about/newsroom/arm-ecosystem-collaborates- to-deliver-initial-server-platform-standard.php)

No more random fork of uboot, proprietary boot method and guess-the-device- tree. Instead you get the goodness(?) of UEFI, ACPI and standard minimum hardware.

<comment><USER5> Are there any breadboard-style releases implementing this spec? I'm looking for the low(er) cost and open ecosystem that I find in ODROID and RasPi style boards, but still the robustness and standardization of this common spec.

<comment><USER4> There's a new development board coming real soon that will implement it. It is also implemented by the firmware on APM X-Gene (Mustang) and HP Moonshot. Not sure about Cavium as I've not used it.

However it's unlikely you'll find a small format SBSA-compliant board any time soon, because the server stack simply assumes a lot more RAM than is available on phone/tablet SoCs. For example, the minimum RAM required to run RHEL/aarch64 is 1 GB/pCPU (so in reality 4-8GB min), and even the Snapdragon 808 only has 3 GB. I personally wouldn't be happy doing development work for 64 bit ARM SBSA with less than 8 GB of RAM, and for OpenStack, 32 GB is the minimum I'd recommend.

(I do run Fedora/aarch64 on my LG G4 phone though :-)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I think server-class ARM is interesting, but it's always struck me as much more interesting for on-premises stuff... like, you want a cheap on-site NAS that doesn't use much power, or a generic machine you can use as a switch, or maybe even an intranet host or something. Anything in the category of stuff that is always on but not very resource-intensive.

In cloud deployments, though, sharing a bigger box amongst lots of virtual machines just seems way more economical.

<comment><USER7> I kept a close eye on the ARM server market for years waiting for it to happen and bring cheap multi core boxes to the masses. Ultimately, I stopped caring when quad core Xeon boxes got down to less than $400 and draw less than 30 watts idle: [http://amzn.com/B00FE2G79C](http://amzn.com/B00FE2G79C)

<comment><USER8> I still think that 30 watts idle are way too much for at-home equipment. At German electricity prices we're still dealing with $75 a year just for electricity. What I want to see is a reasonably powerful machine that is <5 watts idle (for the board, CPU and RAM) plus the power of the installed hard disks.

<comment><USER9> Right now you'd need NUC-style nettops for that kind of wattage. I'm not sure the performance qualifies as "reasonably powerful", though…

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I am going to presume, for ARM to win any market share, they will have to offer a competitive advantage. ( Correct me if I am wrong )

So where does ARM's Server Chip actually offer an Advantage?

Price - The CPU is only part of the Server's Cost. When you look at the whole picture, The Memory, I/O Controller & SSD, Network, will all cost the same. The higher price of the memory and SSD / HDD, the lower total cost % of the CPU. And once you lowered to a certain percentage, you want an incredibly cheap, Atom Server CPU is available for less then $50.

Performance - Even in the chance that any ARM's Server CPU market manage to make a competitive CPU core against Xeon, which in itself is an incredible achievement, they will have to also compete against Intel's world class ECC Memory Controller, Network Controller, and I/O controller. All three are the main reason AMD CPU didn't offer any competition even when they are much cheaper.

Power - This is similar to Price, once you factor in the memory and I/O, CPU's role is relatively small. And the power / energy usage scenario on a server much flavor Intel's rather then ARM.

So where does it offer a advantage? When you want a small baremetal server that is cheap, but in the world where VM is a common place, there is no reason why you cant have a small instance of it running on a much larger CPU. And even Intel admit it, none of their Server Customers, ( Read NONE ) wanted the Atom as they thought. It turns out everyone wanted Xeon-D, you pay a little premium for HUGE amount of flexibility. Intel wanted the Atom to disrupt itself rather then ARM, and it turns out it was the Xeon-D that did that.

<comment><USER11> The current batch of ARM microserver parts are indeed pretty primitive compared to x86, but each year they will copy more & more of the tricks and optimizations that Intel implemented 10-15 years ago, including the superb virtualization tech. Still I agree they are most likely going to fail due to the inevitable patent infringement lawsuits, the fab gap, and/or customer reluctance WRT deploying ARM SW.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> I thought ARM servers might be nice on scaleway but was quite disappointed in the performance. 32bit and all disk IO over a network connection is really not a good start. Maybe that will improve when we see more ARM64 around.

