Transparent Git Encryption - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/shadowhand/git-encrypt

<comment><USER2> Actually, this might not come as surprise to you, but there are a few reasons you should _not_ do this, as highlighted by Hamano, the head maintainer of Git post-Linus.

[http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version- control.git/1132...](http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version- control.git/113221)

<comment><USER3> > Actually, this might not come as surprise to you...

Probably not, given he has a link to that same email as one of the _very first_ things in his README.

> ...but there are a few reasons you should not do this

Having read the thread, it seems that everyone is talking about encrypting an entire repository in such a way, where as this project and (the surprisingly similar) git-crypt[1] are designed to encrypt only a few select files inside a repo--which isn't going to impact the git packer's compression techniques too much.

[1] <http://www.agwa.name/projects/git-crypt/>

<comment><USER4> Hey, git-crypt author here. I agree with Junio Hamano that you shouldn't use this technique to encrypt an entire repo but of course I think it works fine for encrypting a few select files.

Another important difference is that the example in the thread was using GPG, which is non-deterministic encryption, whereas git-crypt (also git-encrypt[1]) uses deterministic decryption (i.e. the same plain text always encrypts to the same ciphertext). Using deterministic encryption is absolutely essential or else git thinks the file has changed when it really hasn't. This was one of Junio's main objections ("making a pair of similar 'smudged' contents totally dissimilar in their 'clean' counterparts").

[1] Beware that git-encrypt uses ECB to accomplish deterministic encryption, which is insecure (the pictures here speak volumes: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Block_cipher_modes_of_operatio...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Block_cipher_modes_of_operation#Electronic_codebook_.28ECB.29)). In contrast, git-crypt uses CTR mode with a synthetic IV, which is secure.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This is cute. It's like encrypting all of your files with the same one time pad so diff works. Also not secure at all.

<comment><USER6> Oh come on that's not fair. You had me thinking the code output a cipherstream and reused it.

It's using a real encryption method, the only flaw is having identical blocks encrypt the same. Since this is designed to be applied to a handful of small text files (I think?) this is not a crippling flaw, only a notable one.

<comment><USER4> git-encrypt uses AES in ECB mode. You're right that it's not as bad as reusing a one time pad, but it's still insecure. The pictures here speak volumes: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Block_cipher_modes_of_operatio...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Block_cipher_modes_of_operation#Electronic_codebook_.28ECB.29)

It might not be crippling in most git-related use cases, but as a user you should not need to worry about your cryptosystem potentially leaking information. My project, git-crypt[1], is similar to git-encrypt but uses AES in CTR mode with a synthetic IV, which leaks only whether two entire files are identical. This is the bare minimum you need to leak to make git diffs work, and there's also a security definition called "deterministic CPA security" which CTR with a synthetic IV provably meets.

[1] <http://www.agwa.name/projects/git-crypt/>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Came across this today: <https://github.com/AGWA/git-crypt> Nearly the same but in C++

<comment><USER8> The biggest difference I see with git-crypt is that it's designed to encrypt a subset of files in the repository. This makes a lot of sense to me for storing secrets within a repo.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> This doesn't seem much better than rolling your own crypto. I'd rather go with ecryptfs. `mount -t ecryptfs mygitproj/ mygitproj/` is easy enough.

<comment><USER10> As said by Hamano, if you want encryption, use an encrypted file system. Besides cryptfs, Encfs uses FUSE and works well too (<http://www.arg0.net/encfs>).</comment></comment>


How to Slice a Bagel into Two Linked Halves - <AUTHOR> http://www.georgehart.com/bagel/bagel.html

<comment><USER2> _He is especially known for workshops he has led around the world constructing very large models of four-dimensional polytopes (e.g., 1, 2, 3, 4, 5), These extraordinary activities expose participants to important conceptual ideas they might never experience otherwise... his alternative introductions to mathematical topics are often effective for engaging students who are not attracted to traditional mathematics teaching._

<http://www.georgehart.com/research/hartbiog.html>

</comment><comment><USER3> This has huge bar-bet potential.

<comment><USER4> Oops, sorry. Accidental downmod. Damn these tiny buttons on the iPhone.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> "In additional to the intellectual stimulation, you get more cream cheese, because there is slightly more surface area." Finally, maximum cream cheese intake problem solved.

<comment><USER6> I'm sure some other cutting gives maximum cream cheese.

<comment><USER7> Sure if instead of making a solid line cut around the middle you use a wave or zig-zag you'd add more cream cheese.

Or start from the top and cut in a spiral pattern like peeling an apple and you can get a long strip of bagel with tons of cream cheese application surface.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> what a long explanation!

i assume that's equivalent to slicing the "tube" while rotating the knife completely around the axis of the "tube".

and if you only do half a rotation you should get a mobius bagel :o)

<comment><USER9> Like this? <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l6Vuh16r8o8>

<comment><USER8> bingo!

thanks for that - i've been racking my head trying to think where in santiago i could buy a bagel tomorrow. now i have no need :o)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I met George in March 2008 - fascinating man - and I have his screw-together cube puzzle:

<http://www.georgehart.com/puzzles/cube-puzzle.html>

I wish I had more money so I could buy more of his stuff - it's utterly intriguing.

<comment><USER11> _Almost_ totally unrelated:

<http://www.rogersconnection.com/>

just wanted to strain your wallet a little further =P (and your mind, of course)

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> I actually laughed out loud. Well done, sir.

<comment><USER13> I did as well. Savory.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> I first heard of George Hart in connection with Zometools, a fine educational toy for current or future hackers.

<http://www.zometool.com/>

<comment><USER15> Thanks for pointing out those toys. I just ordered a set for my nieces and nephew. :)

[http://www.amazon.com/Zometool- ZS005-1-Creator/dp/B00001W0DS...](http://www.amazon.com/Zometool- ZS005-1-Creator/dp/B00001W0DS/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> The doughnut version [http://newyork.seriouseats.com/2009/12/even-cooler-the- mobiu...](http://newyork.seriouseats.com/2009/12/even-cooler-the-mobius- doughnut.html)

</comment><comment><USER17> Yummm, looks deliciously. Are bagels an american thing? I can't remember seeing them in Europe.

<comment><USER8> are you joking? they are a european jewish thing (from poland, according to wikipedia).

they only seem to be commercially popular in the usa/canada/uk, but you should be able to find them in any jewish deli/bakery in mainland europe.

<comment><USER18> Well, origin and source of popularity are two different things. While most yeast-free methods of baking can be traced to Jewish roots, the bagel in it's current, cream-cheese dressed form was made popular (and for most intents "invented") in the US, in much the same way as the minced beef introduced to Hamburg in the 19th century by Russian sailors bears little similarity to the food that made McDonalds successful.

<comment><USER19> Not to mention the Doner Kebap you get in Germany vs the Turkish original.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> If only I could order my bagle like this at a coffee shop.

<comment><USER21> New business idea? Call it "Mobius" and serve all your coffee and beverages out of klein bottles (with holes)? Find ways to Mobius-ify all the food...

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Just Coooooooooooooool man

</comment><comment><USER23> shout out to mglukhovsky and bkudria

You guys should have taken his sculpture class.</comment>


Cisco to make announcement Tuesday which "will forever change the Internet" - <AUTHOR> http://www.marketwatch.com/story/cisco-to-make-major-announcement-on-tuesday-2010-03-08

<comment><USER2> Ahh, I love announcements about future annoucements.</comment>


Plugin allows inline PDFs for Firefox - <AUTHOR> http://www.tuaw.com/2008/06/18/firefox-mac-pdf-allows-in-line-pdfs-for-firefox/

<comment><USER2> Am I the only one that doesn't mind opening up pdfs in evince?

Sure, when I used Acrobat, pdfs used to be slow and annoying and hard to highlight, etc. But it really seems like a problem that stopped existing a couple years ago.

<comment><USER3> This is a Mac-only plugin, so I think evince doesn't really apply.

Most Mac users would probably rather use the built-in PDF libraries, which form the basis of Mac OS X's graphics system. They are well implemented, fast, and work great without the mess of plugin chrome you get from Adobe Reader. And the output looks great.

It's all about preventing people from needing to context-switch into application-switching and file management just to view a document.

<comment><USER2> <http://evince.darwinports.com/>

But yeah, I guess if OS X has good built in pdf support, why not use it, so I can see the appeal on those grounds.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Yay for strongly coupled components. After all, when your pdf-reader crashes it _should_ take your online banking session down with it.

Browsers need to go to the one-process-per-web-page model if they ever want to be taken seriously. The whole concept of multiple (possibly hostile) apps living in the same memory space is madness. If you keep finding vulnerability after vulnerability, guess what? You're doing it wrong. And with a decoupled, bare-bones approach to browsing advancements such as local inter-page communication become feasible, because the security model can be so much simpler.

Situation: 1 browser, N pdf-reader like plugins. Result: not only can vulnerabilities in the pdf-reader affect the browser, a vulnerability in, say, flash, can affect the pdf-reader. So every component can affect every other component. Good luck with that.

<comment><USER5> Did you really mean to suggest that web browsers aren't taken seriously?

I agree that one-process-per-web-page is at least a good metaphor, but I'm not sure those necessarily have to be real OS processes. If the OS can keep processes from stepping on each other's toes, why can't the browser do the same thing for web pages on its own?

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I had been looking for this. Switched from safari to run firebug and was really missing that feature.</comment>


Applied Agile: Theory and Practice - <AUTHOR> http://www.whattofix.com/blog/archives/2011/05/applied-agile-t.php <comment><USER2> When I stopped reading:

"The thing to remember here that separates Agile from everything else is that Agile is inherently empirical in nature."

Agile would be great if it weren't for the 'Agilistas'. The one thing that separates Agile from other software development processes is the unbounded arrogance of most of the consultants.

