34 little POS machines - <AUTHOR> http://svedic.org/philosophy/34-little-pos-machines <comment><USER2> It would have been more interesting to examine why other locations _don 't_ see such a proliferation of card readers or ATMs. That might not have made such a fiery match for the burning of "extreme libertarian" strawmen (because libertarian paradise Croatia), but it would have been plausibly constructive rather than simply polarizing.

<comment><USER3> The real questions here are why is this so rare in other places and why did it happen in Croatia? I wish the article had asked those questions.

<comment><USER4> The example with ATMs happens in a lot of places I've been but I'll just list Japan as the most extreme example.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Wow there's a great irony in that you used the NYC Subway system as an example. When there were three different independent companies they competed hard for customer's business, provide punctual service and fare increases were generally flat or at least in line with inflation. Now that the Subway is owned by the city it is a monopoly with large fare increases every two years, increasingly piss poor service, permanent budget problems, shadowy book keeping, and the victim of all kinds of politics and cronyism that were completely unknown when the system existed as private run entities. The NYC Subway is an example of an absurdity that is equivalent to the 42 different POS devices in that picture not a contrast to it.

<comment><USER6> Which mass transit systems outperform NYC's?

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Many POS machines lately have a bank selection screen at the start. although banks are pretty interconnected, they have ridiculous fee differences between their cards and other banks'.

</comment><comment><USER8> What a terrible article, full of pseudoscience and pseudohistory.

Businesses charging for access to their networks has absolutely nothing to do with the endowment effect. There isn't some sort of "my network is better than yours" ego trip going on just because someone charges you to use their network. Their networks are products; they have infrastructure, maintenance, marketing, advertising. You don't give away your products for free, why should they? And if the expectation was that they should give away their network for free, who would ever care to build the network? Why incur those costs if you can just rely on someone else to build it for you?

Capitalist businesses have totally overcome this problem (despite any possible "my network is better than yours" biases) in many markets, most notable internet infrastructure. You can physically see it in action at Internet Exchange Points, where networks of different sizes and values meet together to exchange access to each other's networks.

My bank lets me use any ATM anywhere in the world without an ATM fee. They do this by refunding any ATM fees that other banks may charge. Why would they do this? Because then they don't have to build and maintain a network of ATMs, and they have happier customers because of it.

The subway example ignores vast swathes of actual history, starting with the very fact that the IND lines didn't exist for 30 years until after the turn of the century. And yes, their networks' tunnels were incompatible between lines, but then again, so are the networks of every other subway of the era, even the ones built by governments. And their demise and eventual merger had nothing to do with market friction, but rather something far less capitalist: government imposed price ceilings. Both companies experienced cost inflation, just like every other company in the US during those years, but neither was allowed to charge more than their Nickel Fare. The companies did what every other company does when they see their margins erode due to price caps: they stopped investing, stopped maintaining, and stopped caring about what their customers thought about it. They couldn't compete with each other on the value of their service, so they accepted their market share and declined together. Once people got fed up with crappy providers for subway service, they decided to go the public option with their own government funded line to bring some competition...which is how the IND line actually came into existence. Unsurprisingly, they also couldn't compete on a Nickel Fare, and all of the companies were forced into merger less than a decade later.

Unfortunately, in this quest to malign capitalism for the merger of three independent subway lines, the author forgets to mention the biggest benefit of that approach: Nobody paid a cent in taxes to build the second largest subway system in the world at the time.

</comment><comment><USER9> The account of what's going on with the POS machines doesn't make economic sense. If it was true, it would be easy for one bank to capture most of the market simply by charging more reasonable POS fees. I think it's much more likely that it's the cardholder's bank that's overcharging, not the POS's.

</comment><comment><USER10> I wish things like square and paypal solves this problem.

<comment><USER11> Speaking from direct experience, both Square and PayPal are _terrible_ for accepting cards. I have a consulting client who wants to pay me with the company AmEx, I have yet to do a transaction that doesn't get flagged or held or otherwise interfered with. Horrible companies, with slow, uncaring, unresponsive customer service.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Must be nice to check out 34 customers at a time though, right?

I kid.

Fragmentation is a huge issue in the retail industry. I've heard of companies that have different payroll staffers for different states, some that have different phones for different states because of fees, etc etc.

It also seems like there might be potential for a POS device that could 'spoof' other devices, to avoid fees and such. Surely it's just sending out certain headers to identify itself, right?

<comment><USER13> > It also seems like there might be potential for a POS device that could > 'spoof' other devices, to avoid fees and such. Surely it's just sending out > certain headers to identify itself, right?

Nope. PoS CC/DC terminals have quite sophisticated HSMs these days. Each device has a unique set of key pairs.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Do you feel proud of the product/project that you are working on? Why? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> Yes. The business owner _listens_ to feedback and can adapt his ideas, but most importantly he not just accepts that customer information/privacy matters are a legal hurdle, he embraces the idea that the service he will offer is the product, not the users data. He is also using this privacy-positive approach as a as a way to stand out from his established competitors.</comment>


Things customers hate - <AUTHOR> http://amazingserviceguy.com/2808/7-things-customers-hate/

<comment><USER2> "Keep your personal business to yourself, unless the customer asks about it." Sounds like a really good idea. He should have followed it himself.

<comment><AUTHOR> You too.</comment></comment>


Idiot-proofing is for Idiots - <AUTHOR> http://37signals.com/svn/posts/3415-idiot-proofing-is-for-idiots

<comment><USER2> The analogies on this post are strange, and the title is a little much. He's essentially arguing that well-intentioned design through technological advancements are hindering our growth and we should limit such innovation to ensure that there's still problems for us to solve and feel frustration by. But every solution introduces another problem, and I think we'd be idiots to stagnate growth over the assumption that people will learn faster if they have to jump the same hurdles as everyone else.

</comment><comment><USER3> At least I don't fully agree. I think sometimes most of us look like idiots, at least if we don't prepare.

Examples of when idiot-proofing saves otherwise smart engineers:

      * really early in the morning (I use Sleep as Droid with a QR code downstairs. Works wonders. IQ often crawls above 70 before I reach downstairs.)
      * in an emergency.
      * car driving. Sooner or later most of us are idiots behind a steering wheel.</comment>


Google: 80% of news organisations are targeted by state hackers - <AUTHOR> http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/mar/28/google-news-organisations-targeted-state-hackers

<comment><USER2> It sucks that I see news like this all the time and realize that my own government has probably known about and participated in these activities, yet I'm finding it out through corporate media/organization that have probably known for a while and still know things that they're not telling us. I've pretty much given up all hope in the US government (or just about any government) to fix its self without some sort of major upheaval.

The digital age came too fast for our politics to keep up and now the age of automation is soon to sweep through, along with a lot of other major advancements when it comes to interacting with digitized goods and services. Whoever controls the main communications vector in the future will be controlling reality, and no one is planning for it.

I believe the transition from the reality we know today to a reality based around augmentation is going to happen extremely swiftly and there wont be time to make fair laws (and figure out what laws we need to make), and the laws that are made will be many, and they'll be hard for the average user to understand, and they'll be authored by legal representatives hired by corporate institutions.

What we really need is a digital bill of rights written by and for the people, and rather than corporations and web sites shoving their TOS down our throats, they should be adhering to _our_ TOS.

It's unfortunate.

<comment><USER3> _Whoever controls the main communications vector in the future will be controlling reality, and no one is planning for it._

Except maybe Facebook, by buying Oculus.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> If China is behind this, then they are committing a horrible crime that no free society can stand for, and the entire western world must band together to fight this menace.

If the US government is behind this, the best thing to do is form a commission to prove that no wrong doing has been done, and make sure these two "researchers" are punished as severely as extra-legally possible.

<comment><USER5> I know you're being sarcastic, but it's upsetting that people are capable of having this attitude. There is no excuse that can ameliorate this behavior in the name of democracy or any other alleged moral acumen the propaganda machine spits out. It strictly amoral to attack freedom of the press, which is why we have so many protections in place, whether genuine or artificial, to prevent just that.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> It's a tricky situation. Depending on what news is released you either get compromised by state hackers from the axis of evil or by state spies from the very hands of the PRISM companies.

</comment><comment><USER7> State hackers really disgust me. Attacking anything or anyone that moves, be that friendly or foe, external or internal. They have no accountability, and no regards for potential harm to innocents.

Sure, history is full of state saboteurs, but it was in war time, not used to target your own population, allies, or third parties. They were acts of war, not to be taken lightly.

</comment><comment><USER8> This is why it is the responsibility of Internet services to provide tools that make it simple to communicate and store data securely, for everyone, all the time. US providers need to do this to regain trust. But, in reality, state and criminal attack threats make tools for security a universal requirement.

</comment><comment><USER9> I am fairly sure that our friends at NSA-GCHQ-Corp. would like it if emails from Ms. Whistle Blower were toned down a bit with certain names and facts removed. Or, even better, if Ms. Whistle Blower just ended up 'hell-banned', to never get a reply from anyone at The Guardian's news desk.

However this article implies that some imaginably rogue North Korean Chinese- Iranian hacker-dude from the Syrian Whatever Army is trying to plant Stuxnet grade virii on journalists MacBooks at the behest of Osama bin Laden.</comment>


Show HN: Easier code reviews by collapse/expand diffs in pull requests - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/kamranahmedse/github-diffs/blob/master/README.md <comment><USER2> What problem does this solve? Isn't the point of code review just to see all changes?</comment>


Using Redis (or Memcached) as a buffer for SQL resulting in near-realtime stats - <AUTHOR> http://cd34.com/blog/scalability/using-redis-or-memcached-as-a-buffer-for-sql-resulting-in-near-realtime-stats/

<comment><USER2> Removed the redirect that bounced news.yc visitors - I guess my site isn't banned anymore. Admins, you can remove the post if my domain should still be banned and your filters didn't catch it.</comment>


Forecast is a new, gorgeous weather service from team that made Dark Sky - <AUTHOR> http://thenextweb.com/apps/2013/03/26/forecast-launches-as-a-new-gorgeous-weather-service-and-api-from-the-team-behind-dark-sky/?fromcat=all

<comment><USER2> Lovely. Are the developers around? My initial thoughts:

\- The overall organization is good.