<comment><USER13> At .004 euro cents an hour, seriously, what were you expecting? 32 bits seems like they threw in 16 bits for free.

<comment><USER12> It's approximately the same price as Digital Oceans lowest offering, which has significantly higher performance in every area.

<comment><USER14> Are you (and parent) looking at something other than their pricing pages? It seems to me that scaleway costs 0.6 euro cents/hour, but also generally has higher numbers for most features than Digital Ocean: more cores, more RAM, more disk, more bandwidth.

[https://www.digitalocean.com/pricing/](https://www.digitalocean.com/pricing/) [https://www.scaleway.com/pricing/](https://www.scaleway.com/pricing/)

<comment><USER12> My comparison was between the C1 offering from Scaleway and the lowest DigitalOcean package. Scaleway has far larger disk and memory, but the disk is remote over the network link and the 4 ARM cores are 32bit and terribly slow. I really like Scaleways configuration and control panel but the performance just isn't there. It's likely better for a lot of things other people are doing but I needed the IO and CPu performance.

<comment> ju-st How did you measure CPU performance? With DO you have propably a high "burst" cpu performance but if you keep using a lot of CPU ressources they will probably supsense your VM because of "abuse" or something (my experience with other VM providers). On Scaleway you have worse CPU performance but you can use the full CPU 24/7.

<comment><USER12> Just general feeling compiling some packages and messing with 'openssl speed'.

<comment><USER15> Compiling software is a somewhat meaningful metric across architectures (with caveats), but openssl speed is not really indicative of the CPU performance, rather it's benchmarking its own fast assembly routines. That only matters if your workload is crypto-bound.

<comment><USER16> You could also be benchmarking the interface between openssl and crypto hardware, several ARM SoCs have crypto accelerators.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I've been out of the loop for a while datacenter-wise, and so fail to see the immediate value here.

Are these servers running virtualized instances? Are they much cheaper as far as $/request or watt/request (or other efficiency metric? How do they compare to a slice of an Intel server, which has the benefit of a more mature environment?

<comment><AUTHOR> ARM has typically been more efficient, for both heat and power consumption, while losing out on computational power.

That's enabled people to cram significantly more processing cores into a server rack. 4 years ago HP release a server line with 288 quad-core ARM processors in 4U, for a total of 1152 cores. Obviously that introduces the complexity of needing code that is suited to massive parallelism. Each processor there took up just 1.5 watts idle, 5 watts under load. By comparison the Atom from Intel at the time had comparable performance, but consumed 8.5 watts, just over 70% more, and didn't idle to as low consumption.

There are a number of problems that are significant with large scale data- centre operations, but power consumption and heat generation are way up there at the top. In theory a data-centre filled with ARM based servers would give you comparable performance, but with cheaper electrical and climate control bills.

The emphasis there is on "in theory" :) The reality at the moment is that companies have spent years trying to get ARM based, massive core count servers to be a thing, and it hasn't really worked out. Switching processor architectures is never something that can be done lightly. Software has to be compiled and supported provided for it, and isn't necessarily tuned for the ARM architecture. The x86 architecture's performance characteristics have been really well understood, and software likely designed with those characteristics in mind.

Historically ARM has also lacked Windows server support, and had very variable quality linux support (not helped by every Tom, Dick and Harry SoC company do the darnedest things in pursuit of creating 'value'.) As far as I've heard, they've since done (or started on?) a huge restructuring of the ARM path in the kernel to clean up the mess and provide significantly better customisation opportunities.

In part it has also seemed like a case of "no one ever got fired for buying IBM". You've only got a certain budget, do you gamble on an unproven (to you) architecture, or stick the the tried and tested Intel?