<comment><USER3> Yup. Agile _is_ inherently empirical, but that doesn't mean that nothing else is.</comment></comment>


Hiroshima (1946) - <AUTHOR> https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1946/08/31/hiroshima <comment><USER3> I just finished reading American Caesar[0], a great biography of Douglas MacArthur. I highly recommend it as the story of a fascinating and brilliant man who is too little remembered today. I especially enjoyed and respected MacArthur's place in the rebuilding of Japan; his almost absolute power gave him space to override the more vengeful elements within the United States to implement an extremely conciliatory post-war settlement. I don't think it's unfair to call him the founder of the modern Japanese nation, both in terms of governance and political economy. Though not covered in the book, the distinctions between MacArthur's Japan and Weimar Germany are especially stark, and it is sobering to consider what may have happened had the Japanese fallen into the malaise which in Germany gave rise to the Stabbed In The Back myth[1].

[0] [https://www.amazon.com/American-Caesar-Douglas- MacArthur-188...](https://www.amazon.com/American-Caesar-Douglas- MacArthur-1880/dp/0316024740)

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stab-in-the- back_myth](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stab-in-the-back_myth)

</comment><comment><USER4> This is one of the all time greatest examples of non-fiction writing. It's strange and a little disappointing to see people debating the morality and merits of warfare in the shadow of this epic achievement of long-form story telling. The point of this story is to make the experience human, but many comments here revert to the kind of academic finger-wagging that is a prerequisite for bringing out the worst in civilizations.

<comment><USER5> Yes, "the point of this story is to make the experience human", so that we can feel and discuss "the morality and merits of warfare".

Discussion of the writing itself, divorced from the actual substance, would be "academic finger-wagging".

<comment><USER6> Your argument boils down to "everything is political". I understand that some people think this -- but I don't.

I believe the goal of this writing is to convey to the reader the scale of the bombings and some fraction of their effects on the populace. A secondary aim is to evoke emotion in the reader. I think that's it, I don't see a political aim.

It's facile to say "war is immoral". Inasmuch as anything is immoral, war certainly is. But it's unclear to me how we ought to apply that axiom because it's unclear to me that the world would be better off today if the US hadn't entered the war, or the atomic bombs hadn't been dropped, or if the Allied policy had been something other than pursuit of unconditional surrender.

<comment><USER7> > It's facile to say "war is immoral". Inasmuch as anything is immoral, war > certainly is. But it's unclear to me how we ought to apply that axiom > because it's unclear to me that the world would be better off today if the > US hadn't entered the war, or the atomic bombs hadn't been dropped, or if > the Allied policy had been something other than pursuit of unconditional > surrender.

Nuclear weapons would have been developed whether or not the US developed them. Thankfully, it _was_ the US, and not Germany or Japan - either of those countries would have used them indiscriminately.

Since the development of nuclear weapons, they have been the greatest force for peace in world history. We had two horrific world wars in the space of just 25 years. Now, we're almost 75 years past 1945 without one.

Fingers crossed that sanity prevails and the major powers continue to be dissuaded by MAD.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> This is a phenomenal mini-book. John Heresy does a superb job portraying the horror of the Bomb. What surprised me most how many citizens didn't feel that its use was inhuman.

"As for the use of the bomb, she would say, "It was war and we had to expect it." "

"Others were of the opinion that in total war, as carried on in Japan, there was no difference between civilians and soldiers, and that the bomb itself was an effective force tending to end the bloodshed, warning Japan to surrender and thus to avoid total destruction. It seems logical that he who supports total war in principle cannot complain of a war against civilians."

<comment><USER9> > What surprised me most how many citizens didn't feel that its use was > inhuman.

It's all about context. At that point in history, the Japanese forces had already murdered millions of non-Japanese. Furthermore, firebombing campaigns on Japan caused way more civilian casualties than the atomic bombs. The Japanese leadership was ready to sacrifice millions in a possible ground invasion. Fortunately, the war stopped at "only" two atomic bombs, there were more to come...

<comment><USER10> > The Japanese leadership was ready to sacrifice millions in a possible ground > invasion

This point in particular comes up a lot , but there is scant actual evidence for it. By this point in the war, the constant firebombing had destroyed any sort of infrastructure allowing for such a strong defense. Contemporary US military estimates of a ground invasion get nowhere near those casualty numbers

<comment><USER9> > This point in particular comes up a lot , but there is scant actual evidence > for it.

There is scant evidence for this (honest question)?

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Downfall#Operation_K...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Downfall#Operation_Ketsug%C5%8D)

> Contemporary US military estimates of a ground invasion get nowhere near > those casualty numbers

That's pretty irrelevant, because hindsight is 20/20\. Given the conduct of Japanese in the war, it wouldn't have seemed implausible at the time. The soviets sacrificed millions of their people to repel the Nazis.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> If you find yourself in Western Japan, I highly recommend taking a train to Hiroshima to visit the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum ([http://hpmmuseum.jp/?lang=eng](http://hpmmuseum.jp/?lang=eng)). The only other place I've been that has struck me as poignantly was the Pulitzer Prize Photographs Gallery in DC's Newseum, but of course you can't compare them.

Sounds weird, but if you come out of it really emotionally affected, go get some chocolate from their cafe and take a break. Helps your body recover.

<comment><USER12> Defenitely going there next year. Will be in Osaka and Hiroshima seems like a mandatory visit because of its enormous historic significance.

<comment><USER13> Just came back from a two-week Japan trip a few weeks ago. Osaka was awesome and we're sad we only booked one day there (on recommendation, but we're nightlife people and the travel agent clearly did not cater to our tastes!). Dotonbori blew my mind.

We didn't do Hiroshima and now I also regret that.

The people and country are beautiful and the legacy of WW2 makes me very sad.

<comment><USER14> How can you disentangle the people, the country, and the legacy of WWII? Without the war Japan today might be an unpleasant fascist totalitarian power ruling over most of Asia. It is hard to reconcile the Japan of today with imperial Japan and the war crimes in Korea, China, and the Philippines.

<comment><USER13> I guess I'm not trying to disentangle them? The past should be recognized, but there is a limit to how much accountability we can hold peoples and countries to now

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> The three things that surprised me most when I visited Hiroshima back in the early 2000's.

1: No sitting US President has ever visited the city; only one previous president had been there (Sorry I can't recall if that was Ford or Carter). 2: The center or 'target' of the drop was a hospital and most of its steel structure remained intact. 3: Nature seemed fine; trees were normal, birds were flying, and of course plenty of cats just hanging about (which is a thing anywhere you go in Japan it seems).

<comment><USER16> They were air-detonated, I believe 200 meters above ground level, so the damage was less than the maximum potential of the bombs.

Nagasaki is more solemn, the ground zero area has rubble visible in a glass display area, and ruins of a brick pillar covered with scorch marks from the historic Urakami Christian Church

<comment><USER17> air detonation is for max damage. "The air burst is.. to allow the shockwave of the fission or fusion driven explosion to bounce off the ground and back into itself, creating a shockwave that is more forceful than one from a detonation at ground level." [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_burst](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_burst)

<comment><USER18> I assume the original commenter meant maximum specific damage - <USER2> the air detonation causes a bunch of shockwave structure (pre cursor waves I think?) that result in much increased overall damage over a much larger area at the cost of a reduction in direct damage at the point of detonation (essentially vaporising basically just a few buildings/block vs functionally demolishing an entire city). There's a documentary called (iirc) "trinity and beyond" that covers a lot of this a at least to the level of understanding of a non-physicist like me :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> >all the buildings round about had fallen down except the Jesuits' mission house, which had long before been braced and double-braced by a priest named Gropper, who was terrified of earthquakes;

I wonder if Mr. Gropper survived the war to know that the building survived (the blast) and his actions were not in vain.

</comment><comment><USER20> Discussed in 2016: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11750331](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11750331)

</comment><comment><USER21> I think this is an early piece of reporting that portraits Japan as victim.

I find this video more convincing, because most things produced by Asian people condemning Japanese war crime during wwii is usually not well received: [https://youtu.be/lnAC-Y9p_sY](https://youtu.be/lnAC-Y9p_sY)

This is not necessarily propaganda. But the author sure forget who caused this tragedy and who should be held responsible. They only saw the human tragedy suffered by people in Hiroshima. And trying to depict a scenarios that the suffering is general human tragedy.

Of course, it's not. It's a tragedy of normal citizens fell for the war propaganda, and willingly start and continue an atrocious war crime against Asian and other peiceful living people.

<comment><USER22> Forgetting Japan's bloody past as an imperialist power in SE Asia is convenient when Americans are dazzled by the novelties of samurai warriors, sushi, jujitsu, anime, zen, etc.

<comment><USER21> Not sure why this is down voted.

Japanese culture before wwii in general is on the more brutal and inhuman side on the world culture spectrum.

The romanticized Japanese scenarios in American pop culture is pretty much a product of the entertainment industry, as this op states.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> The movie "Grave of the Fireflies" is a depiction of the incendiary bombing of Kobe and its aftermath.

After watching it, I found myself challenged to explain why the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki are considered worse.

It's here if you haven't seen it yet.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vldWhL5JQxg](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vldWhL5JQxg)

</comment><comment><USER24> I happened to pick up _Manhattan Project: The Birth of the Atomic Bomb in the Words of Its Creators, Eyewitnesses, and Historians_ in a thrift store (in Warsaw, of all places) a few months back, and I highly recommend it. The nuance of the situation in 1945 seems to have been entirely lost today in 2018.

Whether justified or not, there were a lot of "reasons" for the use of the bomb that have been forgotten or are not adequately understood today. Just for starters:

\- Many of the Manhattan Project scientists were motivated to build the bomb before the Nazis. Indeed, this seems to be one of the single biggest reasons for participation in the project. When it finally came out that the Germans were far behind and posed no real threat, a significant number of scientists quit entirely.

\- The Soviets were on the brink of invading Japan and one of the "reasons" for the use of the atomic weapons was as a show of force / deterrent against the Soviets, in anticipation of the upcoming Cold War.