\- Showing temperatures as shifting bars is very informative.

\- The maps are beautiful. (The whole thing is beautiful, actually.)

\- But what do the colors mean?

\- Also, I want to click and drag the map. A lot.

\- The F/C button is good, but I had to look for it, to be clear on what the temperature scale was. It would be good to indicate in the temperature itself which scale is being used. E.g., you could put a little "F" or "C" after it.

\- Is there a more visual way of expressing cloud cover and precipitation forecasts? Maybe something roughly along the lines of the temperature bars? Or at least make the cloud icon darker for more clouds ....</comment>


One stock analyst says Tesla will fail like Internet groceries - <AUTHOR> http://green.autoblog.com/2010/08/19/one-stock-analyst-says-tesla-will-fail-like-internet-groceries/ <comment><USER2> Elon musk may lose a lot of money if he doesn't sell off soon. He seems to be thinking the IT/Tech model of something new giving a dominating advantage will work in the automotive market. But, I don't think that model is so easily transferable to the auto industry.

There are lots of other things that are required to make it successful in the car market. Either they need to be

1) super exotic like Pagani or McLaren ( many other super exotics couldn't survive on their own either - Ferrari, Lambo, Bugatti, Lotus) or 2) have massive multiple advantages like economies of scale, manufacturing excellence, marketing and distribution clout, supplier clout, high technology that can be produced at high quality and with margins.

Tesla was super exotic when it started off(not in looks though). Too bad for him there is massive interest in this field and every major company, not to mention many Chinese companies are entering into this field. Day by day, Tesla's is losing its "exotic" tag.

I still get a chuckle thinking about this, 4 years ago Carlos Ghosn of Nissan/Renault was lambasting electrics/Hybrids. Now they have the Leaf almost ready for sale.

And Tesla does not have and cannot gain the other advantages fast enough to give themselves a sustainable advantage.

All the giants, Toyota, MB, etc can put in as much as Tesla overall spending, on just developing this technology each year, leverage their other advantages and get a car out cheaper, faster and better quality the moment there is a sustainable market. And they are already doing it.

Imho, Tesla is just dishing out free marketing for these other companies.

</comment><comment><USER3> I wonder how correlated Tesla stock price will be with gasoline prices. I could see a steep rise in P/E as a result of a spike in fuel prices or a short term supply disruption.

It is too soon to gather interesting data as fuel prices haven't had a seasonal change since the IPO, but I'll keep this in the stack of "things that would be good to check."</comment>


A Spreadsheet Way of Knowledge (1984) - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/backchannel/a-spreadsheet-way-of-knowledge-8de60af7146e <comment><USER2> Great quote about how spreadsheets where empowering:

 _The company's chief financial officer wanted certain information, and his top "experts" had difficulty providing it. So one weekend he brought an Apple computer and a copy of VisiCalc home with him. Monday morning, he called his people in and showed them how he had gotten the information he had been clamoring for. "With one swipe of the diskette, he cut them off at the knees." Stein said. "He out-teched them. His experts! He'd cut the chain. The following week, they all came down to learn VisiCalc – fast."_

That's the kind of disruptive technonology that'll get you sales. Making things done, and having Cx0s demanding your product.

</comment><comment><USER3> This is a really great article. This part is so good:

 _The spreadsheet embodies, embraces, that end, and ultimately serves to reinforce it. As Marshall McLuhan observed, "We shape our tools and thereafter our tools shape us." The spreadsheet is a tool, and it is also a world view — reality by the numbers. If the perceptions of those who play a large part in shaping our world are shaped by spreadsheets, it is important that all of us understand what this tool can and cannot do._

Steve Sinofsky ([http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steven_Sinofsky](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steven_Sinofsky)) made a similar point on HN yesterday:

 _Second, people tend to underestimate the way that new tools, as ineffective as they are, drive changes in the very definition of work. Said another way, people forget that tools can also define the work and jobs people have. It isn 't like work was always "mail around a 10MB presentation before the meeting". In fact a long time ago meeting agendas were typed out in courier by a typist -- that job was defined by the Selectric. The tools that created presentations, attachments, and follow up email defined a style of working. While we're reading all this, the exponential rise of mobile is changing what it means to work--to go to a meeting, to collaborate, to decide, to create, etc._

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8525444](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8525444)

</comment><comment><USER4> This is a good read, and far from a one-sided paean of praise for the spreadsheet. Lots of discussion of pitfalls.

This is a fun quote:

 _Already, the spreadsheet has redefined the nature of some jobs; to be an accountant in the age of spreadsheet program is — well, almost sexy._

<comment><USER5> As an accountant, sexy is not how I feel. I think the right word is sexworker... I kid.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> _Stockman's sleight of hand was fairly easy to discern. In 1981, electronic spreadsheets were just coming into their own, and the kind of sophisticated modeling Stockman did was still done chiefly on mainframe computers. The output he was working with wasn't in the now-familiar spreadsheet format; instead, the formulas appeared in one place and the results in another. You could see what you were getting. That cannot be said of electronic spreadsheets, which don't display the formulas that govern their calculations._

This is the real double-edged sword of spreadsheets. They simultaneously surface data, logic and presentation. This enables a very fluid modelling process because you can see everything that's happening... at first. Eventually these things always become intractable hairballs, dumped on the desk of the office "Spreadsheet Mechanic" for critical repair. Ugh.

Excel's Data Tables, ODBC connectivity and named ranges help with this. It gives you have some assurance that the raw data comes from a Source Of Truth and hasn't been totally borked. Unfortunately, most users (that I have worked with) don't understand how to use these features properly, leading to a multitude of math crimes.

</comment><comment><USER7> Everytime I read these accounts of breakthroughs I'm baffled by how everything looks different on hindsight:

 _Bricklin's teachers at Harvard thought he was wasting his time: why would a manager want to do a spreadsheet on one of those "toy" computers?_

or the one about the origins of the telephone:

 _The invention is practically worthless. Don 't through your money away!_

<comment><USER8> After the spreadsheets were going full steam you often heard or read how people scoffed at why anyone would want to play games on a business machine. Most people played on their Atari or Commodore consoles not on an expensive "IBM Compatible PC".

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I think, spreadsheet is at least to calculation what word processors are to writing.

<comment><USER10> Not just calculation, but abstract data comprehension. It's a fair bit more flexible than the word processor in this analogy.

<comment><USER9> Yes, I think similar. That's the reason, I wrote "at least".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> This article points out again, that just in writing programs or defining a process for an artificial intelligence processor, the knowledge put into the system influences the view of the system.

Creating a spreadsheet model is similar to creating a Knowledge Representation of a financial or mathematical system. The interdependencies within the spreadsheet mimic variables whose values are tied together by causation.

Does anyone know if there is a spreadsheet interface for some of the CLP or Prolog programming systems?

</comment><comment><USER12> Reading this delightful blast in the past, made me realize how much I miss Borland's Quattro Pro editable keyboard macros, before becoming defanged by a competitor, Lotus?

That was a long time ago, Open Office still does not have this -- since I last looked. Think if emacs lost its elisp editable recording keyboard macros for some reason, what a loss. This is evidence progress is not monotonic increasing.

</comment><comment><USER10> It is incredible how much software is written solely to "do better than a spreadsheet." And how much fails at it.

Great article.</comment>


World's Fastest Broadband at $20 Per Home - <AUTHOR> http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/04/03/the-cost-to-offer-the-worlds-fastest-broadband-20-per-home/ <comment><USER3> Unfortunately, the article completely ignores the geographic realities or the United States and Japan.

First, Japan's population density is orders of magnitude greater than that of the United States. It's going to cost less to deliver high-speed internet when people live closer together. Likewise, Japan is a smaller country. That 160Mbps is not the speed you're going to get traveling over underseas cables to North America. That's the speed you'll get for servers located within Japan.

Backbone connections are going to cost more to create in the United States simply because Americans are as likely to access a server across the continent as they are within 100 miles of them. Where you can essentially create a backbone in Japan with a under 1,000mi of fiber, in the US you'd need 20x that amount or more.

Those are stark differences. I mean, it wouldn't be too hard for an ISP to provide faster connectivity from Boston to Philly where populations are dense for sites hosted in that area, but that wouldn't be helpful to users - <USER2> most of the time I'm not connecting to servers hosted within eastern Mass, RI, CT, the NYC metro area or Jersey. In fact, I'd say that most of the time I'm connecting to Texas or California.

Can we stop comparing Apples and Oranges? The US can never have broadband like Japan and it's not because of corporations or government or any sort of conspiracy. Maybe those things could offer _marginal_ improvements (seeing our service go from 6Mbps to 10-15Mbps), but we simply won't have service like Japan will since we don't locate ourselves close to the servers we want to access or to each other.

<comment><USER4> This argument is complete BS.

Running fiber lines between large cities is cheap; there's far more bandwidth there than anyone could possibly need at the moment. The main cost is the last mile of connection.

And the last mile of connection is going to cost you pretty much the exact same thing in New York City as in Tokyo. There is absolutely no technical justification of any sort for the United States' backwards internet situation, at least in regards to urban areas.

<comment><USER5> I'd agree with you for most places in the US vs most places in Japan, but NYC vs Tokyo may or may not be an apt comparison. Putting any lines at all in NYC is a huge hassle. There is basically no clear map of the underground areas. Try getting some quality dedicated lines put in in NYC, it sucks. I can't comment on Tokyo, but it would be a lot easier to run a startup in the suburbs simply for ISP reasons if only the talent would agree (damn fickle trendy programmers).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> "The industry is worried that by offering 100 Mbps, they are opening Pandora's box, he said. Everyone will be able to get video on the Internet" \- WTF? This really pisses me off!