<comment><USER18> Twirrim: _ARM has typically been more efficient, for both heat and power consumption, while losing out on computational power._

i_have_to_speak : _Current ARM server chips are much worse than Intel chips on the performance /watt metric._

It's hard to square these two statements. It might depend on how you define "efficiency". If efficiency is the amount of energy to perform a calculation, I don't think ARM is more efficient. This paper from a couple years ago concludes that ISA is no longer a defining factor: [http://www.embedded.com/design/connectivity/4436593/Analysis...](http://www.embedded.com/design/connectivity/4436593/Analysis- of-contemporary-ARM-and-x86-architectures)

Separately, this is an excellent article comparing recent generations of Intel against each other, showing that although power use has been going up, "instructions per cycle" has been going up even faster, resulting in a net improvement in energy efficiency: [http://kentcz.com/downloads/P149-ISCA14-Preprint.pdf](http://kentcz.com/downloads/P149-ISCA14-Preprint.pdf)

<comment><AUTHOR> I wonder if the question we ought to be asking is "How idle is your server farm"? ARM still uses significantly less power than Intel chips do when idle. If your fleet is working hard all the time, it would be a no-brainer to go with Intel. What if your fleet spends 50% of the time not working? 70%? There presumably is some tipping point there.

<comment><USER19> Cloud services probably upended this.

If my server farm is idle any significant amount, I'm going to take those servers offline. If I need capacity, I'll spin up some cloud instances in the short term, and I'll bring my own servers online until I'm at an appropriate idle/busy metric.

I suspect that the days of 99% idle servers are long gone. I suspect that utilization is probably above 70%.

<comment><USER20> The interesting market is the "personal" server, which is idle 99% of the time but cannot be turned off as the owner only has 1 to start with.

<comment><USER21> That's not an interesting market because it is tiny and will get relatively smaller going forward.

There are 2, maybe 3 interesting markets that will come to dominate computing even more than they already do in the next few years:

Cloud, Mobile and IoT (maybe)

Desktops, personal servers and any other non-cloud server workloads will be a rounding error.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> [https://www.hetzner.de/us/hosting/produktmatrix/rootserver-p...](https://www.hetzner.de/us/hosting/produktmatrix/rootserver- produktmatrix-ax) \- this is an interesting offering, Hetzner is one of bigger hosting companies in Europe. They seem to be experimenting with cheap ARM offerings recently.

</comment><comment><USER23> Looking forward to a high performance JVM on the ARM server. Is there a way to rent an ARM server which has a high-performance JVM ?

<comment><USER24> Oracle JDK has full support for C2 and hard float on ARM 64. That code is _not_ in OpenJDK. Red Hat is working on C1 in OpenJDK for Java 9.

<comment><USER25> Full support for C1 & C2 is available in OpenJDK 7,8 & 9\. Prebuilt binaries may be downloaded from [http://openjdk.linaro.org/releases.htm](http://openjdk.linaro.org/releases.htm). Sources are upstreamed for jdk9 ([http://hg.openjdk.java.net/jdk9/dev](http://hg.openjdk.java.net/jdk9/dev)). For jdk8 they are maintained in the OpenJDK aarch64 project ([http://hg.openjdk.java.net/aarch64-port/jdk8](http://hg.openjdk.java.net/aarch64-port/jdk8)). For jdk7 they are maintained in the IcedTea project ([http://icedtea.classpath.org/hg/icedtea7-forest](http://icedtea.classpath.org/hg/icedtea7-forest)).

The default java on Ubuntu trusty (14.04) and vivid (15.04) LTS releases is openjdk. From my 48 core aarch64 platform running trusty.

ed@arm64:~/jdk8/jdk8$ cat /etc/lsb-release DISTRIB_ID=Ubuntu DISTRIB_RELEASE=14.04 DISTRIB_CODENAME=trusty DISTRIB_DESCRIPTION="Ubuntu Trusty Tahr (development branch)" ed@arm64:~/jdk8/jdk8$ uname -a Linux arm64 3.18.0-g57fcd51 #1 SMP Fri Jun 26 17:33:54 PDT 2015 aarch64 aarch64 aarch64 GNU/Linux ed@arm64:~/jdk8/jdk8$ java -version java version "1.7.0_51" OpenJDK Runtime Environment (IcedTea 2.4.6) (7u51-2.4.6-1ubuntu4) OpenJDK 64-Bit Server VM (build 25.0-b70, mixed mode) ed@arm64:~/jdk8/jdk8$

OpenJDK is also the default java on RHEL and fedora.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> I think these servers can be interesting for increased privacy. You can use them as a low-cost, low energy dedicated server where noone can snoop on you undetected (unlike a VPS).