\- The timeline was longer than I had known. Little Boy was dropped on August 6. Fat Man was dropped 3 days later, the same day that the Soviets declared war on Japan. The Japanese didn't surrender until August 15, six days later. The book mentioned that many historians think the Japanese were motivated to surrender more by the Soviet threat of invasion than by the atomic bombings.

In any case, it's a fascinating story that I think any technically-minded person would enjoy reading.

<comment><USER25> > The Soviets were on the brink of invading Japan and one of the "reasons" for > the use of the atomic weapons was as a show of force / deterrent against the > Soviets

Soviet invasion of Japan was discussed in detail on Yalta conference. Don't you think it was a little too late to deter Soviets by bombing Japan?

> The book mentioned that many historians think the Japanese were motivated to > surrender more by the Soviet threat of invasion than by the atomic bombings.

Japanese emperor mentioned both of them when he addressed the nation. I wonder why those historians wasn't aware of that.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> page on firefox becomes blank while scrolling

<comment><USER27> Use reader view, much nicer that way.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> they deserved for what they have done.

</comment><comment><USER29> I don't get it: why doesn't the USA get more flak for being the only country that has used nukes on people?

This is a horrific crime against humanity that this happened not once, but twice. Two bombs that killed ~250,000 people.

The USA should be building monuments as a reminder of how they should never let it happen again. Instead, they are taught that it was necessary to end the war.

<comment><USER30> > Instead, they are taught that it was necessary to end the war.

That is not what we are taught.

What we are taught is that it was a terrible evil that was judged to be the better option of two evils. This is still potentially not true, and in hindsight with knowledge that the Japanese were not nearly as stubborn as we thought they were, it looks terrible. But these are luxuries afforded to people with the Internet and decades of time to analyze the situation that President Truman did not have.

Only idiots in America think that it was necessary to end the war. Quit knocking down strawmen.

<comment><USER31> > But these are luxuries afforded to people with the Internet and decades of > time to analyze the situation that President Truman did not have.

This is a bit like forgiving Nazis because they did not have the internet to read about Jews that they are not so evil.

<comment><USER32> No - it was use nukes or waste 250000 to 500000 US lives (and possibly allow Stalin to occupy half of japan) to make them surrender.

<comment><USER31> According to the official U.S. standpoint. According to others Japan was already on the verge of collapse - supply chains broken, morale very low and all their allies were surrendering.

Its very much possible the Japan would have surrendered a few months later anyway if the US does keeps up the sea blockade and does a few more normal bombing runs.

NOTHING justifies killing 200.000 civilians, its a war crime.

<comment><USER32> I doubt that they would have surrendered in couple of months in a way that would have not exposed Americans to risk of losing their lives.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> And current Japan is trying to rebuild their Army.

</comment><comment><USER34> I'm a student in Japan. The story of Hiroshima is before I was born, but I hear it often.

Speaking of nuclear we had nuclear meltdown in Fukushima a while ago.

<comment><USER35> Where are you studying? I'm on an exchange in Hirodai.

<comment><USER34> I am in Shimane prefecture above Hiroshima. Because it is near, I often go to Hiroshima. I have been to Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park.</comment></comment></comment>


Feds use anti-terror tool to hunt the undocumented - <AUTHOR> http://www.detroitnews.com/story/news/local/detroit-city/2017/05/18/cell-snooping-fbi-immigrant/101859616/ <comment><USER2> Surprise!</comment>


Scientific research: big questions – small data - <AUTHOR> https://blog.esciencecenter.nl/big-questions-small-data-f5a8bed0bb16 <comment><AUTHOR> Despite all great advances in deep learning and big data, scientific research often is more about getting the most from very little data.</comment>


YouTube Offline - <AUTHOR> http://allthingsd.com/20130918/no-internet-no-problem-youtube-getting-ready-to-let-you-watch-videos-offline-on-your-phone/

<comment><USER2> Hmm... sneaky title me thinks.

<comment><AUTHOR> sorry, it wasn't meant to be sneaky. I'll avoid in future...</comment></comment>


The Restless Clock: In Defense of Lamarck (2016) - <AUTHOR> http://plausiblefutures.com/restless-clock-defense-lamarck/ <comment><USER2> TLDR: An historian urges biologists to don't discard Lamarck's theories of evolution because epigenetics or something. There's a bizarre framing of the debate between the "mainstream" neo-Darwinists and ???(non-scientists)?

This veers close to marrying MeToo and climate change denials.</comment>


A Bit of Advice for the JavaScript Semicolon Haters - <AUTHOR> http://benalman.com/news/2013/01/advice-javascript-semicolon-haters/

<comment><USER2> I've never liked the aesthetics of a leading comma....

      var foo = {
            bar: 100
          , baz: 200
      };

However the fact that (some) Javascript engines don't like trailing commas...

      var foo = {
          bar: 100,
          baz: 200,    // this borked the last time I tried it!
      };

causes me no end of trouble coming from regular Perl usage where they are allowed (and recommended best practise).</comment>


(GitHub) Git LFS 1GB bandwidth free tier limitation - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/azul3d/engine/issues/156 <comment><USER2> The blog post that lists the limitation: [https://github.com/blog/1986-announcing-git-large-file- stora...](https://github.com/blog/1986-announcing-git-large-file-storage-lfs)

Part of the communication issue is that Github doesn't treat "Free" as a plan so there's no good place to place limitations. [https://github.com/pricing](https://github.com/pricing)

I suppose that part of that is the subtle difference between the idea that "Github is free for open source projects" versus "being free for you to host your open source project". There's a separation between users and accounts along the lines of Github as a free social network and as a money making business.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> (OP here) @shurcooL raised an interesting point with me while chatting.

If I commit a 50 MB file into a git repo, GitHub is just "OK, download as much as you want". But if I put it into git-lfs where it really belongs? "No, you need to purchase data packs for >1GB bandwidth!".

I mostly just submitted this to warn others of the nuances here.

</comment><comment><USER3> This is honestly not surprising.

Git LFS is an over-engineered solution to the problem that deliberately makes running your _own_ LFS server needlessly complex.

All of this just encourages/reaffirms people's decision to use GitHub, and then of course they end up having to pay extra for data transmission on LFS stored files.</comment>


Accelerating SQL[ite] Database Operations on a GPU with CUDA [pdf] - <AUTHOR> http://www.cs.virginia.edu/~skadron/Papers/bakkum_sqlite_gpgpu10.pdf

<comment><USER2> This is really cool, but something doesn't smell right.

1) They give numbers from a single-core CPU implementation, and from a many- core GPU implementation, and they discuss numbers from a many-core CPU implementation as well, like some of the new four- or eight-core chips; without many-core CPU numbers, it's comparing apples to oranges.

2) What indices are on the table? Does the GPU have any indices? A read-only database is certainly going to have indices, and (hopefully) covering indices for all the big queries.

3) SQLite has strongly-typed _values_ not _columns_ (you can stick a string in an integer column and that's just fine) and it seems like they disregarded much of the SQLite type system, only focusing on integer values. I'd like to know how much time is spent on type checking values.

</comment><comment><USER3> The queries are extremely simple (in appendix after references) and, in the absence of indexes, require independent evaluation of all of the rows in the table. This maps extremely well to the CUDA architecture which has hundreds of memory-coupled independent processing elements.

But this isn't anywhere near the typical usage scenario of SQL databases. If it was, scaling databases would be trivial by sharding tables across many servers. In real life, you have indexes and joins, which translate into random access patterns, which do not perform very well on CUDA.

</comment><comment><USER4> Heh. When I first saw the document I thought there is no way I am going to read all that now. Surprisingly, the sections that I did end up reading were quite easy to digest (and it's 5am here). I recommend bookmarking it and reading it later if you can't do it now. This is genuinely interesting.

The gem which you might be looking for is:

 _The queries executed on the GPU were an average of 35X faster than those executed through the serial SQLite virtual machine._

(my apologies to authors for reducing the entire document to that)

</comment><comment><USER5> _The contribution of this paper is to implement and demon- strate a SQL interface for GPU data processing. This in- terface enables a subset of SQL SELECT queries on data that has been explicitly transferred in row-column form to GPU memory._

This is fascinating stuff, but having to keep the entire DB in GPU memory poses some obviously non-trivial problems in terms of practical applications.

</comment><comment><USER6> When are databases ever cpu bound?

<comment><USER2> I was going to give you a snarky answer, because one of the preconditions for the paper is that it's CPU vs GPU operating on an in-memory database (so there's no disk access by definition), but in thinking about it perhaps it's not even CPU bound but cache-miss bound, and you could trade the latter for the former by compressing the data into a trie or something smarter than just a B+tree.</comment></comment>


Flapping Bird game open sourced - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/C0deH4cker/FlappingBird

<comment><USER2> This is an extremely simple game to clone, it's pretty interesting that the original creator had so much success

</comment><comment><USER3> You should probably add clone to the title.</comment>


Venture Pimp: IActionable wants to add game mechanics to, uh, everything - <AUTHOR> http://venturepimp.com/post/903678173/iactionable

<comment><USER2> Thanks Mark!

I'm one of the founders of IActionable and would love to answer any questions.</comment>


Ask YC:  Do you feel bad when some users spend way too much time on your site? - <AUTHOR>

I know it's a strange question but I'm curious. <comment><USER2> I worry about it, yes. Particularly when the user is me.

<comment><USER3> Or your startup founders?

I assume you have done the math.

<comment><USER4> Ask PG or RescueTime or 8aweek: how much time has the current YC batch spent on YC news?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Nah. I think in general most users would just watch TV or play a game otherwise.

</comment><comment><USER6> If someone were spending all their time on <http://dfranke.us>, I'd not so much feel bad for them as be rather scared and probably call the cops.

</comment><comment><USER7> Most of the site's I've made in the past have been tools to help my users, so the more a user is on the site, the more are getting at a personal level. Now if it were my blog or something similar, it's their time-I have no room to complain or feel bad. I do the same sometimes when find a new blog or news site I like.

</comment><comment><USER8> You should rephrase the question.