<comment><USER4> This is because cable companies are worried that streaming video will put their VOD services out of business. Hence many companies trying to add caps to their bandwidth. When they tell you it's because of 1% of users using the most bandwidth, they're lying; it's because they want users paying for VOD content.

This is understandable, as VOD is by far their most profitable business segment on a %-basis (I work for an IPTV company). Thus, they are scared to death by the concept of decent internet service--it'll reduce their profit margins.

<comment><USER7> Really? We haven't slipped through a hole in the space-time continuum and been magically transported back to 2003?

There _will_ be decent internet service. Anybody whose business model depends on internet access sucking forever needs to find a new source of income, fast.

<comment><USER8> Whenever this comes up on HN, my response is that just because it is hopeless having a business model that depends on copyright (crappy internet), doesn't mean they don't benefit from prolonging the process.

The days of mature consumer technologies depending on Broadband speeds you get in S. Korea are a ways away. How many people are still not connected to the internet at all? How many people have no broadband at all?

If they can add 1 or 2 or 5 or 10 years to the point where youtube is what people connect to their big TV, they make a lot of money.

It's sort of like saying a business model that requires U2 to stay popular is not sustainable. Of course not. But it doesn't mean you should give up.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Did I miss it, or did that article not explain how it somehow cost $600 more per American home to upgrade here than in Japan? They touched on competition, but it seemed like that was only for the final service, not necessarily for the supplies. I thought maybe homes were more compacted so it was easier to upgrade multiple homes.

<comment><USER10> I would assume that the combination of denser residentials and fewer suburbs in Japan has everything to do with the cost difference. When you can upgrade 10 homes in Japan with the same space of 1 home in the US, and there are no sprawling suburbs to lay long runs of cable, it's easy to grasp that per- person price gap.

That's still no excuse for the floundering broadband speeds in this country. I live in Rochester, NY, where Time Warner announced that on top of the "10Mbps" that I never get as it is, they'll be introducing capped plans, with a _maximum_ cap of only 40GB! And I _can't_ just take my money elsewhere, because the city granted them a monopoly; my only other options are horrible DSL that has a 25GB cap, ClearWire broadband at 1/10 the speed I have now, or dial-up. There's absolutely no competition!

It's no wonder Time Warner chose my town for second-round "evaluations"; nobody can leave Time Warner because of this policy, so _of course_ they'll "find" that people are "happy" with the caps. It disgusts me!

<comment><USER11> _my only other options are horrible DSL that has a 25GB cap_

I don't think this is true. If you can get a loop to your house, you can get some sort of business DSL plan, which definitely won't have a cap. I use Speakeasy for this. Expensive, but worth it because I have an unlimited pipe that I can use for whatever I want, and they have actual people (who are native speakers of English) that I can call when something goes wrong.

Anyway, you aren't looking hard enough, or you aren't willing to pay for more than 40G a month.

<comment><USER10> I live in an apartment. I have no other options...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Why is it that in Silicon Valley, the fastest consumer connection that I can get is 12Mpbs? And that costs me $60 a month.

Sharpen the pitchforks and light the torches.

<comment><USER13> Comcast recently rolled out (last month) 50 Mbps down / 5 Mbps up, they call it Extreme 50, it's $140/mo.

<comment><USER14> That's a joke in Japan, South Korea and Escandinavian Nations

<comment><USER15> I can't attest for South Korea and Scandinavian countries, but Japan's internet access was unbelievable when I was there for a week on vacation. From what I understand, they're working on getting 1GB of bandwidth to the home over there.

Meanwhile I see more Comcast commercials here telling me how good we have it, but no comparable service to back it up. Torches and pitchforks indeed.

<comment><USER14> FTTH, right? [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fiber_to_the_premises#Fiber_to_...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fiber_to_the_premises#Fiber_to_the_premises)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I would gladly pay the $100 to get my home upgraded. Doesn't it seem like individuals or even communities should be able to round up the money to pay for the upgrade themselves? It's basically like we are at the mercy of the cable/telcos until they decide it's cost effective for them to upgrade people. It's not like a hard drive where you can pay extra money to get something better, you have no options.

<comment><USER17> The $100 is probably an amortized number, assuming that your whole neighborhood gets upgraded. e.g. It costs $50,000 to upgrade your cable node which serves 500 customers. If only 50 people round up the money to pay for the upgrade they'll need $1,000 each, which isn't as palatable.

<comment><USER18> Amortize that $1000 over two years, though, and the upgrade costs less than $50/mo, which starts to sound reasonable again. If all 500 customers paid, it only takes a price increase of $5/month to pay off the upgrade in two years.

<comment><USER17> Yeah, I'm a believer in the concept of customer-owned broadband, but the ISPs are stuck in a model where they think they have to accept all the risk of upgrades.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


GCC: Will it optimize? - <AUTHOR> http://ridiculousfish.com/blog/posts/will-it-optimize.html

<comment><USER2> Substantial discussions from 3 weeks ago, and over a year ago:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3003841>

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1540567></comment>


Ask HN: Constant pain in my hands, any advice? - <AUTHOR> Since September I've been experiencing some mild but very uncomfortable pain in my hands, especially in the right one. It is becoming more and more painful to type and to hold a mouse. I'm very concerned because my hands are, with my eyes, my main working tools.
As anyone experienced this? What can I do?
When I look it up online, I find things about Carpal Tunnel Syndrome, but there doesn't seem to be anything actually useful to do to make this go away besides maybe getting an operation (that feels extreme). <comment><USER2> See a doctor, get a referral to an ergonomic specialist.

Immediate action: try wearing a wrist brace, at least on the right hand. This will make a lot of activities difficult to do. That is the point.

In 1993 I went on a multi–night bender writing a gopher server that could also speak HTTP, using a keyboard and computer that weren't mine which didn't have a wrist rest. At the end of the bender I had a working gopher server, but my wrist had swollen so badly I couldn't type anymore (while the bones of my hand ached badly, the surface skin was numb). It took six months of working with a wrist brace to undo the damage and to this day it resurfaces from time to time.

</comment><comment><USER3> If you catch it early enough, CTS can be handled by physical therapy. Go to an orthopedist.

Secondary: In some cases, reduced bloodflow can cause pain. Are you working in a place that has been notably colder since September? Perhaps wear a jacket while you work, and/or wear gloves when outside (smartphones have an unfortunate tendency to discourage glove use in weather that really does justify it).

</comment><comment><USER4> Really, stop looking up stuff online (except to find a specialist ASAP). That will just inflame your condition even more. But do find specialist, _right now_ , please. As in, call in sick to take a half or a full day off (just to find someone available and make an appointment) if you have to. That's what your sick days are _for_ , actually.

Better, try to see at least 2, ideally 3 specialists. (That's what I've found to be prudent for any condition substantially "tricky" \-- like potential nerve damage, for example). But definitely make sure to see someone as as soon as humanly and physically possible. Because that's how serious your situation is.

It isn't necessarily likely (so I don't want to sensationalize), but there's a significant chance that your condition can "tip" into a state such that the damage is essentially untreatable. Significant enough such that there's really no value proposition at all delaying action, any further.

</comment><comment><USER5> Things I've done to completely get rid of wrist pain:

\- use a Kinesis Advantage keyboard: works, but it's like, the wrist is still weak, and you can't use laptops (or mice?).

\- use a piano keyboard: play the piano regularly, and vigorously. This makes my problems go away _completely_. And then I stop playing, and... a few years later, I get the problem again. So I start playing regularly again, and the problem's gone again. By vigorously I mean playing etudes that push the limits of your muscular endurance. Somebody mentioned physical therapy, and I think this is an example of that.

Note that one symptom of my problems was a loss of grip strength.

I think that even for non-ergonomic keyboards, the choice of keyboard matters a lot -- some keyboards require less hand strain to reliably actuate the keys -- less precise movements. For example, the last two Vaio Z models were horrible, compared to, say, Thinkpads. And some cheapo office keyboard is worse than something with a clear actuation point (such as Cherry MX or Topre or a buckling spring keyboard). Basically, I think whatever key switch is easiest to use in cold weather is better than the others.

</comment><comment><USER6> [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12986759](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12986759)

</comment><comment><USER7> I had acute pain in my right hand last year - went to a doctor, wore a brace, now use wrist pads, and it went away.

So I second the advice of seeing a doctor.

The week with the brace was awful, but, as other posters mention, it's the point :) .

I do live in a country where I can have a week off for medical reasons and still get paid though.

</comment><comment><USER8> First recommendation: see a doctor. There can be many causes besides carpal tunnel.

</comment><comment><USER9> I agree with all the others that say to go see a doctor. If you don't know the actual cause, any treatments you try are much less likely to fix it...</comment>


Study of the effect of Vitamin D, Magnesium and Vitamin B12 on Covid-19 patients - <AUTHOR> https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.06.01.20112334v1 <comment><USER2> I wonder, when I see stories about studies about treating patients with basic nutrients and vitamins, if a root-cause to consider is that our standard diets are so deprived of essential vitamins and minerals that "treating" someone with what they have been missing causes the body to simply function the way it's supposed to. I haven't read the full study but if it takes into account what someone's diet was prior to this treatment as well as their vitamin and mineral levels (however that is measured) I think it would be more interesting to see how such a vitamin boost affects those who are vitamin starved versus those who were taking a "decent amount" of vitamins but where given a boost because of an illness. It just seems the more we learn in this field the more it shows us what we don't know.

<comment><USER3> You are right and it is no secret:

\- 40% of US Americans are B12 deficient [https://www.livekindly.co/b12-deficiency-genetic- makeup/#:~:...](https://www.livekindly.co/b12-deficiency-genetic- makeup/#:~:text=B12%20deficiency%20is%20often%20perceived,are%20deficient%20in%20this%20nutrient).