</comment><comment><USER27> Until they succeeds to persuade AWS/GCE/Azure to sell ARM backed instances, they will be taken seriously.

<comment><USER28> Let's not lose sight of who James Hamilton is :

From his Linkedin :

VP & Distinguished Engineer

Amazon.com

December 2008 – Present (6 years 11 months)

A member of the Amazon Web Services team. Specializes in infrastructure efficiency, reliability and scaling. Prior to joining Amazon.com, James was Microsoft Data Center Futures Architect. He has spent more than 20 years working on high-scale services, database management systems, and compilers.

And a couple of biographies :

[http://highscalability.com/blog/2015/1/12/the-stunning- scale...](http://highscalability.com/blog/2015/1/12/the-stunning-scale-of-aws- and-what-it-means-for-the-future-o.html)

[http://www.wired.com/2013/02/james-hamilton- amazon/](http://www.wired.com/2013/02/james-hamilton-amazon/)

<comment><USER29> He presently lives on his trawler, he's presently on an island 1200 miles west of Australia.

      http://blog.mvdirona.com/

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> That link is dead.

<comment><USER31> His site doesn't appear to be able to handle the load. Google has it cached thought:

[http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:CAYvaWj...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:CAYvaWjavB8J:perspectives.mvdirona.com/2015/10/arm- server-market/+&cd=11&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us)</comment></comment>


Is this a better .csv? - <AUTHOR> Https://ccsv.io <comment><USER2> CSV with special seperation characters is nothing new. It won't generally solve the problem, because the choice of the seperation characters is always related to the data supposed to be hold by the table. Just think about a CCSV file holding CCSV files.

If you want to avoid escaping, you need to declare the length of your fields, so it says for instance "now come 20 bytes of field value" and no termination symbol is necessary. This is nothing new, read about the pros and cons of null terminated strings or old and traditional standards such as ASN.1 if you want to learn more about that.

I don't like the name TSV (Tab seperated values), because it is just CSV, and the name should be agnostic about the used seperators. See for instance [https://pandas.pydata.org/pandas- docs/stable/reference/api/p...](https://pandas.pydata.org/pandas- docs/stable/reference/api/pandas.read_csv.html) for a versatile parsing library in a widespread data science library. It just calls all these data formats _CSV_.

</comment><comment><USER3> The SQLite command shell supports the format described there. I have also independently used the same format too. But now, they have a name for it, which can be useful.

One variant I have sometimes used is DLE to escape the next character if it is a control character that should be part of the data.

<comment><AUTHOR> Unfortunately, I was unable to get the .separator command to accept the control characters. It always threw an error stating that multi-character separators are not allowed. Since those characters are in the regular ASCII table, I wouldn't have thought they were multi-character/byte characters, but maybe sqlite just doesn't allow the use of non-printing characters.

<comment><USER3> To use control characters as separators, type:

      .mode ascii</comment></comment></comment>


Programming while listening to Music? - <AUTHOR>

I struggle to be effective in really noisy environments (starbucks), so i will usually listen to music, but that also seems to be a detractor as I will stop what i'm doing to listen to the words.  Instrumentals seems to be the solution but I cant find a good source that just has instrumentals.<p>Does something like Pandora exist with just Instrumentals? <comment><USER2> I've had the best luck with electronica/techno. Long time favorites include heavier non-vocal Ministry, which has a nice cadence for typing. Lately I'm on to Aphex Twin's Drukqs double album.

Classical tends to draw my attention too much, as the good stuff is really complex and deep, and will pull me right out of _flow_ when it gets to the tricky parts. Same problem with Jazz.