Would you feel bad if your boss overpaid you(on purpose)?

</comment><comment><USER9> Not in the least. They have every right to enjoy their memories as much as they can.</comment>


Ask HN: Online photo service for my entire library? - rkuykendall-com

I would love to sync my entire 500gb+ Aperture library to the web for anyone to browse. I would mark photos / albums as public, give a friend access to a private album, give family access to many private albums, and give my girlfriend access to the whole library, all from the web interface.<p>I know this is possible, but has anyone done it yet? <comment><AUTHOR> Flickr? You can control privacy of "sets" and they have 1TB included now.

<comment><USER2> I think the problem is "sync". I don't know about Aperture, but this has always been a thorn in my side.

<comment> rkuykendall-com Indeed. Exporting _everything_ to Flickr would be a mess, and I don't think Flickr would handle a library that big as well as a service designed for it.

It's looking like this doesn't exist though. Is there any place you can add startup-ideas to a list and hope HNers take them?</comment></comment></comment>


Tell HN: Happy Holidays - <AUTHOR>

Happy holidays and happy hackerdays with your days off (for the non-self employed) <comment><USER2> entrepreneurs have no days off ;-)

<comment><USER3> Compared to past cube jobs, I find every day is a holiday.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Thanks! Right back at ya!

</comment><comment><USER4> Happy holidays! :)

</comment><comment><USER5> Days off? What are those?</comment>


TensorFlow ConvNets on a Budget with Bayesian Optimization - <AUTHOR> http://blog.sigopt.com/post/141501625253/sigopt-for-ml-tensorflow-convnets-on-a-budget <comment><AUTHOR> Hi, I'm one of the co-founders of SigOpt (YC W15) here. I'm happy to answer questions about this post or anything about SigOpt. More info on the methods we use can be found on our research page as well [1].

[1]: [https://sigopt.com/research](https://sigopt.com/research)</comment>


Why Microsoft needed to make Windows run Linux software - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2016/04/why-microsoft-needed-to-make-windows-run-linux-software/ <comment><USER2> I do agree that Windows support for the Linux CLI is a good thing but I hope it doesn't lead the device manufacturers caring less about Linux drivers for consumer hardware.

"What Apple did was to give every computer science and software engineering student a three-pound Unix workstation for not very much money, and unsurprisingly, they proliferated"

Haha, this is a joke, right? College students can rarely afford "premium" things. Maybe the author was some sort of arts major? Apple doesn't make low end laptops. A CS student is much more likely than the general public to "spec out" a laptop and if you're spec'ing out a mid range or lower laptop and don't have a lot of money to throw at a brand then you're very unlikely to wind up with a Mac.

The vast majority of the CS major at UM was running a mid-low end laptop. There was a horribly dated Debain VM that was supposedly used to test run student code that students were encouraged to write their code on. People with tended to stick to Windows with a Linux VM lying around for use if needed. As they got to the classes requiring lower level system calls (threading) they made more use of the Linux VM and a lot of people transferred over completely as they became more comfortable with Linux. There was a direct correlation between available hardware resources and how quickly people switched to Linux. The people who played video games held out the longest. Apple laptops and newer cars did get more common in senior year because more people had summer internships and could afford to drop big money on something. However, there was a pretty big divide in the hardware everyone was running. People had old laptops with batteries that lasted 1min from fully charged and people had new laptops and not much in between.

I think there's a lot of truth truth to academia pushing people toward *nix but I don't think apple laptops affected that one way or the other. Just spending a lot of time in an environment where everything is built LAMP stack or run on the same machine that used to run a LAMP stack for something else is a far bigger influence.

</comment><comment><USER3> I still don't think Windows will become the best dev platform for everyone even with Bash support, even though it is a great addition to the OS. But I think Microsoft is headed the right direction.

Windows really needed a better "native" CLI. This truly solves that issue.</comment>


4 Reasons Why Google Is Bringing Google Plus Back to Life - <AUTHOR> http://recode.net/2015/11/17/three-reasons-why-google-is-resurrecting-google-plus/ <comment><USER2> I like google+, much better than facebook IMO.</comment>


Started in 2014, Trying to list all server monitoring and APM Solutions - <AUTHOR> Back in September 2014, I wrote about an article that touched on the subject of server performance monitoring. After which, a reader asked me via LinkedIn: "I am using New Relic to monitor my cloud servers but need an alternative. Any suggestions?"
So I wanted to share and expand on my answer to that question by creating a quick/go-to list of all the server monitoring and APM solutions out there, as well as get some feedback on tools being used. I haven't tested all of these services listed. But have used more than one third of them. Some, such as SolarWinds, Nagios and New Relic I have been using for over a decade.
Any feedback on whats missing and/or what should be removed from this 5 year old list is very welcomed.
Full list comment below... <comment><USER2> Thank you for the list! I would like to suggest eG Enterprise APM suite which is a full-stack APM solution with Real User Monitoring, Business Transaction Monitoring and Synthetic. Differentiates itself with seamless navigation from APM to deep Infra visibility.

<comment><USER2> Here's the link: [https://www.eginnovations.com/application-performance- manage...](https://www.eginnovations.com/application-performance-management)

<comment><AUTHOR> Will check them out. Thanks!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Full list: [https://haydenjames.io/20-top-server-monitoring- application-...](https://haydenjames.io/20-top-server-monitoring-application- performance-monitoring-apm-solutions/)</comment>


Roguelytics – Real-Time On-Page Analytics Free for All Developers - <AUTHOR> https://www.roguelytics.com/ <comment><USER2> Seriously ? Lying on Hacker News will only bring you troubles.

Your title say "free" while the pricing on the platform says not free !</comment>


What's the sound of a great 60 seconds pitch? - <AUTHOR> http://pitch.vocalytics.com/

<comment><USER2> This is great - love the interface.

I'm wondering about the pace metric - just by listening, it seems that some of these pitches are much faster (mailchimp) than others but the pace indicator looks pretty much the same for most of them. What are the extremes of the scale? It seems in order to get a "slow", you'd have to speak at 1 syllable per second or so. Maybe narrow the range a bit?

EDIT:

And it would be cool to have some sort of summary or total score on the overview page for each pitch.

<comment><AUTHOR> Agreed on both points... We wait to have more data to get a global score that is fine tuned for pitches.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> This is a mighty cool idea.</comment>


Yakatee: Public chat, but only with people using the same WiFi AP/Router - <AUTHOR> http://yaketee.com/

<comment><USER2> Are we going to see many ChatRoulette types of products coming out now?

<comment><AUTHOR> This isn't quite like CR. It's persistent, and it's not only 1-to-1.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: How do you hire? - <AUTHOR>

we(me and cousin) just started our own small company, cousin manages everything related to customer, finding projects, administrative stuff and etc. I am the only programmer in company, we don't have lots of projects yet, but we need to hire another programmer. turns out finding new hire is not so easy, most of the experienced devs have job, in order to find junior developer I am teaching at local programming course, but I don't feel like they are doing well (maybe I was also like them back in college). So how do you hire if you have trade-off for salary, at this moment sure we cannot pay big salary, but we also do not want to hire someone who doesn't know anything and spend time to teach them and when they are ready to work they may leave. <comment><USER2> > How do you hire?

If that's the question -- the answer is simple. I have worked at places that want the best developers we can find. So we paid market salary+benefits. We wanted entry-level and experts, and so paid them according to their value.

You want top 10%, then pay top 10%. If you can't afford it -- that's ok -- find someone who is not as good and train them. If they become top 10%, pay them more. Oh -- and charge enough for the work they do so that you don't worry about it.

It's a trade-off -- make the trade-off.

</comment><comment><USER3> Pay a huge salary. If you can't afford it, share the profit. Three guys means 33% for each one. So offer 33% of all profits for the next two years, paid monthly or when the company gets money. It's expensive, but you keep your equity. Offer less, and nobody will be interested. The offer must be compelling. Nobody likes cheap nitpickers.

After a year or so you can also figure out if this new developer should be an equity owner. Or if paying him for work is enough.

</comment><comment><USER4> Very difficult; I would look at open source projects somehow related to what you need. There are developers that are 10-times as productive as others, or 100-times. These you need to get motivated; Sharing part of your company is tough if they do not hang around for the long term, so if you give them options, have it mature over a few years.

Go for cheap, newbies hardly ever pays off. Imho domain knowledge matters, too.

<comment><AUTHOR> I need someone who has programming mindset even he doesnt know programming, because I am ready to teach him if he is going to be with us for at least 1-2 years</comment></comment>


On a lady who knows the word for "butterfly" in 139 languages - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/21/nyregion/amid-butterflies-a-bit-of-a-lingua-franca-at-the-natural-history-museum.html

<comment><USER2> In Sinhala, it's "Samanalaya".</comment>


To Fight Religious Monuments, Atheists Plan Their Own Symbols - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/05/us/to-fight-religious-monuments-atheists-plan-their-own-symbols.html?hp&_r=0

<comment><USER2> "True equality means all or none," "Christianity has had an unfair privilege for at least the last 150 years. We want to level the playing field by stripping them of privilege, and bringing them to equality with all other ideologies."

That's silly, you don't want to include suicide-bomber's ideology. Not all ideologies are created equal.</comment>


Robust Adversarial Examples - <AUTHOR> https://blog.openai.com/robust-adversarial-inputs/ <comment><USER2> My own view of this having spent some time in visual neuroscience is that if you really want vision that is robust to these kinds of issues then you have to build a geometric representation of the world first, and then learn/map categories from that. Trying to jump from a matrix to a label without having an intervening topological/geometric model of the world in between (having 2 eyes and/or the ability to move and help with this) is asking for trouble because we think we are recapitulating biology when in fact we are doing nothing of the sort (as these adversarial examples reveal beautifully).

<comment><USER3> We tried that; the reason deep nets are popular is that they outperform geometric (or other problem-specific) models. This might be because they implicitly develop such representations somewhere along the way, or because such a representation is not really necessary for visual classification.