\- 42% are Vitamin D deficient: [https://www.cantonmercy.org/healthchat/42-percent-of- america...](https://www.cantonmercy.org/healthchat/42-percent-of-americans- are-vitamin-d- deficient/#:~:text=42%25%20Percent%20of%20Americans%20Are%20Vitamin%20D%20Deficient).

\- up to 50% are Magnesium deficient: [https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/02/180226122548.h...](https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/02/180226122548.htm)

\- 10 - 20% of women are iron deficient: [https://www.aafp.org/afp/2007/0301/p671.html#:~:text=The%20p...](https://www.aafp.org/afp/2007/0301/p671.html#:~:text=The%20prevalence%20of%20iron%20deficiency,a%20gastrointestinal%20cancer%20when%20evaluated).

My unscientific conclusion is that the vast majority of people world-wide probably suffer from at least one and probably more significant nutrient deficiency. With that we are wasting our "performance potential" and, less capitalistic, our "well-being potential". The lack of any of just those nutrients I looked up can cause anything from debilitating brain fog, over physical and mental deterioration to numerous physical ailments...

Yet for most of them, taking them in excess causes the exact same problem. If I was filthy rich I would get nutrient levels measured once a week. (-;

<comment><USER4> Presumably it's relatively easy for a lab to run a panel of tests on me and say "you're deficient in X, Y, Z; try eating more A B C; spend 30mins extra a week outside; drink less alcohol".

How easy is it too get such tests (in UK), I'm surprised we don't seem to have anything like this as part of our health system. I've had blood pressure and height/weight taken a couple of times (I'm middle aged). But that's about all wrt biological metrics, seems lackadaisical?

<comment><USER3> Just measuring those 4 costs 83€ in a laboratory in Vienna. And there are more measurements one should probably take! And you need to test them more than once to see if supplementation works and you are not getting too much.

That's not cheap...

<comment><USER5> We're talking an expense of somewhere around 1k total over a period of a few months. While not within everyone's reach (and if a single check is performed say yearly after initial alteration of your diet also an ongoing expense), it's far from an insurmountable cost. Especially considering this directly impacts your day-to-day well-being.

<comment><USER6> If shouldered by the individual, an extra $1k over a few months, plus however much it costs to keep re-testing, and the cost of supplements or better food to correct the deficiency, is a staggeringly insurmountable cost for the people who need it most—the poor.

As you say, this directly impacts day-to-day wellbeing. It's exactly the kind of thing that should, if it's even moderately effective, be provided free of charge for every human being.

<comment><USER5> I agree with you, but I must also admit it's not much of a concern if you live in a country with solid health insurance.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> The methodology mentions nothing about randomization so its unclear if there was any selection bias here.

If you look a table 2, the control group was on average 6 years older and had more co-morbidities. This suggests that there was some selection bias and that other undocumented factors could have greatly affected this experiment.

Doing multi-variate analysis with such a small sample size gives rise to huge uncertainties. In all, this study is only very weak evidence.

<comment><USER8> However, taking 3 vitamins is almost entirely harmless.

<comment><USER9> Many are toxic (vitamin D included) in unsuitable amounts, that's probably too strong of a statement.

<comment><USER10> The study mentions 1,000 IU D3 dosage. A quick google turns up a rough figure of 60,000 IU "daily for multiple months" can become toxic.

You're probably right, most things taken at 100x the normal dose for long period of time are toxic. (Water included)

<comment><USER11> The largest dosage of D3 I can find on Amazon is 5000 IU in a 240 capsule bottle. To take 60000 IU, you'd have to take a dozen capsules daily, getting a new bottle every 20 days, probably multiple times.

While possible, it does seem unlikely.

<comment><USER12> I'm currently taking 60K IU D3. The dosage is 1 capsule a week, for 8 weeks, and the capsules come 4 to a pack. This is followed by a maintenance dosage of 1 60k capsule once a month.

<comment><USER10> Is this to treat a medical condition?

I'm curious why an acute high dose would be preferable over a lower dose taken daily.

<comment><USER12> No obvious medical condition, other than a vit D serum level of 15 ng/mL. Depending on who you ask, that's a deficiency. I'm personally less convinced.

It's not quite an acute high dose. The body produces the equivalent of 10,000 IU per day in high sun exposure, so 60K per week tries to achieve that level. I believe the high dosage is simply convenience. The 2K IU daily dose is pretty common as well.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> N=43 (17 given vitamins vs 26 not)

Highlights:

"Significantly fewer DMB patients than controls required initiation of oxygen therapy subsequently throughout their hospitalization (17.6% vs 61.5%, P=0.006)."

"DMB combination in older COVID-19 patients was associated with a significant reduction in proportion of patients with clinical deterioration requiring oxygen support and/or intensive care support. This study supports further larger randomized control trials to ascertain the full benefit of DMB in ameliorating COVID-19 severity."

So while this is too small of a study to do anything but call for bigger studies, its additional evidence that vitamin deficiency may play a role in COVID-19 severity. Since taking a basic multi-vitamin is good anyway, it seems wise to do that.

<comment><USER13> > Since taking a basic multi-vitamin is good anyway....

Could you elaborate on that? I thought that taking vitamin supplements without a recommendation from a doctor is just a way to have very expensive piss. Most of the things that get in, are removed from the body without being absorbed.

<comment><USER14> If you're deficient in something, your body probably up-regulates absorption.

You can get higher quality vitamins with forms that are more easily absorbed, for example chelated magnesium instead of magnesium oxide.

That said, I thought the evidence actually pointed to higher all cause mortality in people who take vitamins.

<comment><USER15> If you have a study that shows higher all cause mortality please link it.

My hypothesis would be that healthy people don't take vitamins because they never saw the need, putting already sick people in the second category. I doubt that taking vitamins can actually do much harm in low doses.

<comment><USER14> I just Googled "vitamins lead to higher all cause mortality."

First result: [https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/10/111010173019.h...](https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/10/111010173019.htm)

>After adjustment, use of multivitamins, vitamin B6, folic acid, iron, magnesium, zinc and copper, were all associated with increased risk of death in the study population.

The top three links showed association between beta carotene supplementation and risk of death.

A little further down, a study showing "higher plasma concentrations of vitamin B12 were associated with a 25% increased adjusted risk of all-cause mortality per 1-SD increase" [https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/fullarticle...](https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/fullarticle/2758742)

>The use of multivitamins overall was associated with 2.4% increased absolute risk for death (hazard ratio [HR], 1.06; 95% confidence interval, 1.02 - 1.10).

[https://www.medscape.org/viewarticle/751462#:~:text=The%20us...](https://www.medscape.org/viewarticle/751462#:~:text=The%20use%20of%20multivitamins%20overall,substantially%20between%201986%20and%202004).

The conclusion I personally draw from all this is: don't take a multi vitamin. Don't take any vitamins unless I have a good reason like a tested deficiency. If I think I could benefit from a supplement then I try to increase it in my diet instead.

<comment><USER16> The risk of excessive iron is known and not new

If you read that link you'll see the findings for iron and calcium were replicated. (Not to mention this article is basically referencing a different article which is somewhere else, so we're missing the context)

The B12 issue, as the own article mentions, is not necessarily connected to a dietary excess consumption

> Participants within the highest quartile of vitamin B12 plasma > concentrations (>455.41 pg/mL) were more likely to be older and have higher > BMI and blood pressure.

<comment><USER14> >The risk of excessive iron is known and not new

OK so that's one mineral they called out from a long list that includes multi vitamins, B6, and magnesium, very common recommendations. What about the rest?

Point taken about the B12 study.

What about [https://www.medscape.org/viewarticle/751462#:~:text=The%20us...](https://www.medscape.org/viewarticle/751462#:~:text=The%20use%20of%20multivitamins%20overall,substantially%20between%201986%20and%202004)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> just a personal note, I had many many respiratory tract problems - tonsillitis, flu, cold, at least 3 times a year. I always thought it was something natural, given the seasonality of these diseases, especially in winter. but after a routine blood test, my doctor prescribed vitamin D because mine was way below recommended. since 2017, when i started taking vitamin D supplementation, only a mild flu is what I had in 3 years, so to me that article is no surprise, of course in a personal experience level.

<comment><AUTHOR> There were big studies in 2016/2017 that demonstrated the connection between Vitamin D and lowering the incidence of colds and other respiratory infections. This led to some governments (like the UK) recommending universal daily supplements for all citizens during the winter months.

See [https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2017/02/170216110002.h...](https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2017/02/170216110002.htm)

<comment><USER17> cool, that's great. will check it, thanks!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> PSA: Before supplementing Vitamin D, do some research on calcification and Vitamin K2.

Or you can trust a random person from the internet and supplement 40mcg K2 mk7 all-trans per every 1000IU of Vitamin D. That seems to be around the usual amount used in studies [1].

I'm not sure if this is the appropriate factor for high Vitamin D dosages of multiple tenths of thousands IU. Personally, I'd be wary of such dosages anyway.

[1] [https://www.heise.de/tp/features/Schuetzt-Vitamin-D-vor- Covi...](https://www.heise.de/tp/features/Schuetzt-Vitamin-D-vor- Covid-19-4704193.html?seite=2)

<comment><USER19> Why would you be wary? 15min of full body sunexposure will net you ~20,000 IU. Supplementing 8-10,000 IU will not bring you into danger territory by a LONG shot.

<comment><USER20> Getting vitamin D from the sun is different than from supplements. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypervitaminosis_D#Long- term_e...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypervitaminosis_D#Long- term_effects_of_supplementary_oral_intake)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> > Patients were administered oral vitamin D3 1000 IU OD

I've seen multiple sources say that 1000 IU of vit D is usually insufficient to boost levels, with suggestions of up to 5000 a day. My mothers doctor put her up to 2000 a day because 1000 did nothing to her levels, which were already low.

<comment><USER22> How did the doctor know her vitamin levels were low? I once asked a doctor if the vitamins in our body can be measured, and he said it can't be done, is not something you can measure.