Most "easy listening" music makes me want to puke and throw things or stab someone, so I just don't go there.

<comment><USER3> Can you please point me to songs/albums by Ministry without vocals? Can't think of anything (not that I know a lot of their songs).

<comment><USER2> Many of the songs on _Land of Rape and Honey_ , for instance, either have no vocals, or the vocals are repetitive bits that seem (to me) more part of the music than typical lyrical vocals.

* The Missing <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0gzXpzDwwbI> vocals don't bother me.

* Hizbollah <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0JRxVov_0a0> has vocals I can't understand ;-)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I too have difficulty focusing in noisy environments. If you're interested in filtering environmental human-sound out while still being able to listen to music, or hear an approaching train, check Mack's Earplugs out.

Clickable: [http://www.macksearplugs.com/details/ear-plugs-for-loud- musi...](http://www.macksearplugs.com/details/ear-plugs-for-loud-music/pillow- soft-earplugs-6-pair-value)

I use them when flying, or working in a common space. Worth buying in bulk and keeping. They can stay in comfortably on a 13 hour flight without impairing your ability to hear someone approaching/speaking to you.

</comment><comment><USER5> You could try some musicians earplugs, they have the effect of reducing the noise around you without muffling. [http://www.amazon.com/Etymotic-Research- ETYPlug-Protection-E...](http://www.amazon.com/Etymotic-Research-ETYPlug- Protection-Earplugs/dp/B0044DEETC/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&qid=1298142432&sr=8-3)

<comment><USER6> They have them (something comparable at least ) at Walgreens, $5 or so, blue with yellow/green string connecting the plugs

<comment><USER7> I have tried earplugs, but they cut out _too much_ sound, I am always uncomfortable when trying to concentrate when wearing them (I had three younger brothers who liked playing nasty tricks).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> You might try classical - Mozart and Vivaldi concertos have worked well for me. Also some techno has no words, try the TranceGlobalNation cds, the first one was the best. I like these in particular because the music is upbeat, which seems to help me keep going. Note that when you _really_ concentrate, even without words music can be distracting; sometimes a fan, or fan-forced heater in winter, is just the thing for white noise to help close out the world.

</comment><comment><USER8> As a European, I don't have much trouble with most of the music since my brain doesn't recognize English words so easily.

I strongly recommend some Finnish songs. They have powerful voices and pretty strong instruments with roots to classical styles, but with a metal twist. It might be your cup of tea as well.

The point is, do not necessarily avoid human voice as long as it's not your primary language.

<comment><USER9> There's always Finntroll, who do most of their vocals in Swedish.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I recommend the following (mostly instrumental) styles - all of them works really well for me:

* Neoclassical (Arcana, Ophelia's Dream)

* Post-Rock (God Is an Astronaut, Explosions in the Sky, Mono)

* Shoegaze / Dream Pop (Beach House, Cocteau Twins)

* Nu-Jazz (Parov Stelar, The Kilimanjaro Darkjazz Essamble)

* Dark Ambient (Lustmord, Desiderii Marginis, Sephiroth)

</comment><comment><USER11> If you're into the BPM-heavy electronic stuff, I can recommend Kniteforce Revolution with DJ Luna-C. Mostly Hardcore, Breakbeat, DnB, Jungle. For me, some tracks really have shivers/goose bumps potential.

<http://www.kniteforcerevolution.com/music/mixes>

</comment><comment><USER12> Classical, electronica, and soundtracks all make excellent programming music. Grooveshark provides ample quantities of all three.

I've been on a dusbstep kick lately. Heavy bass and fast beats tend to be great for getting into a groove and coding like a maniac.

</comment><comment><USER13> I have to seal myself from any disturbance with an exception for Vivaldi's four season music.

</comment><comment><USER9> Do you like classical music? If so, there are plenty of shoutcast streams out there with classical with no vocals. There's also plenty of electronic music (some techno, some trance, etc.) with no vocals, that you can find to listen to.