Additionally, introducing ancillary modules is not without cost-- you might gain robustness to some kinds of adversarial inputs at the expense of becoming vulnerable to others. There's plenty of ways to fool biological visual systems: c.f. magic-eye posters, optical illusions, or the various exploits described in Lettvin and Pitts' paper "What the Frog's Eye Tells the Frog's Brain".

<comment><USER4> > outperform

I think that remains to be seen, at least in the general case, since we haven't yet agreed on a measure of performance. The debate around adversarial examples can be interpreted as arguing over the proper measure of performance. Although so far the debate is doing so somewhat implicitly, since afaik nobody has formalized a measure of robustness to adversarial examples; it's progressed more by case studies (which is fine, since research into NN robustness is still quite early stage, and case studies can help illustrate issues). I think it can be fairly said that neural nets perform well _on the ImageNet benchmark_ and similar measures of performance. But whether those are good measures of performance, or whether some kind of metric that weights robustness more heavily should be used (and what methods would perform well on that) is the subject of current research, like this research.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> There are plenty of adversarial examples for humans too: [http://i.imgur.com/mOTHgnf.jpg](http://i.imgur.com/mOTHgnf.jpg)

<comment><USER6> Is it though? The human correctly interpreted the image. The problem is that the image was well, not "real". Human have a limit of figuring out what is real and not real based on experience.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> IMO, what these adversarial examples give us is a way to boost training data. We should augment training datasets with adversarial examples, or use adversarial training methods. The resulting networks would only be more robust as a result.

As for self-driving cars, this is a good argument for having multiple sensing modalities in addition to visual, such as radar/lidar/sonar, and multiple cameras, infrared in addition to visible light.

<comment><USER8> But at what point do you have to wonder if we're using the wrong basis? And how do you know that augmenting the data with tiny adversarial perturbations won't just leave the network vulnerable in a different direction?

It's pretty obvious how to build translational symmetry into a net that's still expressive and easy to train (convolution). But you have to spoon feed CNNs rotational and other symmetries by augmenting the training data. What you really want is a model that has all the symmetries your data has built in.

My sense is that the community at large seems to regard DL as a magic blackbox which it really is not. Complete basis of function + finite data = guarantee of wonky interpolation between samples. What you really need to do is restrict the class of expressible functions to those you need - build your prior into the model.

<comment><USER9> This is a huge topic in applying ML in physics and chemistry where we already have a lot of prior detailed knwoledge about the systems we want to describe and it would be silly not to build it into the ML models.

<comment><USER10> What's the current state of art in this direction? Is there a way to encode equations explicitly prior to training?

<comment><USER9> People now try to use ML anywhere and everywhere so it's wild west a little. Three examples: [1] uses a standard neural net to represent a many-body wave function, with all the machinery of quantum mechanics on top of that, and reinforcement learning to find the true ground state. [2] uses a handcrafted neural net, which by construction already takes advantage of a lot of prior knowledge, to directly predict molecular energies. [3] uses a simple kernel ridge regression coupled with a sophisticated handcrafted scheme to automatically construct a good basis (set of features) for a given input, to predict molecular energies.

In all these cases, the ML itself is not the target problem, but only a tool, and most effort goes into figuring out where exactly to use ML as a part of a larger problem, and how to encode prior knowledge, either via feature construction or neural net handcrafting.

[1] [http://sci-hub.io/10.1126/science.aag2302](http://sci- hub.io/10.1126/science.aag2302)

[2] [http://sci-hub.io/10.1038/ncomms13890](http://sci- hub.io/10.1038/ncomms13890)

[3] [https://arxiv.org/pdf/1707.04146.pdf](https://arxiv.org/pdf/1707.04146.pdf)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I can paint a road to a tunnel on a mountain side and fool some amount of people. Meep. Meep.

The problem isn't that there are adversarial inputs. The problem is that the adversarial inputs aren't _also_ adversarial (or detectable) to the human visual system.

</comment><comment><USER12> Does this effect carry over to classifiers which were trained with different training data?

<comment><USER3> I am unsure what you mean-- do you mean with different training sets but the same testing set?

It's an interesting question; maybe the reason for (some) of these adversarial vulnerabilities is due to a handful of bad training examples. You could formulate it as a search problem to see if there's particular images (or small groups of images) that are responsible for the adversarial vulnerabilities. This might then indicate that some of these perturbations are really just taking advantage of the fact that neural nets tend to "memorize" some of the data, so we're not really exploiting some deep structural feature so much as just feeding the echo of an input that the net has learned to automatically classify as, say, a computer/desk[0].

It would be a good project, but I don't have enough GPUs on hand to train scores of deep nets from scratch.

Assuming one were to bite the bullet, it might also be worth trying different data augmentation strategies. Most of the time, we try to eke out additional performance/robustness by using the same sets of transformations (translation, rotation, cropping, rescaling, etc.), but if the net is vulnerable to adversarial examples because of something in the training set, then you might just be making sure that adversarial vulnerability is present everywhere in the image and at multiple scales.

On a related note, there's an interesting paper about _universal_ adversarial perturbations, i.e. those that can be added to _any_ image and thereby induce a misclassification with high probability[1]. This effect holds even across different models, so the same perturbation can cause a misclassification in different architectures.

\</comment></comment><comment>

0\. Neural nets learn by some combination of abstraction and memorization. If, for some reason, many members of a particular class are hard to generalize, then it's possible that they instead learn to identify some particular aspects of those classes (that are not usually present in other images) and have a disproportionate response when those features are present. If such features are not obvious to human visual inspection, then we get misclassifications without insight into _why_ they were misclassified.

1\. [https://arxiv.org/pdf/1610.08401.pdf](https://arxiv.org/pdf/1610.08401.pdf)

<comment><USER12> > I am unsure what you mean-- do you mean with different training sets but the > same testing set?

Yes, assuming we have 10000 different training images. Divide these into 5 sets of 2000 each and train 5 networks with them. Assuming that 2000 images are plenty for this application, we will have 5 well trained networks that have similar performance for a test set.

BUT

They will work slightly differently internally and those "inverse gradient search" methods (or what they are called) might only be able to manipulate an image for one network at the time with "specifically chosen additive noise" while the other 4 are unimpressed.

That's assuming that the manipulation can't be targeted at all 5 classifiers at the same time.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> I don't know how you guys think this is an adversarial example. I see a picture of a desktop computer.

</comment><comment><USER14> To me it's an image of a picture regardless of the contents of the picture.

<comment><USER15> A classifier that implements that logic is not going to be useful for anything.

<comment><USER14> It's sure as hell not a cat. cat's aren't flat and don't have white borders. Well I guess it could be road kill.

Once you figure out it's a picture(or photo) of something then figure out what it's a picture of.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> It's not clear to me how malicious actors can manipulate this observation to confuse self-driving cars. That said, I don't think this discredits the point of the article; it's important to note how easily deep learning models can be fooled if you understand the math behind them. I just think the example of tricking self-driving cars is difficult to relate with / understand.

<comment><USER17> Why do you say that? The first demo they provide shows that the adversarial image, when printed and then manipulated, still fools the algorithm. That means that the example is robust to various affine transformations but also to the per-pixel noise that is a result of a printing something and then viewing it again through a camera.

Suppose you were to place an example like that on a stop sign that fooled a car into thinking that it was a tree. The car might blow through an intersection at speed as a result.

The training strategy they used provides a template for doing even more exotic manipulations. For example, you could train an adversarial example that looked like one thing when viewed from far away but something quite different up close. Placing an image like that by a road could result in an acute, unexpected change in the car's behavior (e.g. veering sharply to avoid a "person" that suddenly appeared).

<comment><USER18> Though I generally agree with your point, the tree vs stopsign example may not be the best because it would arguably work equally well on humans.

<comment><USER19> Only if the adversarial image printed doesn't look like the stop sign, though the example in this article shows that it's entirely possible to make an image that just looks like a distorted/badly-printed kitten to a human but completely different to a computer. A similar image for a stop sign might just look like wear in the paint or weird reflections or something but still look like a stop sign to a human.

<comment><USER20> yes but wont we still notice that self driving cars aren't stopping at the stop sign? and we'd investigate</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Obama: No warrantless wiretaps if you elect me (2008) - <AUTHOR> http://www.cnet.com/news/obama-no-warrantless-wiretaps-if-you-elect-me/

<comment><USER2> OK, great. It's terribly, terribly disappointing that he changed his mind, or maybe couldn't get rid of warrantless/dragnet surveillance. He broke a campaign promise, and made himself into Just Another Politician.

But what can we decide from this info? Do elements of the Deep State actually dictate policy to the elected leader? Is the temptation of an all-seeing spy agency just too great? There was clearly some political currency to be had from the issue, but what made him drop it once in office?

<comment><USER3> >But what can we decide from this info?

don't bet on campaign promises, or the idea that a candidate will act according to the party he ran for?

<comment><USER4> Or realize promising things like this is like a student council president promising everyday is pizza day and no school on Fridays.

<comment><USER2> But then why bother? We've all been through election cycles before. We all know that once elected, a lot of promises don't come true. Why even make this one? As I wrote, there was some political capital in the issue, even in 2008. What made Obama change his mind?</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Malcolm Gladwell on the Trick to Building Self-Confidence as an Entrepreneur - <AUTHOR> http://www.inc.com/graham-winfrey/malcolm-gladwell-on-the-trick-to-building-self-confidence.html

<comment><USER2> Interestingly this also supports the argument that Peter Thiel made in Lecture 5 of the Startup Class (by YC at Stanford) to avoid competitive markets or to focus on a niche of the market that doesn't contain any direct competitors</comment>


"SuperFoam" block collapses into chair under weight - <AUTHOR> http://www.cctv.com/english/special/news/20091026/103440.shtml

<comment><USER2> Seems to me like it would take some pretty crazy 3D modeling to come up with that structure. I'd love to see the model of that and how they computed what to put where in order for it to collapse just so. Along the same lines I'm sure the manufacturing of that is pretty unique too.