<comment><USER23> It can be measured with a blood test:

> The most accurate way to measure how much vitamin D is in your body is the > 25-hydroxy vitamin D blood test.

[https://www.webmd.com/diet/guide/vitamin-d- deficiency](https://www.webmd.com/diet/guide/vitamin-d-deficiency)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> FYI this site provides helpful "top 10" lists of foods that naturally contain a lot of vitamins and minerals (or are fortified). E.g. here's the Vitamin D list: [https://www.myfooddata.com/articles/high-vitamin-D- foods.php](https://www.myfooddata.com/articles/high-vitamin-D-foods.php)

P.S. I learned a fascinating factoid from that Vitamin D list. You might be aware that standing out in the sun for 20 minutes is a good way to generate Vitamin D. Supposedly the same process happens by leaving crimini mushrooms out in the sun for 20 minutes before eating them.

</comment><comment><USER25> Was this known early on about COVID?

Early on in the lockdown I noticed that these vitamins were among the kind of weird items completely cleared out of stores.

People were very selective... initially all FHD laptops and Chromebooks were gone, along with power strips, ibuprofen, hair clippers, etc.

<comment><USER26> Vitamin D has been thrown around a lot from the get-go, probably because of its value against other forms of coronavirus including SARS and viral infection in general. My layman's understanding is that supplementation hasn't shown to be effective, meaning D deficiency may be a co-indicator.

[1] [https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7189189/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7189189/) [2] [https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3308600/#:~:tex...](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3308600/#:~:text=Newer%20evidence%20suggests%20that%20it,influenza%20and%20respiratory%20tract%20infection).

<comment><USER27> Perhaps Vitamin D status is just an indicator of adequate sunshine on the skin. This would explain why people with low vitamin D are more susceptible, yet supplementation with Vitamin D is ineffective.

<comment><USER26> I've seen two theories floated:

1\. Vitamin D as a side effect of sun exposure is not itself the important indicator. Instead, some other biological response increases immune response simultaneously. Hence, D supplementation is itself copying the wrong response.

2\. Vitamin D deficiency is caused by illness, hence it actually doesn't affect mortality and the relationship is not casual.

<comment><USER27> My money is on 1. Vitamin D deficiency is caused by lack of sunlight. I'm skeptical of doctors telling me to avoid the sun and take a pill instead.

<comment><USER25> I eye-rolled at that guidance too, until a loved one was diagnosed out of the blue with stage-2 melanoma. It's terrifying.

Don't screw around with sun protection. Despite what the internet says, people who work outside get it too.

<comment><USER27> I don't doubt that skin cancer happens. I doubt that vitamin D supplementation is delivering all the benefits that sunshine does.

<comment><USER28> and you're basing this on....

<comment><USER27> [https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5593895/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5593895/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> There is a ton of correlational evidence of low vitamin D and C19. And it would be easy to ignore that as having cause and effect weaknesses.

But we also have dozens of RCTs showing that vitamin D supplementation suppresses respiratory infections!

Folks always act like we just take this study in isolation. That's not how it should work. The totality of the evidence is quite strong for vitamin D versus C19.

</comment><comment><USER30> Here's a github with various vitamin D covid resources, to my knowledge this is all of the relevant preprints and publications.

[https://github.com/GShotwell/vitamin_d_covid](https://github.com/GShotwell/vitamin_d_covid)

</comment><comment><USER31> Every time a new D & C19 item comes up, 75+% of the comments are already addressed in my review: [http://agingbiotech.info/vitamindcovid19/](http://agingbiotech.info/vitamindcovid19/) This new study is already incorporated there with a couple paragraphs of good discussion in strengths, weaknesses, importance, etc. Broadly, it's consistent with prior evidence but significant for being the 1st controlled trial (even if not random, which would be unethical at this point and thus should be impossible now). It's too bad the control group had so much more comorbidity. Hopefully their multivariate model is trustable for taking baseline differences in the 2 arms into account. The effect size is huge (OR=0.15).

Other common comment topics here (correlation vs causation, sun exposure, burden of proof for correcting deficiency, etc.) are all covered in the review already. If something important isn't covered, email me.

</comment><comment><USER32> It looks like the preprint was published 6 weeks after the study finished (15 April 2020).

It is a real shame we can't get our science moving faster (maybe slow so we don't break things?).

<comment><USER33> Perhaps it's the fact that breaking things in science leads to really bad long term effects? Think what would happen if we rushed through a medicine for cancer and it had an effect after a few hundred thousand patients have started taking it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> One more reason to go for a walk everyday outside for at least 60 minutes.

<comment><USER33> From the article linked above [0], it appears that 20 minutes is good enough. My GP mentioned something similar to me a couple of weeks ago. The interesting point is _when_ to go out for 20 mins walk and for where I stay (Sydney,Australia), the timing seems to be this :

Noon during winter Before 10 AM or after 3 PM during summer

[0][https://www.myfooddata.com/articles/high-vitamin-D- foods.php](https://www.myfooddata.com/articles/high-vitamin-D-foods.php)</comment></comment>


Ask HN: How do I learn about financial matters as a software engineer? - <AUTHOR> Hello there,<p>Just wanted to ask how I can learn about financial matters like equity, stocks et al? I am a recent grad and have little knowledge about financial management. I'd like to know more about it so that I can plan my finances better. <comment><USER2> This is a question to which there is a Right Answer. That answer is low-cost index funds.

Your options:

1) Invest in a Vanguard target retirement date fund. They will manage a portfolio comprised of ETFs for you, and also change the mix over time, in return for a fee.

2) Invest in Wealthfront or a similar "robo advisor" (Charles Schwab also has one), who will manage a portfolio of low-cost ETFs for you, in return for a fee.

3) Self-manage a portfolio of low-cost ETFs. You should probably not do this. Your decisionmaking for it will be strictly worse than a machine's.

If you feel the need to know _why_ index funds are the Right Answer, read A Random Walk Down Wall Street. This is the canonical answer among Bogleheads, a group of devotees of the guy who invented low-cost index funds. (He made Vanguard from the ground up.) If you want other book recommendations, they have several: [http://www.bogleheads.org/wiki/Books:_recommendations_and_re...](http://www.bogleheads.org/wiki/Books:_recommendations_and_reviews)

Most of the consequential decisions for you are not going to be in what to invest in (because you will, being rational and aware that you cannot out- compete the market with any degree of predictability, choose low-cost index funds) but rather a) saving a generous amount every year, b) making especially sure to max out tax-beneficial retirement contributions, and c) not panicking and _selling_ your low-cost index funds on a day like today.

If you enjoy playing the stock market not because you want to maximize your return (again, low-cost index funds) but because that sounds like a source of fun, ask me again in, oh, 2 weeks.

<comment><USER3> Completely agree with _all_ of your answers but would add a nitpicky option 4;

4) Self-manage a portfolio of 2-4 index funds across the spectrum of equities and bonds, starting with a standard allocation rate (80-95% equities, the remainder in bonds) and rebalancing yearly, while adjusting the rate as you approach retirement age.

This is slightly different than the options you mention (though largely the same formula). The reason you might do this is that it can be much cheaper than the other choices (except for 3) and requires not much more savvy than items 1 or 2.

Further, sometimes you get lucky with a 401k plan that will boost you into higher fund categories (Flagshipt etc) and thus lower fees at much lower investment points than an open market fund would require.

<comment><USER4> The stakes are high, so I'm going to be blunt: This is terrible advice. [1]

The amount you're trying to save with "option 4" can be estimated fairly accurately; it's about 0.09% per year. [2] Over forty years, this savings will compound and you'll make 3% more money, _if_ you never screw up the rebalancing, and if you're at least as talented as a Vanguard analyst, and if you remain so even as you grow older.

But the US market has gained more than 5% per year on average, so you could make the same money by just investing for six extra months. Or, looking at it the other way: If it costs you six additional months to get started with option 4, you've just thrown away all your potential gains from option 4.

And option 4 has a much harder conversion funnel. You have to:

      1. surf to Amazon
      2. get the free Kindle version of William Bernstein's *If You Can* [3]
      3. read it
      4. Contemplate the inevitability of your own death.
      5. build a spreadsheet
      6. Make some strategic decisions
      7. open a Vanguard account before noon tomorrow
      8. Carry out at least four trades.
      9. Set up an automatic investment plan.
      10. Repeat steps 4 and 7 every year without fail for the rest of your career.

DON'T DO THIS. You are going to put this off for months. And every year you put it off will cost you in the end.

patio11's advice converts better:

      1. Open a Vanguard account before noon tomorrow.
      2. Visit this page:

[https://investor.vanguard.com/mutual-funds/target- retirement...](https://investor.vanguard.com/mutual-funds/target- retirement/#/mini/overview/1487)

      ... and pick the fund that matches your age.

      3. Buy some of that fund.
      4. Set up an automatic investment plan to buy more of that fund.

DO THIS TODAY, I BEG YOU, YOUR KIDS WILL THANK ME ONE DAY.

\---

[1] I should know; I have followed this terrible advice for years. Writing this essay may be the best investment I've ever made.

[2] Vanguard's Target Retirement Fund for 2055 (VFFVX) has an expense ratio of 0.18% and would be managed for me.

Or I can follow Vanguard's strategy on my own. At the moment, Vanguard's VFFVX consists of:

      54%  VG Total Stock Market index (expense ratio 0.05%)
      36%  VG Total International Stock index (expenses 0.14%)
      7%   VG Total Bond Market II index (expenses 0.07%)
      3%   VG Total International Bond index (expenses 0.19%)

Weighting all those expense ratios by their fraction of the portfolio, I compute that I can achieve an overall expense ratio of 0.09%. So I'm saving 0.09% compared to letting Vanguard do the work.

[3] Technically the book I read back in the day was Bernstein's _Four Pillars of Investing_ , but I'm assuming that Bernstein has diligently refined his teaching over the years and I can safely recommend his latest.