<comment><AUTHOR> Rock, some elctronica, and hip hop would be ideal. I'm more into indie rock, stuff like company of thieves, band of skulls, the hush sound, jack's mannequin, etc. Although I can listen to some electronica like mgmt and can also listen to some hip hop.

<comment><USER14> Can't help with the rock/hip hop, but for electronica (and its ilk) I would recommend: soma.fm (or, apparently, somafm.com, now.)

(For example, the "cliqhop/idm" shoutcast stream is what I use when I need non-distracting music in the background, for working.)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> If you like electronica, this is pretty good:

<http://feeds.feedburner.com/EdBangerRecords>

no vocals (or very little), never enough to distract.

</comment><comment><USER16> Pandora has classical stations. I've also setup some channels such as Howard Shore and Nobou Uematsu.

</comment><comment><USER17> Try creating a Pandora station for artist Mozart or Bach.

</comment><comment><USER18> how about this: create a HN group on last.fm, use it while working, and everyone can all refer to that instead of these threads popping up every 3-6 months.</comment>


Ask HN: Does disabling cookies save battery? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> Disabling them can waste time as you get to the portal and have to progress through pages to your landing page. Cookies are supposed to take you there by recalling where you left off. Misuse of cookies? yes, lots of thangs... [https://www.google.com/search?q=Misuse+of+cookies&oq=Misuse+...](https://www.google.com/search?q=Misuse+of+cookies&oq=Misuse+of+cookies&aqs=chrome..69i57&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8)

</comment><comment><USER3> Not likely. More useful would be researching the advanced power management capabilities of your device (BIOS / Firmware settings, OS settings)

Blocking ads and other 3rd party content can reduce power consumption a little, as well as save bandwidth if you are on a metered data plan. Closing all apps not in use rather than letting them idle in the background can also reduce power consumption a little bit.

</comment><comment><USER4> I'm using an extension with FF which claims to reduce the number of requests the browser makes for `extra' files and reduces your online tracking. Might be useful?

[https://addons.mozilla.org/en- US/firefox/addon/decentraleyes...](https://addons.mozilla.org/en- US/firefox/addon/decentraleyes/)

</comment><comment><USER5> If so, it would be such a minuscule amount that it simply doesn't matter.

</comment><comment><USER6> Blocking ads and trackers certainly does, probably 2X time on a full charge</comment>


US Senators ignore unintended consequences of criminalizing embedding videos - <AUTHOR> http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20110616/16480114722/senators-unconcerned-about-massive-unintended-consequences-criminalizing-people-embedding-youtube-videos.shtml <comment><USER2> Is it just me, or are we reaching the point where every other day there's a major news story about the security state and the continued criminalizing of civil matters? You could almost devote a website to it. Lots of new material.

What it looks like is that we've reached the point with the legal system that the trick is to make huge swaths of behavior illegal, then selectively enforce the law. This is basically like having no law at all, only instead of a central ruler we distribute it out to thousands of various prosecutors (and their associated political parties.)

I don't want to be all "the sky is falling" but heck if I can see where we can continue like this for a lot longer.

<comment><USER3> No it's not just you. It just seems the majority of the people have lost sight of the fact that Freedom is not free.

<comment><USER4> Arg, I hate that phrase. It may cost you something to protect your freedom from those who would take it, but the freedom itself does not have any inherent cost. Secondly, I hear that phrase being used to justify all sorts of things that I consider to be impinging on my freedom rather than increasing it, such as using my tax dollars to wage wars against countries that are not actually threatening my freedom at all.

<comment><USER3> I believe everyone has taken my comment the wrong way. When I say Freedom isn't free I absolutely do not mean we have to give up our rights to remain free. I mean we have to fight for our right to remain free!

<comment><USER5> And that was, if I recall correctly, the original intent of that message when it was said, far back in the day.

<comment><USER6> I was just today thinking about how so many sayings, like _a few bad apples_ , reverse their meaning in a generation or few. References don't survive and witticisms are taken out of context.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I just called John Cornyn's Washington office at 202-224-2934 and talked to an aide about S. 978 because I live in Texas.