<comment><USER3> Not really. If you look closely at the video, you can see it's just flat pieces of foam layered on top of each other. Presumably, she hand-made one chair for the competition. My guess is that the "crazy 3D modeling" involved a bunch of trial and error.

I love the simplicity of it, and I'm always amazed at what design students are capable of coming up with.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Here is a video of the chair:

[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PRWIRWZ9hos&feature=playe...](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PRWIRWZ9hos&feature=player_embedded)

</comment><comment><USER5> Original story with background:

[http://www.cctv.com/english/special/news/20091026/103440.sht...](http://www.cctv.com/english/special/news/20091026/103440.shtml)

<comment><USER6> From the start of the second page: "Wu, who has a girlish hairstyle, ..." ... WTF?

<comment><USER7> Yeah the headline also calls her a 'girl' even though she's a University graduate. When does she become a 'woman', I wonder?

<comment><USER8> I'm guessing, when she gets married? Until then it's all messing around with 21st-century algorithmically designed materials, you know, 'girl' stuff.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> For some reason, this chair reminds me of:

<http://www.keilhauer.com/pdf/brochures/Felt.pdf>

</comment><comment><USER10> Wow. Where can I buy one?

</comment><comment><USER11> It's a good gimmick, but on the video it seems to be a regular chair with a few thin layers of foam stretched out over it.

</comment><comment><USER12> It looks more jello-shaped than tofu-shaped to me, although I concede it is more tofu-colored.

</comment><comment><USER13> Tetris chair: [http://technabob.com/blog/2009/10/28/line-breaks-tetris- chai...](http://technabob.com/blog/2009/10/28/line-breaks-tetris-chair)

</comment><comment><USER14> But will it retain fart odors in it's porous materials?

<comment><USER15> I seriously wish HN could handle the humour. Sure, eventually we would degrade from an intelligent discussion to being knee deep in lolcatz and welcoming overlords.

That said, your comment brought needed mirth to my morning.

<comment><USER14> That was actually a serious question.

For anyone that sits for 17 hours a day, you would understand the importance of the ability for your ass to breath.

I switched from an Aeron to Steelcase and it was a huge mistake, for the simple fact that I could not fart sitting down without the odor lingering far longer than it normally should.</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: What are your war stories for converting teams to remote? - <AUTHOR> Stories for starting remote teams also welcome! <comment><USER2> We had a colocated team in Cebu, Philippines. Turns out, not too many Go devs in Cebu, so went remote. Now UTC+1 to UTC+8. Bigger challenges:

\- the utter unfairness that some people are really effective (possibly because experienced) remotely and can just do it while others are not. The latter we gradually "released" into remote work, with a lot of feedback.

\- Biggest skill to be learnt, of course: communication. so much patching up is possible by just noticing someone is in a bad mood, or switching to a live discussion. Doesn't work with remote.

\- hard to support juniors: they need to learn both work skills and communication—and often even don't realize it.

\- learning to take responsibility. You're Internet at home doesn't work today? Too bad—I'm not fixing it for you. You're remote, you figure it out.

\- currently: the realization that most things are _not_ urgent. Going more and more async.

edit: late-night formatting

<comment><USER3> Have contact info? Exploring opportunities in Cebu.

<comment><USER2> Well, we're a remote team. ;) Incidentally, I'm still in Cebu, but it wouldn't matter where you are.

<comment><USER3> I'm just a Cebuano finding excuses to visit home bai :). How's the tech scene over there?

<comment><USER2> Not too sure. You'll likely find stuff for PHP, but a bunch of meetups have gone dormant AFAIK. High paying jobs here are scarce if they exist at all, probably same as when you left.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Disclaimer: not an intentional fully onsite to fully remote conversion, but a gradual transition of existing and addition of new, fully remote members.

\- People miss socializing in the office. We've addressed it by actually drinking coffee and chatting on camera for about 15 minutes after the daily. Also considering regular team-based video game sessions, though the question here is whose time they're on (the company isn't too excited to fund weekly counter-strike time and team members aren't to happy to spend their free time to improve work relations).

\- Daily meetings become way more valuable, as you can no longer just turn to people and go "Hey, Julia, what was that flaky integration test you were fixing yesterday?". It takes a lot of adjustment to figure out when it's worth interrupting people and when you should just write something down and ask on the daily.

\- It's more difficult to effectively manage people. You notice everything on site - sighs, high fives, facial expressions, keyboard rattling, all the things that can help you recognize whether people are happy, stressed, bored, productive etc. Being remote, you need to develop processes to get that information "manually" and in a way that respects your team members (i.e. without constantly breathing down their necks).

<comment> em-bee i don't get why text chat message about that flaky test is any issue.

send it and let the person respond when they are free. doing that in remote work all the time

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> The company I work for is 100% remote. 100% remote is far easier than 10% remote, because all of your processes must evolve around that.

My general observation is that the worse your processes are before your transition, the worse the conversion will go. "By the skin of your teeth" and informal processes are less efficient. Communication must be documented and asynchronous.

We use a typical scrum process. We do daily (short!) standups to keep in touch with each others' stuff.

We're all expected to be on voice chat during work hours. (We have multiple channels for side discussions, meetings, etc). This helps a lot with the feeling of isolation.

We get together in meat space twice a year.

The biggest challenge going forward is growth. We're now too big for one scrum. Even the voice chatter has lessened now, because radio discipline is more important te

<comment><USER6> Is voice chat always on?

<comment><USER5> Push to talk.

<comment><USER7> What software solution and hardware are you using for this?

<comment><USER8> I don't know what the OP uses, but I used Mumble and it was fantastic. Super light, and unbelievable quality.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I've built (not converted) and managed two NA-wide remote teams of high- performers in the last decade (once at my own startup DotSpots, second time here at FullStory). I don't have any particular stories, but happy to answer any questions.

<comment><USER10> how do you facilitate coffee break/after work beers/etc creativity?

<comment><USER11> Two things I've tried (neither of these are ideas original to me, just things I've been a part of and brought with me to multiple orgs):

\- office hours: this is __not a meeting __... it's just a team dialed into a hangout or other voice chat for an hour. Totally optional. Folks can talk while working, talk about work, talk about not work, whatever. Just share the virtual space for a bit. This can be really helpful for "serendipity", building trust and depth in interpersonal communication, cross-training, and otherwise just de-tensioning if you are involved in a high-stakes activity.

\- BOF/hack-a-thon/quarterly on-site... basically, everyone meets somewhere in meatspace for a week (Monday PM to Friday AM). Good things to do during this time: planning, team-building, demos, tech-talks, bring in an outsider or trainer, etc. Lots of larger OSS projects do this.

<comment><USER12> Any interesting outsider / trainer experiences?

<comment><USER11> I've generally only ever had budget for internal stuff. I've tried to bring in leads from other teams to talk about the tech they work with (I mostly worry about backend, so, eg, have client tech leads come in). I find that kind of cross training really helpful for inter-team communication. A surprising number of "backend" engineers don't really know much about their OS or the Unix environment (why this is... I don't know), so having folks from Ops come in and give a quick tutorial on those sorts of things is also really helpful. I could do those things myself, but I think working with leads from other teams helps build rapport and familiarity, it also gives those folks a chance to emphasize what they think would be most helpful for them if we knew more about it.

At a previous job we had good PMs who were skilled as "agile coaches". I hate to call them that, but I think it's probably the closest thing that would be generally understood. They would help organize and host some excellent sessions on how to make our retrospectives and planning sessions go better.

I've also worked with sales engineers from key vendors to come in and do a hands on about new features, if I can schedule it. It's usually low or no cost training. Making better use of tools you pay for can be huge.

Ps. Would love to hear more about others experiences with outside trainers coming in for hands-on sessions.

<comment><USER12> Hey thanks, these are great ideas and inspiration!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> My war stories are only about remote-first teams slowly perverted into office- based ones... sadpanda.jpg

<comment><AUTHOR> I agree with you there.

Were there any major reasons why they were converted?

<comment><USER13> In one case, sales & admin felt "uneasy" not having a real office where to invite customers and partners. I honestly don't see how a crappy shared-space office is better than no office, but I'm not in sales... Another case, ISO-8000something about controlling infrastructure from which you access customer sites; which is kinda stupid in the third millennium, but there you go.

The problem is that, as soon as you have expensive real estate paid for, you get all sort of pressure about actually using it, so new hires are placed there 100% etc etc, until "grandfathered remotes" are effectively considered legacy.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I didn't start a remote team myself but for the past few months I've been trying to get into one.. Honestly the worst thing that I'm facing at the moment is lack of trust. I've passed interview tests, showcased code, showcased apps already running in production, went through dozens of meetings and for some reason people still think I'm there to scam them.

<comment><USER2> Curious, how do you know that lack of trust is the reason? I mean, they wouldn't tell you, right? Maybe it's something simpler like, salaries, timezone, ...?

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Lack of trust by management quickly turning into micromanagement which turns into resentment. It's really hard to stop it once it starts.

</comment><comment><USER16> I've been working remotely for the past decade. Some issues I think any company will deal with:

At most places, I never felt connected to the company. Since I didn't have that social aspect of talking face-to-face every day.

The amount of discipline it takes to work remotely is the same as starting your own company. You need to be able to keep working, knowing that there isn't someone watching you all day. Most people can't handle this and end up getting very distracted at home. One company where I worked went through many employees because of this.

Communication is key and you need a manager that can communicate very well. In my experience, introverts were the worst remote managers. Passive aggressiveness and poor communication went hand-in-hand with introverted managers.

One manager was poor at communicating, wouldn't take the blame for issues with his own code, and I had to initiate all communication regarding projects and tasks because there would always be something intentionally or unintentionally missing.

I would complete a task/project and then after it was completed, the manager would reprimand me because something was missing. I always try to fix these situations, so in future tasks, I would have a voice call and go over everything that needed to be completed. This really didn't change anything.

I left the company over frustration and within 6 months, it went out of business.