<comment><USER3> Like I said, this is nitpicky to the nth degree (and in full disclosure I advised my wife to do a target fund when she started investing). You can do much, much worse than a target fund and hardly better.

That said, I've encountered many 401k plans over the years where the target funds have very bad expense ratios (.35 or higher). Meanwhile there will be a total market fund and a bond fund sitting closer to .08 or .09.

I personally, had a 401k plan that had the choice of a target fund at .28 expense ratio or a fidelity spartan class total market with NO initial investment requirements. I was able to invest at 0.07 expense ratios when I had less than $500 in a retirement account.

So, if you have the choice at a Vanguard target fund, yeah you aren't going to do much better than that. But especially when someone else is limiting what you can invest in, it can be advantageous to go with bare index funds.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Lost in Life and at Work, Help? - <AUTHOR> I am 30 years old backend engineer, totally lost in life. What can I do: create CRUD/REST API over database.
Trying to change my current job, but have fear of failing in new place, companies are asking for high-load experience, AWS, GCP, distributed systems, microservices, event driven architecture, some asking how many micro-services we have in current stack and so on.
I work in fairly loaded system with over 1M daily active users, for which we create analytics, with small team, with good old RDBMS database. No fancy distributed systems, no 1000s of microservices (just 4-5 services are working really fine for us), no consensus problems (in case we need consensus, simply lock database table and serves us fine for quite long time, not enough? just lock different table based on hash of key).
I assume natural way to grow as an engineer and not regret at 40 years age is to become expert in some area, could be storage engines, some types of NoSQL, in-memory caches, maybe AWS/GCP expert or person who understand leader election/gossip/.. type of things really well.
But I am afraid I should sacrifice lots of time from my family, from my kids and wife to become an expert in a field which I am not currently employed.
What can I do? <comment><USER2> No specific advice, but if I had it to do over again, I'd spend a lot more time with my kids and family, and less on tech.

</comment><comment><USER3> I think you're describing what keeps many of us working in tech; an unceasing itch to learn and tinker. It's a good thing though - you can't be successful in this field without it. We all struggle with balancing that itch with the FTE and maintaining relationships - none of us have it figured out (I certainly struggle with it).

Look, all that aside, sometimes the best thing you can do is jump. Being in your comfort zone is a dangerous place that breeds complacency.

</comment><comment><USER4> Here's advice from another almost 30 years old engineer :). So I might not have more experience, but here is how I think about things, maybe it helps.

I think the most important question is: What interests you? And I believe the answer should be more general than a specific technology such as AWS or GCP.

You said you would like to grow as an engineer. There are typically 2 directions - going more into managerial/leadership roles (e.g. staff engineer) or being more of an individual contributor (no management, only engineering). Good book on this - Radical Candor. It is also totally ok to switch between these roles.

About being afraid - what do you have to lose? With engineers being in such a high demand you definitely won't end up jobless. If you are thinking about doing it and are not happy with your current company, I'd say do it and fail as many times as needed until you get where you want to.

Another good way to learn and build a portfolio is doing a side project. You can then open-source it, write a blog post on it and sort of become an "expert" on that topic.

Regarding your wife and family, probably the best thing IMO would be to talk to them - explain them your position, ask for support and agree with them how it is going to work.

When I don't know what to do, what typically helps me is to take action. Any action. Once I start doing things, things start to unravel and become clearer very quickly.

Hope this helps!

<comment> non-entity Serious question: If you have 10 years experience in _X_ , but is looking for jobs in _Y_ , are employers, recruiters, etc. really going to care if all you have to show your competence is a few side projects and blog posts when the position wants 10 years of experience with _Y_?

<comment><AUTHOR> this was exactly my point, if you are lucky and joined company which has high potential to grow and/or joined Google like companies with crunching lots of competitive programming problems (leetcode, hackerrank) then you might join teams where people work on kubernetes, large scale storage, low latency proxies and so on.

Even though some of them are open source, it is not easy to do contributions after whole day of coding. I did this in the past, to become productive in projects like k8s you should invest a lot of your own time. At small scale k8s rarely fails and features out of box is enough for most companies, since you don't have large scale problems/experience it is difficult to come up with feature which could be useful for k8s community.

this applies to other projects as well. Unless you are working full time on field, it's not easy to become expert in that field

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> 1\. talk to your family, let them know 2\. think about what you'd like to learn - be specific 3\. look for jobs in that area, and explain from the get- go that you'd like to learn-on-the-job (explain your expertise), and tell them that you're willing to take a loss-in-pay in the short term, just to prove yourself (thus, your truly desired salary will happen later).

If you can take a loss in the short term, and are actually willing to learn, I think you'll succeed long term.

</comment><comment><USER6> Could more direct contact with your company's clients help? It might be advantageous for you, your company and its clients.

</comment><comment><USER7> Thoughts from a 36yo engineer who has decided to transition away from IT:

Specialising in the areas you mention is a big bet, as it implies that the product / architectural approach will remain constant as time goes on. Except for enterprisey institutions like Oracle, SQL Server, or big ERP systems, this isn't really a tenable strategy as the rest of the industry carries on innovating.

Rather than specialising, the modern approach to longevity is _learning_. You can still carve out your preferred area (e.g. backend), but you must be prepared to move with the tides. You don't have to be an early adopter of every new hot, prototype tech that comes about, as that takes a lot of energy and can be frustrating. Instead, consult industry publications like InfoQ which cover more long-term patterns in the field, and use those to inform your choices of further investigation. This will expose you to actual use in the field, by other companies (e.g. how many seem to be using it, and what common failures are experienced). For example, microservices has been around since about 2010, and was borne (IMO) from Service-Oriented Architecture which was around since about 2005. If you take notice of the rise of cloud technology, you would be able to see the trend towards separating applications and separating processing.

Cloud and microservices, regardless of their foibles or unsuitability, are often a reality as the tech industry moves in a way that is not really very wise, and things are often rediscovered in different ways. As an alternative to embracing this "move with the tide" approach wholeheartedly, you could position yourself as a wise consultant-type figure (not necessarily an actual consultant, just an employee who has wisdom), and push for the right approach for a given situation. I would still keep abreast of trends though.

Something that has worked for me is doing university / polytechnic courses whilst working. This will add interesting flavour and variety for your mind to work on during the day, and you might discover a new interesting field (for me, it was people and HR, the role I'm now transitioning into). If you want to do this, I'd recommend the book: The HBR Guide to Changing Your Career (has advice on how to gradually incorporate more of what you want to be doing into your day job, safely).

Best of luck in your quest!

[Edit] You mention "good old RDBMS" which suggests a strong affinity to things in your comfort zone. I'd suggest Googling "Growth Mindset" and "Immunity to change" as tools to help you recover your curiosity. Remember: Don't focus on _others_ already knowing a subject better than you, think about what you know _now_ and improving _that_ knowledge exclusively. Otherwise, you will always persuade yourself out of learning something.

<comment><USER8> I'm interested to know why you transitioned away from IT, if that's something you can share :)

Reason: strongly considering this for few months already.

<comment><USER7> My main reason was that I felt programming into advanced age was an untenable career path, since I'd have to expend more effort competing with fresh CS grads. This was a concern for me as my wife and I were planning to move overseas eventually, where the talent bar was higher. Additionally, I also had exposure to leadership and people-oriented thinking during my tertiary study, which I found stoked my fire more so than programming.

While I still get joy from programming, upon reflection I've come to realise that my career in IT was borne from a love of programming in isolation in my younger years. Working in a team environment on projects I'm not invested in, sapped my passion. Also, because I had worked in IT for so long, I had developed a disinterest in the field, so I didn't want to work it in even in a leadership capacity. Simply put, it was time for a change.

I now classify it as a hobby, and enjoy daily activities in my new role which are rich and interesting again.</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Am I being shortsighted? - <AUTHOR> After joining a large multinational almost a year ago, I currently work on financial applications. One of my motivations for joining was the fact that there seemed to be a lot of room for advancement, promotions and several ladders to climb. Now I'm disillusioned by the process through which those promotions happen - /that taking on a new role within the company does not change your title or your salary, just your responsibilities. The promotion process is completely separate.
Last week a recruiter reached out to me with a very good opportunity on paper. The pay offered is $160k/year (60% premium from my current $100k/year) doing senior LAMP stack work (this in a low cost of living Texas city). It's a 1 year W-2 contract with benefits (not sure what those look like yet), adds one hour to my daily commute, and it sends me back to doing LAMP stack work; two years ago I couldn't muster offers for more than $85k/year with this skillset.
Another issue is that my team recently picked up a new project, and I'm doing a significant chunk of it. I don't want to burn any bridges or make my manager look bad and potentially get blacklisted since later on I would like to rejoin the company at a more senior role.
But the way I see it, I work to provide for my family, and a place that gives me over 50% salary bump makes that easier. I've entertained the idea of doing W-2 contracts since my tenures tend to be short anyway; I'm an effective developer, communicate well and focus on delivering business value - I tend to feel that I outgrow my responsibilities quickly.
What are some things I should be asking this recruiter? Am I looking a gift horse in the mouth by questioning the tech stack and future employment prospects? Or am I being shortsighted in considering leaving a place that's currently dominating its industry for a larger paycheck? <comment><USER2> I'd definitively ask about the tech stack and the replacement rate of the developers to be sure that they have a same tech and human environment.</comment>


Trash this app as much as you can - <AUTHOR> http://wokheisandbox.appspot.com/ I am looking for brutal feedback on this web app (it's a testing sandbox). I know the video sucks - if you've got 5 spare mins tell me what else does. <comment><USER2> I like the idea. While crowd-sourcing is good in many areas, sometimes it "feels" good to interact with a company. I could definitely imagine myself using your service, especially with the no risk free license. On the usability side, I had to squint to see past the bright pink. Try a white background =)

</comment><comment><USER3> the service looks pretty useful...

However the domain name is very hard to spell/pronounce so I just forgot it even though I made a mental note to use the service next time I need a logo.