He explained a few details of the bill to me like how it only applies when the economic value of the public video streaming is above $2500. I asked if this would include a blogger who makes more than $2500 from ads on his blog and he said yes. Then I gave an example of a blogger embedding a YouTube video which is copyrighted in a blog post, even if the blogger removes the video after finding out it is copyrighted, to which he just said "OK, I will notify John Cornyn".

I tried my best to express my concern that millions of people including myself could be charged with a felony if this bill gets passed, but I don't think my effort will work. I don't think the people passing this bill, like my Texas senator John Cornyn, can see the dangers in making it illegal to embed videos. Maybe they just don't care because they don't use the internet the same way younger / technology efficient people use it?

<comment><USER8> They don't care because they haven't heard the other side of the story, nobody's employing lobbyists to defend medium-time bloggers.

Moreover, many senators and congressmen, especially Cornyn, have determined that "capitalism" means "support entrenched business interests through favorable legislation" rather than all that hooplah about competition we learned in school.

<comment><USER9> I liked how the Economist put it (that was about GW Bush): "Being business- friendly is not the same as being market-friendly."

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I see only one commenter who has clearly read the bill, looked up the sections of the USC that it modifies, and has tried based on that to start discussing what the bill actually does and its actual contents, instead of the largely made-up stuff based on third hand sources that most people want to discuss.

He's getting voted way down.

Stop doing that, please. The end result of that kind of down voting is to discourage people from putting research into the comments, and the overall quality of discussion goes down.

</comment><comment><USER11> US Senators ignore the unintended consequences of criminalizing _everything_.

</comment><comment><USER12> John Cornyn is an unmitigated disaster. It's unfortunate that the TX Democratic party has a tenth of a snowball's chance in hell of ousting him.

This is yet another reason we _need_ term limits. Career politicians and bureaucrats are massive facilitators of regulatory capture.

<comment><USER13> Do term limits help or hinder? After all, if we had term limits then the average congressman would need to go off and find a new job once he's finished in congress. And there's no shortage of folks (whether companies, unions, NGOs, foreign governments, or any ol' well-funded group you like) who'd just _love_ to give cushy well-paid jobs to former congressmen who had been suitably sympathetic to their interests during their time in congress.

<comment><USER14> More churn in Congress would decrease the value of any one congressperson to private industry, and would also reduce the tendency of members of Congress to amass large numbers of markers that they call in later.

It would also change the entire dynamic of Congress, to be less of a club and more of a transitional job, people coming from some other job -- some of them perhaps even hoping to do the right thing regardless of political fallout -- and then disappearing from the public stage and moving on to another stage their lives, rather than turning elected service into their lives.

A seminal paper on this subject from 1968, The Institutionalization of the U.S. House of Representatives, by Nelson Polsby: <http://crespin.myweb.uga.edu/polsby.pdf>

<comment><USER15> 1968 was a long time ago. Term limits have been implemented all over the place. In reality, it means that politicians stop being responsible for their actions, and you get white elephant projects and unusually brazen bribery.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> The unintended consequences are often the point of the law. By being "unintended", the crafters of the law creates a small intellectual barrier to understanding the ramifications of the law that perhaps half the population fail to overcome. This is enough to get just about anything through without considerable widespread public opposition.

<comment><USER17> Bingo. The MAFIAA wants to criminalize any sharing of content unless they stamp it with their blessing.

This law basically kills youtube and ad-supported blogging.

I'm surprised Google isn't all up in arms over this, two potential sources of revenue are greatly impacted by this legislation.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> The thing about unintended consequences is that law enforcement will often use them to get what they otherwise cannot get. If you're investigating a group of people on Offense A but can't gather enough evidence to make an arrest and charge, you can arrest them on anything else you can stick them with, and suddenly they're in your control and potentially more pliable.

</comment><comment><USER19> Part of the solution to the problem is we need more tech savy people working on capitol hill--party preferences regardless. The federal government usually lags several years behind the industry standards for information technology and the people writing or reviewing proposed policies for technology regulation are much more likely to have a BA in Government or Poli Sci than a BS in engineering or CS.