</comment><comment><USER17> We started as an "office company" in 2011, turned partly remote in 2014 and fully remote in 2018. Being all in an office worked great. Fully remote worked great. Anything in between is difficult. Remote workers are just not fully integrated, no matter being it things happening spontaneously in the office or social events.

Also in confirmation of one of the sibling comments these have been for us the main issues as well:

• Communication is a skill that most engineers don't possess and have difficulty learning.

• We stopped working with junior people. It's just too time-consuming grooming them remotely.

• Teaching team members that they are responsible for their own working environment. Shitty Internet and working from a loud coffee shop is just not acceptable. Still, they do it.

To onboard new team members and even as guidelines on a daily basis we've written and published an extensive company handbook (used to be a not so visually appealing internal wiki): [https://mobilejazz.com/company-handbook- pdf/](https://mobilejazz.com/company-handbook-pdf/)

</comment><comment><USER18> We went from partial remote to full remote with zero issues. Our team was half or more remote by the time of the transition. Everyone worked remotely at least part of the time before the switch. We already had remote processes in place. Frankly, it doesn't have to be a war story. It can be a smooth transition.

We don't force socialize people. We don't force video on people. We don't force schedules, other than a daily and weekly meeting, although even that early forced start time leads to lost productivity from the engineering team members that prefer to start later. But we had the same problem before the change. The managers run the scrum meeting simply for their own benefit to the detriment of the team. So just like everywhere else. Other than that, it works great. Few meetings outside of this. A lot less time wasted lollygagging around the water cooler, playing games, going to lunch, and so many other useless activities that chew up a typical day on site.

I will never go back to an on-site company if I can help it.

<comment> house9-2 > We don't force socialize people

That's good. I prefer to keep work and normal life separate. Of course you can develop great friendship through work, no need to force it.

> We don't force video on people

Once you are established that seems fine, but when bringing on new members I get a better feeling that I am dealing with another human being instead of some random person bugging me on slack.

> I will never go back to an on-site company if I can help it.

Same

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> A good manager is one whose absence doesn't affect performance. Most managers are there for power, game of control, therefore hate remote work. At best they micromanage - "Did your Slack status turn to 'Away' for a few seconds? Here is an urgent message from me!"

</comment><comment><USER20> I've been working remote for over 5 years. Here are my lessons.

1) work from home is really hard. Home is home, work is work. You need either a fully isolated work room where you only work or go to some co-working space which is work. Dress like you're going to work. No pajama work days. Best is when you have couple of folks in same city that make a remote satellite office. I've seen great success with many satellite offices.

2) ensure you have good internet connection, a good headset with noise cancellation mic and speakers, a good camera that works in low light. A good powerful machine. MacBook pros are prolly the most popular.

3) Out of sight, out of mind is a real thing. Reply to messages within a certain timeframe, say an hour. I used to have morning hours which was reviews and discussion. I replied immediately and was open to any interruptions. Evening hours I liked to get 3-4 hours of in the zone focus.

4) write things down. Google docs, slack, wikis are great tools. For every project I used to have a team doc with overall eagle eye plan + weekly notes. What happened last week? what metrics/impact we moved? What we're gonna do this week, why we're gonna do it and what metrics/impact we think will be made. Anyone could look at the doc and had a good idea where things were headed. Documenting progress is just as important as actually making the progress.

5) There's usually some work timezone where everyone is expected to have at- least 4 hours in common. Make use of that. Set 1:1s, talk about feelings, ideas, overall health of business, kitchen sink conversations etc.

6) remote folks sometimes end up being over worked. Know when to shut off and switch to "non-work" mode. It's important.

</comment><comment><USER21> In an office setting, A lot of personality tendencies (To excel or slack off) are tamped down. I've caught myself more than once in a position where I waited too long and let too many red flags pass by telling me that a team member could not cut it as we reorganized with more or all remote work. I wish I had cut them or decided to make the difficult investment to coach back towards success earlier.

</comment><comment><USER22> Does anyone have a concrete set of requirements before going remote? My managers want to do this but I'm not convinced we have the right stuff, in terms of process.

Stuff like:

How should we/should we not set up our git repo? How should we organize our slack channels, meetings, team documentation, etc.

<comment><USER14> Honest question: why would those things be different? I mean, of course meetings can't happen if everyone is in a different timezone, but everything else should be just the same as with a non-remote team.

<comment><USER22> I don't know, that's why I'm asking.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> My favorite anecdote is from adding an _on-site_ intern to a remote team. So, it started with my team being split accross three locations, including the main office where I was. Then we finally got a working student / intern as support who was placed at the main office. As luck would have it, the project he could best support the team was handled by one of the remote team members.

long story short, I was so used to manage the team remotely, that it took me almost two months to realize the intern, as far as HR was concerned my intern, was remotely managed by someone who was remotely managed by me. despite the intern sitting right across my desk. Embarassing when I realized it, but it showed what a damn good team it was.

</comment><comment><USER24> I love this question so much and have been thinking about it for the past few days (especially as I just put out a four-part guide on remote work).

Here are a few stories I picked up in the past five years:

I was an executive at a tech company which had a HQ in California. I joined to lead our European expansion so from the outset it was clear that I was going to be defacto 'remote'. Although, at the time it wasn't discussed as such. What was very obvious was that at the start the responsibility was very much on me to get in front of the people I needed, be heard, aggressively communicate what I wanted/needed, wake up early, stay online late, set reminders to ping people before I would go to bed...

Then in order to acquire the best talent, the company decided to become remote-friendly (and later remote-first). And more or less immediately I felt the burden of responsibility lifting form our small European team because I (and the European team) was no longer alone in the remote work situation.

The moment the company was clear on its intention, the habits started to settle in and everyone seemed to get on the same page. It was quite impressive to watch. But this shift was absolutely intentional and top-down driven.

One interesting impact the shift to remote-friendly (which lead us to become remote-first) was the following:

An increasing number of people took advantage of this shift, the HQ office slowly started to empty and lost the upbeat and busy atmosphere it once had. The remote attitude also started to extend to people working at HQ and remote became synonymous for 'Work from home' and making this a recurring habit was tempting. Seeing as the default was starting to be remote, it mattered far less if the HQ people were physically in the office because all those habits necessary for remote work had settled in.

I would certainly avoid the blend of remote work and centralised office because right from the outset it creates two separate cultures. I would advocate for going all in if you are doing in. While we were transitioning we certainly had two cultures.

Common mistakes: \- not being explicit and intentional with the decision \- not knowing why you are doing this shift in the first place \- seeing it as a perk rather than a fundamentally new way of working \- not preparing for such a shift \- being very clear on what 'remote' means for your company (how are you defining it)

</comment><comment><USER25> I've worked with teams in india and employees there ( rightly) feel no involvement/empathy for the project. They just wanted to write software to spec, go home, get paid. And writing software specs doesn't really work. I don't see why someone getting paid to write software to spec doesn't do exactly that.

</comment><comment><USER26> Converting a team is difficult because you:

a) Already have ways of communicating that aren't particularly friendly to being remote

b) Presumably have a lot of people on a few locations so remote employees outside those areas can feel left out of the loop

The question I have is, why do you want to convert to remote? What is the drive and goal?</comment>


What's new in Neo4j 2.0 - alok-g http://www.slideshare.net/neo4j/new-in-2

<comment><AUTHOR> I really really wish they'd Javadoc their code properly, before they do anything else at all..</comment>


Show HN: Design Critique Cards - <AUTHOR> https://www.designcritiquecards.com/ <comment><AUTHOR> A colleague made a pack of design critique cards a few years ago as a way of helping the design process. I thought (with his blessing) that it'd be nice to make these more widely available in a randomized form, so built this mini site.

There's nothing complex here, it's basically just one file of semantic HTML, a bit of styling and some basic vanilla JS. But it's screenreader compatible (tested with VoiceOver) and has the necessary bits and pieces to be installable on phones to allow for usage whenever you want without any network connection.</comment>


Anyone Can Contribute to Open Source - <AUTHOR> https://www.works-hub.com/learn/anyone-can-contribute-to-open-source-find-out-how-dce92 <comment><USER2> I've had an idea for a project but I suspect it's either done already in whole or in part: a multi-editor, offline-capable, cross-platform blog composer/editor app. Think Live Writer but for macOS and Linux too, and one where the master state of the whole site lives locally. Sounds like something that could be done by combining Ghost, Electron, SQLite and a few other bits.... but this also seems so obvious that someone had to have done it already, but I can't see that it's been done.

THAT is my challenge of the week in contributing to open source: not wanting to reinvent a wheel that seems so obvious it has to have been done, right?</comment>


Ask YC:  Read any good books lately? - <AUTHOR>

I'm currently reading Regional Advantage: Culture and Competition in Silicon Valley and Route 128 by Annalee Saxenian, and I'm loving it.  It covers the history and tech culture of Silicon Valley vs Boston.  I'd recommend it to anyone trying to get a grip on what makes Silicon Valley unique.  I was suprised, but a lot of the Valley's distinct high tech culture flows from the early years of Fairchild, HP and Intel.  This book provides great readable insight into that culture.
What are you reading that's good? <comment><USER2> Eileen Powers' _Wool Trade in English Medieval History_ , Geary's _Before France and Germany_ , Dorrie's _100 Great Problems of Elementary Mathematics_ , Saga's _Confessions of a Yakuza_ , and a terrible book on Klee that I bought for the illustrations.

If you want to understand Silicon Valley, I would not recommend Saxenian's book. Lecuyer's seems better.

<comment><AUTHOR> Are you referring to: _Making Silicon Valley: Innovation and the Growth of High Tech, 1930-1970_ ?

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> You might want to explore someone of your taste here: <http://www.facebook.com/apps/application.php?id=2406120893>

I was one of the initial creators, not involved any more. They should have pretty good suggestions for you and I can bet you will bump into your biblo- twin there.