<comment><AUTHOR> that's just the sandbox (<http://wokheisandbox.appspot.com/>) - domain is --> www.wokhei.com - but you won't be able to log-in just yet as still undergoing testing

<comment><USER3> I think wokhei is a bit hard for native English speakers to spell phonetically...

just my opinion, though...

<comment><AUTHOR> interesting opinion - thanks for your feedback. The 'stir fried logos' tag- line was added to make it a bit more catchy, but I am not behind those choices - also looking for usability feedback ( <http://wokheisandbox.appspot.com/> it's a testing sandbox so you can try and submit fake orders)</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Four Signs That WebOS Is on the Right Track - <AUTHOR> http://www.pcworld.com/businesscenter/article/248794/four_signs_that_webos_is_on_the_right_track.html

<comment><USER2> 'Another such victory and I am undone.' -- King Pyrrhus</comment>


Relax, the Slowdown in Bitcoin Investment Isn't as Bad as It Looks - <AUTHOR> http://mattermark.com/im-not-dead-yet-i-want-to-go-for-a-walk/ <comment><USER2> I find it very difficult to take the word of a TechCrunch journalist over a BitCoin developer. The issue of rescinding payments certainly isn't resolved to my understanding, and that itself would kill any currency.</comment>


Show HN: HackerCouch - <AUTHOR> https://hackercouch.com/ <comment><USER2> Interesting.

I've hosted over 40 couchsurfers in Manhattan so I have a few concerns.

My largest one is that HackerCouch lacks a reference system so that people "know" who is a good or bad host or guest. Googling every one who messages me, the host, may not yield as much info as I would like, since most folks aren't 1000-twitter-followers, ten-thousand-github-commits, Forbes-interviewed, rockstars (Like Me![1]). Accordingly, HackerCouch needs some faculty to indicate and ensure the trustworthiness of its listings: perhaps like the kinds founds in Couchsurfing.org, BeWelcome or AirBnb. Otherwise, all hosts ought to have and to link their listings to at least one other platforms so guests can see their pictures, reviews, and other metadata, to make an informed decision to stay with someone who is, essentially, a stranger.

On this note of having to use another platform: I know I would also have to create a staging email address for managing requests. Having received 400+ requests in 4 months, I can safely say that 1% of people will go to... creepy lengths if they feel like they aren't getting the attention they deserve. Clearly showing off all my contact info is fine on my marketing site, but not fine when I'm offering something up for free that people can take free advantage of. AirBnB and Couchsurfing offer a comforting layer of messaging for the host: allowing me to interact cordially with most potential guests without fear of the crazies.

Please note I'm not saying this to discourage you; I would just like this promising idea to avoid the many painful lessons Couchsurfing.org has learned. (... and then ignored.)

[1] This is sarcasm. But if we meet in real life, I'll be sure to scream about it with conviction[2].

[2] This is not sarcasm.

<comment><USER3> Slightly off topic but... I've never couchsurfed but have Airbnb'd quite a bit. I've held the unfounded assumption that couchsurfing accommodations would be questionable, in unsafe locations, have issues with scams or theft, etc.

Can you comment on how this compares to reality in a place like Manhattan where short-term housing rentals can be pricy?

And also, philosophically why you choose to host couchsurfers vs paid guests?

<comment><USER4> We've hosted both in Japan. It's a very different atmosphere, couchsurfers tend to be long time world traveling hippie types that are interesting to host just to hear their stories and help them out. They often arrive by hitch hiking and we've even had some who are walking hundreds of km across Japan.

Surfers have low expectations for accommodation and usually the day is spent chatting and going to places together.

AirBnB is for example couples and people who expect something closer to a hotel and more privacy, they may be busier and prefer to pay for convenience. Say career people who only have a week or two to spend in Japan, so they pay to make things go as smoothly as possible.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I love the implicit filtering mechanism through allowing people to post couches only via pull-request.

<comment><AUTHOR> The other option was to have something like a wiki, but that brings its own problems. Plus, I really love using Jekyll. Made perfect sense to just have people fork it and file a PR instead.

<comment><USER6> What about filtering couch requests? I can see how people might abuse well- intentioned hosts...

<comment><AUTHOR> Its completely upto you to use what identity you want. Just specify a different contact detail/email address if you want it to be that way.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> This website should really use CouchDB ...

<comment><AUTHOR> Any specific reason? Its a simple static website that doesn't really need a database. If it grows to a point where I need filtering, I might think about it. But plain-old HTML is really powerful.

<comment><USER8> All back-end infrastructure should reduce to a good pun. This is a known design pattern.

<comment><AUTHOR> Its 6am in the morning here, and that went straight over my sleepyhead.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I know that I am not worthy to surf on anybody's couch. Even my own. Call me an idiot but I don't understand this site. At all.

Whom do I contact to get a spot on one of these WiFi enabled couches? Are they available over the New Year's Eve time frame? Can I bring a bag of Doritos?

What the hell is this?!

<comment><AUTHOR> The idea is this: Hackers like meeting hackers. People have couches they are willing to share. If you are are in both the groups, you add yourself and people send you a request to ask you if you are free.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Original Hackercouch dude here [https://github.com/jancborchardt/hackercouch](https://github.com/jancborchardt/hackercouch) – thanks for taking my concept and driving it forward! :)

<comment><AUTHOR> Hola! Thanks for making it. Did you register hackercouch.com, btw? I just saw your project and checked whois and it was free.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I like that, but it could use some CSS love. Will you accept a PR if I clean things up a tad?

<comment><AUTHOR> Sure. A friend of mine is working on a redesign (#7), but a bit of CSS love would go a long way. This is just the basic Jekyll theme with a few changes.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Github as a federated database engine. That's super clever.

<comment><AUTHOR> To be fair, I stole the idea from [http://remy.mit- license.org/](http://remy.mit-license.org/)

<comment><USER12> I love these repurposing hacks. No matter where you stole it, realizing that you could use this mechanism for your problem is imo just as neat as the project itself.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I've been waiting for a solution like this specifically for digital nomads. (It's also on my own to-build list so I might punch it out one of these days.)

My unsolicited advice: Market it to digital nomads exclusively.

I get that it's open sourced, but I don't like that and don't think it makes sense for the nature of the project... I'd prefer someone treating it like a startup and maintaining the product, making a nicer design, growing it, etc.

<comment><AUTHOR> One of the main reasons behind the death of Couchsurfing was that they pivoted to a company and became a startup[0]. I, on the other hand, don't want to make money on this.

There is also the issue of privacy. Would you be fine giving your travel information to a central third-party? I would like to keep HC to a minimum listing site and let people take conversations to a side-channel instead.

[0]: [http://kernelmag.dailydot.com/issue-sections/features- issue-...](http://kernelmag.dailydot.com/issue-sections/features-issue- sections/13124/life-and-death-couchsurfing/)

<comment><USER13> It's mostly a problem that resolves itself. The digital nomad community is on average made up of professionals who are savvy and financially OK, who are all pretty similar and generally on the same page about things. It doesn't have all the variables of couch surfing, so I don't think you can meaningfully compare the two platforms.

If someone manages to find the site, they're probably there for the right reasons. It might be as little as getting it sidebar'd on r/digitalnomad to get the right crowd on it.

100% agree with having conversations off the platform, I don't think it needs to be dramatically different than what you have now.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Really great idea. There is a long way to go here, but please keep doing this!

</comment><comment><USER15> I'm one of the co-founders of http:/ww.horizonapp.co - which is hospitality exchange (aka couchsurfing) for groups. Think Peace Corps, Teach for America, Stanford alum, Kiva Fellows...but it could be any existing group/community -- such as members of HackerCouch, or Hacker News even.

Unlock code for the "Hacker News" group on Horizon: hn2015#$

I'm happy to create a private unlock code for Hacker Couch if there is any interest.

*Note most of our effort thus far has been on iOS version -- the web version is still basic (we're currently working on adding a few pieces of functionality). Recently started development on a native android version.</comment>


Scientists Discover a Jewel at the Heart of Quantum Physics (2013) - <AUTHOR> https://www.wired.com/2013/12/amplituhedron-jewel-quantum-physics/ <comment><USER2> The relevant Wikipedia article: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amplituhedron](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amplituhedron)

</comment><comment><USER3> "In a sense, we would see that change arises from the structure of the object," he said. "But it's not from the object changing. The object is basically timeless."

I have said it before, the universe is some sort of a cellular automata running on top of matrix shape.

This Jewel thing may represent the possible patterns of nteraction between the cells of the matrix.. but we have to go deeper and try to model something similar so that it exhibits the phisical rules that we observer in our Universe.

<comment><USER4> Funny, I just stumbled upon this yesterday:

Special Relativity Theory and Cellular Automata: Light as a Cellular Automata Process [http://arxiv.org/abs/physics/9902034](http://arxiv.org/abs/physics/9902034)

Also Edward Fredkin is a big believer in cellular automata being the foundation of reality: [https://arxiv.org/find/nlin/1/au:+Fredkin_E/0/1/0/all/0/1](https://arxiv.org/find/nlin/1/au:+Fredkin_E/0/1/0/all/0/1) And a great book with him in it: [https://www.amazon.com/Three-Scientists- Their-Gods-Informati...](https://www.amazon.com/Three-Scientists-Their-Gods- Information/dp/0060972572)

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Previous discussions:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6403285](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6403285) (3 years ago, 91 comments)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6421017](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6421017) (3 years ago, 45 comments, related blog post by Scott Aaronson)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6894292](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6894292) (3 years ago, 14 comments, flagged as dupe)

<comment><USER6> Thank you.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> (2013)</comment>


Flakes – Proposed mechanism to package Nix expressions into composable entities - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/NixOS/rfcs/pull/49 <comment><USER3> This is really interesting. Right now you can't really compose nix expressions from several different sources. There are ways of doing it, but they all involve one hack or another that limits the usefulness of the result. This is why nixpkgs is a huge monolithic repository.