If I go to a friends' house and watch a movie and that movie happened to be pirated (and I was not aware) could the law logically be extended so the government could arrest me for viewing pirated content even if I didn't know it was pirated? Or what about the "viral" video defense where companies will release promos or "restricted" content under false names to drum up interest in a product. I could see a defense attorney arguing the uploading account could be used by someone in __AA industries to create interest in a product and there was no way their client could have known.

</comment><comment><USER20> One man's unintended consequence is another man's tool in the power-(ab)using chest. What makes you think the effects are unintended?

<comment><USER8> Depends on who's doing the intending.

The companies hiring the lobbyists know exactly what they're doing.

The lobbyists are too blinded by dreams of cocktail party cachet to care what they're doing (on this or anything).

And the legislators have only heard one side of the story. They're too busy dialing for dollars most of the time to actually read up on this stuff.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> "potentially putting people in jail for embedding YouTube videos or just putting up YouTube lip synching videos. "

Sounds like FUD

If you read the amendment here <http://thomas.gov/cgi-bin/query/z?c112:S.978>:

It updates this [http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/718/usc_sec_18_00002319---...](http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/718/usc_sec_18_00002319 ----000-.html)

Which references this [http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/html/uscode17/usc_sec_17_0...](http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/html/uscode17/usc_sec_17_00000506 ----000-.html#a_1_A)

which then says the following

(A) for purposes of commercial advantage or private financial gain;

(B) by the reproduction or distribution, including by electronic means, during any 180–day period, of 1 or more copies or phonorecords of 1 or more copyrighted works, which have a total retail value of more than $1,000; or

(C) by the distribution of a work being prepared for commercial distribution, by making it available on a computer network accessible to members of the public, if such person knew or should have known that the work was intended for commercial distribution.

Basically, if you don't profit from it, you're cool so YouTube is safe.

<comment><USER8> B) and C) are basically "It's on the internet and a studio paid for its production". So they're always true.

Now we only need an argument that you were doing it for private financial gain, to satisfy A). If you have adwords on the blog you're embedding the youtube video on? Sounds like a felony to me.

The word "felony" should really be reserved for crimes that hurt people.

<comment><USER21> "The word "felony" should really be reserved for crimes that hurt people."

Oh, I agree and don't agree with the law. Just stating that it's not as overreaching as stated by the linked article.

I do not know much about the law I believe this comes down to interpretation by a judge which I hope will use their best judgement. I know there are cases where judges have been ignorant but that's why we have an appeals process.

I'm certain that if court rooms are filled with bloggers embedding videos that these will either be thrown out in most cases or the law will be altered.

I'm more worried about letters from lawyers to bloggers and others trying to bully them around with this law. The lawyers may know they can't win but may be able to scare someone enough to cough up cash to not go to court.

Personally, I'd like an anti-bullying law to prevent companies from sending templated emails for profit.

<comment><USER9> My trust in the courts to do the right thing went out with Eldred vs Ashcroft. And there's no appealing that one.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> This may be a silly (& uninformed) question, but are there any strong lobbyists that are representing the interest of us hackers?

I guess we have the EFF, but what's the power structure look like? Are the odds stacked against us?

(NB: I use the term "us" loosely to refer to the common ideals found often on HN)

</comment><comment><USER23> Just one more way the feds can go after a group of people they don't like. It is like all of the mobsters getting charged with tax evasion instead of their actual (if any...) crimes. The same will hold true in the future: XYZ leader of ABC "radical" environmental group was put in jail because...he/she had a parody video mocking Exxon on their website.

</comment><comment><USER24> This is getting ridiculous. So it looks like eventually the internet will be colonized and taken over by the government soon enough. Where is our next frontier for freedom of speech, open data, and endless cat videos? The internet is supposed to be free and unhinged.

</comment><comment><USER25> Authoritarianism + Campaign Contributions make for a lousy cocktail.</comment>


Pachelbel Train Horn – Prague Main Railway Station - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cD3QlR98--A&feature=youtu.be <comment><USER2> I don't know why, but this video totally captured my dog's attention. And she's never even seen a train before.</comment>