</comment><comment><USER4> Influence by Robert Cialdini. This book is required reading for any entrepreneur who will eventually be a marketer (i.e. all of them)

</comment><comment><USER5> Born Standing Up by Steve Martin, wry observations on growing up to become really really creative. It makes me less sad that I left magic tricks behind me.</comment>


Fring: Cross Platform Mobile IM - <AUTHOR> http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/fring.php <comment><USER2> Fring is interesting, but this article written really, really badly.</comment>


Ask HN: RFS 3: Things Built on Twitter. Where are the companies? - <AUTHOR>

I've seen plenty of press come out around all the startups that came out of ycombinator this year. I haven't seen much about the twitter startups. I'm interested because our startup http://keytweet.com applied under that RFS. We have, like the other startups, been working hard all summer. I'd really like to see how we stack up against the companies that did get YC funding. We are working on a major redesign...so stayed tuned. <comment><USER2> I think people are catching on that building a company that's totally dependent on an third party whose interests aren't intrinsically aligned with yours is dangerous. Sometimes it works out, but it adds a lot of risk.

So, "things built on Twitter" isn't more popular because you're throwing yourself at the whims of another company which isn't a very solid foundation for a business.

</comment><comment><USER3> Some data which may be interesting and indicative of less interest in Twitter- oriented startups overall.

Investment in pure-play Twitter startups dropped 50% vs last year.

[http://www.cbinsights.com/blog/venture-capital/pure-play- twi...](http://www.cbinsights.com/blog/venture-capital/pure-play-twitter- startups-attract-50-less-venture-capital-and-angel-investment-than-last-year)

</comment><comment><USER4> Well, my 'Built on Twitter' micro startup (a twitter client for feature- phones) hasn't been quite a success I was hoping for. It has attracted some users, and still hovers somewhere at the bottom of top 100 clients, but after I realized I don't have a good way to monetize it, I decided to leave it and move to a greener pastures.

</comment><comment><USER5> <http://www.fanchatter.com/> are YC alums who've built their company to some degree on twitter. They went through a few years ago, probably pre-RFC 3.</comment>


It Could Be Old Age, or It Could Be Low B12 - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/29/health/vitamin-b12-deficiency-can-cause-symptoms-that-mimic-aging.html?src=me&ref=general

<comment><USER2> Let me be the first to post the obligatory vegan response to this.

Yes most every vegan knows about B12 supplementation. People who don't know the vegan viewpoint might view this article as critical to us.

Vitamin B12 is the new Vitamin D. In yesteryears, Vitamin D deficiencies were a huge public health concern. Companies, especially milk companies, began fortifying their product with vitamin D and marketing that fact because consumers responded well to "give milk to your kids or they'll get rickets". Now D deficiency is rare. If you read ingredients labels often (and shop at health food stores) like most vegans, you'll have noticed that many, many products are now fortified with B12 and other B vitamins. Even many energy drinks! This article seems pretty misleading by saying vegans "must consume supplements or fortified breakfast cereals to get adequate amounts [of B12]." They seem to be saying "Vegans who don't take supplements or don't eat some esoteric cereal for breakfast every day will become demented." Why mention only "breakfast cereals"? Why not any of the growing number of foods fortified with B12? I guess no article on NYT would be complete without some spin.

I'm glad this was posted in the NYT because B12 deficiency in everyone's diet is a big concern. We as consumers should be aware of which companies are deciding to fortify their products and support those by buying their products. Hopefully this can go the way of Vitamin D.

<comment><USER3> Lack of sufficient B12 also causes one to erroneously believe that they are being slighted by the mass media.

<comment><USER2> Sneak, if you think the media, especially the NYT, does their job well and reports without bias, you're sheltered and ignorant.

It's also surprisingly bad that you go around defending the media and calling others "erroneous" who call the authenticity of the reporting into question. Agribusiness is one of the largest lobby groups in America. Do you know how lobbyists get their agenda across? One of their most successful ways is to pay journalists. This is simple PR expenditure for them. And it works. And people like you defend them.

And you seem to making some jab at me lacking B12 as if my veganism threatens you. I see this all the time with people who are insecure in their own opinions.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Pernicious Anemia, the inability of the body (digestive system specifically) to absorb B12, can be very difficult to detect. An ex-gf had it, and spent two years going to doctors all over the world trying to figure out was wrong with her.

At various times she was diagnosed with a hole in heart (for which invasive open-heart surgery was the cure), auto-immune disease, MS, depression, and other totally worse and completely unrelated conditions. She was suspicious of all and kept getting second opinions until she finally found a doctor who got it right. The treatment is relatively simple, weekly self-administered B12 injections.

So if you find yourself feeling worn, tired, mentally "cloudy"/"fuzzy", neuropathy (fading feeling) in your extremities, or other neuro-related issues, definitely look into this before you investigate more severe conditions.

</comment><comment><USER5> Interesting article, especially for those of us who have to problem solve for a living. Also, I didn't realize that stomach antacids (Prilosec, Pepcid, etc) could inhibit the body's ability to absorb B12.

<comment><USER6> I used to take Prilosec everyday, and although I changed my diet and exercised more, I also started taking B vitamins. After six months I'm about 90% cured of acid reflux and can even eat some things I had to avoid early on.

[http://www.livestrong.com/article/303855-b-vitamins-that- sto...](http://www.livestrong.com/article/303855-b-vitamins-that-stop-acid- reflux/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> For a list of foods ordered by B-12 content, see:

[https://www.ars.usda.gov/SP2UserFiles/Place/12354500/Data/SR...](https://www.ars.usda.gov/SP2UserFiles/Place/12354500/Data/SR24/nutrlist/sr24w418.pdf) [pdf]

From: <http://www.ars.usda.gov/Services/docs.htm?docid=22114>

<comment><USER8> Good thing I'm a meataterian! :D

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Nutritional yeast on popcorn. It's full of B12. It's usually in the bulk bins at your local grocery store. Kind of an odd cheesy taste, but you get used to it quickly. Most animal products also have a good amount of B12.

<comment><USER10> Gotta be careful - many nutritional yeasts are fortified with B12, but the yeast product itself doesn't naturally contain B12.

That said, it's yummy stuff.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Are there people who still do not take a multivitamin daily?

Some studies say it doesn't help but I have to think that if someone has a complete deficiency, it must provide a base level of sustenance?

</comment><comment><USER12> Some good reading on B12: <http://veganhealth.org/articles/vitaminb12>

</comment><comment><USER13> Totally sloppy journalism. Anecdote followed by fact dropping intended to create the impression that the facts support the conclusion of the anecdote.

<comment><USER14> You're right, but it still does not change how vitamin b12 deficiency is linked to depressive disorders: <http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/12450964>

I found it through: <https://www.google.com/search?q=vitamin+b12+depression>

The article doesn't mention methyl-b12. Most supplements supply the non-methyl type, which is cheaper and useless. I first learned from it from knowledgeofhealth.com. I passed the info. to an acquaintance. She and her adult daughter finally had the energy to take showers and go back to work. (They used NOW Foods Methyl-B12 and TwinLab Folic Acid caps.)

As much as I dislike NYTimes, at least it got attention on HN. If I had submitted a link to similar data, it would have been ignored since NYTimes gets people's attention. I'm used to it. My idiot relatives ignored me when I told them my cousin could have a vitamin B12 deficiency. This after they took him to some shrink and a medical doctor diagnosed him with... a vitamin b12 deficiency! The only time they get excited for vitamins/supplements is to lose weight or gain energy.

<comment><USER13> Good points. BTW how do I check if the b vitamin supplement I have (which I take occasionally b/c I don't eat much meat) is methyl or non-methyl?

I only made the remark about the journalistic quality b/c lately I've noticed that that exact structure (anecdote -> fact dropping -> implied conclusion) is very commonly used by the Times in all different sections of the paper, and clearly from the success of the paper many people are unaware that they are reading a persuasive piece.

<comment><USER14> Check the ingredients list on label. If it says, "cyanocobalamin", you got the cheap stuff. If it says, "METHYLcobalamin", you got the good stuff.

I also recommend Purity Products multi-vitamins. Those are the best I found. They put supermarket/drug store namebrands to shame. Just follow the directions on the bottle. (The only reason I stopped taking them was because they are expensive.)

I agree with you on the NYTimes and other major publications, including TV. I remember when they tried to link Vitamin C to breast cancer. Most of the "indie" stuff I read is in a very different format: General overview, laymen's terms, with plenty of citations to studies and research throughout. I then use Google for more verification and expansion on the issue. I found the world is working against you: It's so easy to get mediocre info. and then think the vitamin/supplement claims are just pure hype.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> The most amazing study on nutrition I've ever seen, is where a morbidly obese person did not eat for one year but was kept perfectly healthy with nutrition supplements: <http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2495396/>

He went from 486 to 180 lbs, and kept it off afterwards, only gaining ~16 or so in the next five years.

I would be interested in knowing what nutrients he was supplied to stay alive!

<comment><USER16> It looks like basic multivitamins were given.

I've never heard of this solution before, but it seems it would be wise to consider it when contemplating extreme solutions like surgery.

"Patient A.B. aged 27 years, weighed on admission 456 lb (207 kg). During the 382 days of his fast, vitamin supplements were given daily as 'Multivite' (BDH), vitamin C and yeast for the first 10 months and as 'Paladac' (Parke Davis), for the last 3 months. Non-caloric fluids were allowed ad libitum. From Day 93 to Day 162 only, he was given potassium supplements (two effervescent potassium tablets BPC supplying 13 mEq daily) and from Day 345 to Day 355 only he was given sodium supplements (2 5 g sodium chloride daily). No other drug treatment was given. "</comment></comment>


Show HN: Hex Edit Pcaps in Vim - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/benjaminr/vimcap <comment><AUTHOR> This is one of my first ever Vim plugins, so go easy!

The general gist is you can open a pcap and use vim as a hex editor.

Much of the background hackery is powered by the Python module Scapy, so I intend to extend the functionality around that too.

Hope someone finds it useful; let me know what y'all think!</comment>