Flakes would allow package definitions from different sources play well with each other. This means a bunch of things:

1) Nixpkgs could be broken up into several package sets for better scalability. Eg, haskelPackages and pythonPackages could be broken out into separate repositories.

2) Package authors could provide package definitions along with the source.

3) Companies could have a flake for internal packages without having to patch or overlay nixpkgs.

4) Alternatives to nixpkgs can get started without having to supply _all_ the packages that a user might need.

5) You could even create libraries of nix functions that supply no packages at all, but get used by other flakes to define packages. For example, the machinery for composing a python environment.

<comment><USER4> > 1) Nixpkgs could be broken up into several package sets for better > scalability. Eg, haskelPackages and pythonPackages could be broken out into > separate repositories.

While this _could_ happen, it's exactly what I hope _won 't_ happen, because in my opinion the idea that haskell or python packages are fundamentally different and can live in their own world is a fallacy. I spend quite a bit of my time fixing python packages on nixpkgs master and the number of times the fix actually involves making a tweak to a non-python library means I would forever have to be playing games synchronizing repositories. Also, gone would be the ability to make atomic changes across these boundaries.

Viva la monorepo.

<comment><USER5> > Viva la monorepo.

Absolutely. Look at edolstra take on this though [https://github.com/NixOS/rfcs/pull/49#discussion_r305450668](https://github.com/NixOS/rfcs/pull/49#discussion_r305450668)

This is why I'm scared of this change.

<comment><USER6> Me too. I think (hope) that the NixOS community won't end up doing all the work it would take to break up the existing monorepo; instead they'll just add a few small additional repos.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I'd love for a way to write nix expressions that easily lead to reproducible builds. Of course this is possible right now next, but requires substantial legwork to pin Nixpkgs version or add SHA for every tarball. Especially now as the machine learning story for NixOS is becoming strong, it would be awesome to have fully reproducible model training using such a system. This highlights a difference from docker or nvidia-docker, which do not control driver version.

<comment><USER8> Fortunately, `builtins.fetchTarball` makes this easier. I do this in my `nixcfg` repo so that I can build my entire machine config (patches and enabling Iris in Mesa, and all) on a stupidly-cheap Packet.net VM: [https://github.com/colemickens/nixcfg/blob/master/default.ni...](https://github.com/colemickens/nixcfg/blob/master/default.nix).

If you follow the rabbit-hole: `default.nix` -> `lib.nix`, etc, you can see that I pin nixpkgs, have an update script that updates the nixpkgs revs I build against, it supports building against a custom, local `~/code/nixpkgs` if it exists, and I have my machine config abstracted out to where I can build a "GNOME instance of my machine" or by default, my machine with Sway and sway related packages installed. Much of this should be easier with flakes, as I understand it.

It's not the cleanest config, the README needs love, but maybe it can be inspiration in the meantime. :) My latest trick was figuring out how to get the new Mesa Intel Iris Gallium driver enabled without rebuilding the world, and I extracted it to what I call a "mixin" that anyone can copy and just use: [https://github.com/colemickens/nixcfg/blob/master/modules/mi...](https://github.com/colemickens/nixcfg/blob/master/modules/mixin- intel-iris.nix)

(And technically I still use mozilla/nixpkgs-mozilla to pull the latest Firefox Nightly which is impure and thus not always perfectly, perfectly reproducable. I do however pin the overlays themselves also - like my nixpkgs- wayland overlay that packages HEAD versions of Sway and other Wayland related tools!)

<comment><USER7> This is interesting. Sounds like you do this on the system level? I'm interested in doing this on a shell or package level eg I'd love to have system on bleeding edge but be able to jump back to same binary blobs associated with a particular revision of software

<comment><USER8> `nix-env` can be coerced into pinning a package at a specific revision, effectively ignoring channel updates. However, yes, I do all of my nixos package management in my system configuration and try to avoid `nix-env` at all costs as it leads to drift. However, in at least one case, this is largely un-avoidable (in the case of OBS Plugins, there's no NixOS infra to make sure that 'wlrobs' is available at a well-known spot for OBS to pick-up. We'd need to make a plugin-aware wrapper, or `programs.obs` module probably. This is because nix-env does some additional symlinking that isn't done for system- installed packages).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> While Nix's concepts are awesome, the implementation doesn't look so nice. Their "language" for writing Nix files [1] doesn't look attractive. Doesn't make me want to write a package description.

Of course, it is better than languages with lots of brackets, but still not good enough.

[1] [https://github.com/edolstra/nixpkgs/blob/release-19.03/flake...](https://github.com/edolstra/nixpkgs/blob/release-19.03/flake.nix)

<comment> vertex-four For basic package descriptions, the language is not terribly different from JSON. Here's a definition of a Python application I'm working on:

        { pkgs ? import <nixpkgs> {}}:

        with pkgs;

        python3Packages.buildPythonApplication rec {
          name = "quicktill";

          src = ./.;

          doCheck = false;

          propagatedBuildInputs = with python3Packages; [
            dateutil pyyaml
            sqlalchemy psycopg2
            pycups reportlab
            requests_oauthlib
            pygobject3
          ];

          nativeBuildInputs = [ wrapGAppsHook ];
          buildInputs = [ gobjectIntrospection gtk3 ];
        }

The only big things here are the fact that this is defined as a function that takes the package repository as an argument to access dependencies (the first line), and the "with" expressions that allow me to skip having to type "pkgs." and "pkgs.python3Packages." for every package I depend on.

<comment><USER10> That looks completely inscrutable to me. Like a sequence of magic words. I don't see the connection with JSON at all.

<comment> vertex-four I'm not really sure what you're finding inscrutable. I'll tear out the boilerplate that explains that this file is a function and returns a Python application (which is documented in the nixpkgs manual and can just be copy- pasted if you really don't want to figure out what it does):

        rec {
          name = "quicktill";

          src = ./.;

          doCheck = false;

          propagatedBuildInputs = with python3Packages; [
            dateutil pyyaml
            sqlalchemy psycopg2
            pycups reportlab
            requests_oauthlib
            pygobject3
          ];

          nativeBuildInputs = [ wrapGAppsHook ];
          buildInputs = [ gobjectIntrospection gtk3 ];
        }

Is that any better? It looks an awful lot like some dialect of something JSON- like to me - there's some different symbols used and array values are separated with spaces rather than commas, but aside from that it's just a record of key-value pairs.

From there, the first line in the original example says "the following expression is a function that is called with this parameter", and the parameter is an object containing a key called "pkgs", which is defaulted to the result of "import <nixpkgs> {}". This is explained in more detail in a handful of lines in the language manual.

Functions are called just by referencing the function and then the arguments separated with spaces, like Ruby or Haskell - <USER2> python3Packages.buildPythonApplication is a function that is called with the object above.

Finally, "with foo;" just means "every key in foo can be accessed without typing foo. in the next expression".

The result is basically: this file defines a function which takes an object containing the package repository as the "pkgs" key, and returns the result of calling pkgs.python3Packages.buildPythonApplication with the object defined in the rest of the file.

It's a lot more derived from the syntax of functional languages than C-like ones, but that's not necessarily a bad thing. Also: this is basically the entire language. There's a couple of different string syntaxes and some stuff for merging objects together, and also a mechanism for temporarily naming things that aren't part of an object, but in general... there's not a lot more to it. Most of the complexity is in the domain itself - what's the difference between a propagated, native and regular build input, how do you manage plugins and options for a package, etc.

What's your preferred packaging DSL?

<comment><USER10> I mostly deal with openembedded at work and I have few positive things to say about it. I'm sure Nix is much faster and nicer. Frankly it's hard to imagine that the opposite could be true.

But your example looks nothing like Json.

<comment> vertex-four I'm not sure what to say. Replace the = signs with colons, the semicolons with commas, stick commas between array elements and stick everything between quotes and you basically have json.

<comment><USER11> That looks like a Turing-complete DSL. Not like JSON at all. Do we need yet another Turing-complete language for writing package metadata?

<comment><USER12> The example lacks functions / flow-control statements (ok, apart from "import if not defined", but it's more of a default value than a branch) / references to other elements. It's pretty much key-value dictionary. Not sure how you got an impression of Turing-complete DSL from that, since it would require at least one of them.

<comment><USER13> The Nix expression language has branches and functions (including recursive functions). It is Turing complete, and it probably is necessary for its charter.

<comment><USER12> OP said it "looks like" a Turing complete DSL just from the example. Regardless of what extra functionality the actually is, the examples didn't suggest it.

<comment><USER13> I guess I was giving the benefit of the doubt, since that's such an irrelevant nit to pick...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This proposal makes me scared for my bet on going full with NixOS.

To me it seems like a really complicated technical solution to a social problem(the monorepo approach doesn't scale).

If more people are needed to maintain the nixpkgs repo why instead not focus on ways to increase the community size.

Missing docs have been a problem for NixOS for a long time, most awesome features are lost on some proficient users tweets. Having better docs would do wonders for the community.

I think if NixOS wants to copy some of Rust strengths, quality docs should be its first priority.

<comment><USER4> > the monorepo approach doesn't scale

Citation needed.

<comment><USER5> That's mentioned by edolstra in a comment on the proposal.

[https://github.com/NixOS/rfcs/pull/49#discussion_r305450668](https://github.com/NixOS/rfcs/pull/49#discussion_r305450668)

<comment><USER14> I know who the author of that comment is, but it is not a universally held opinion among Nix users.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> kalium-xyz Looks good, but makes me worry that target sponsored this. Are RFCs normally cooperate sponsored?

<comment><USER15> Target is also behind lorri: [https://github.com/target/lorri/](https://github.com/target/lorri/)

I view corporate interest as a good sign for the continued health of the ecosystem. As long as they don't "take over" the project there's no harm. And in particular, publishing an RFC like this shows that they're doing things the right way and cooperating with the community.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> It will replace nix channels? Looks like a big change!</comment>