Unhappy Developers: Bad for Themselves, for Process and Bad for Software Product - <AUTHOR> https://arxiv.org/abs/1701.02952 <comment><USER2> I'm incredibly intrigued as to how they are sure they are not measuring the reverse direction. That is, developers in a poor process and badly managed product are likely to be unhappy. Not that unhappy developers are likely to poorly follow process and create poor software.

I'm not asking to throw out the results. I want help understanding how they are able to make this claim.

<comment><USER3> Does it matter? Fix the broken process and you get happier developers and better productivity.

<comment><USER2> Yes it matters. You have to know the direction of causality.

Consider it in different words. "Tired people are bad for themselves, for process, and for projects." To many, this will read as "hire folks that aren't tired." Worse, it will be "your folks are tired, so they will make things bad for themselves, their processes, and their projects."

At best, you will get people who will see it and victim blame in a way that won't help. "You are jeopardizing our ability to succeed with your tiredness. In addition to your current tasks, I'm assigning you the job of getting less tired." So... odds of increasing wakefulness, slim.

Now, it could turn out that it is something you can fix in this way. I _don 't know_ and that is my point.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> "... cost-effective way to foster happiness and productivity among workers could be to limit unhappiness of developers .."

Come on.

<comment><USER5> Unhelpful sedition twoards, or deviation from, corperate montra is banned employee 453297. Please pack your bags, family, self-supplied toiletries and proceed to the incinerator.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> The bottom line is a balance of functional requirements (e.g: user facing features) and non-functional requirements (e.g: maintainability, performance). Software that doesn't implement non-functional requirements has a name: a functional prototype.

Bad engineering feels like taking a loan of technical debt to pay your manager, so customers can be scammed receiving a half finished product for the price of a finished one.

In the other hand, when you do good engineering you can proudly stand behind your work, be motivated and engaged.

<comment><USER7> What's interesting is that the economics favour low cost at the expensive of quality.

<comment><USER6> You can sell a functional prototype for a while, until customers start massively reporting bugs, someone finds a severe vulnerability, or you end up with a 1000 developer payroll to compensate for low maintainability and people getting checked out.

Sometimes it's better to invest a bit in other aspects as well. Of course, you don't protect a $100 bike with a $1000 lock. There are tradeoffs.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> First idea that will come up by many managers after reading this: "we should fire those who are unhappy and hire happier developers".

<comment><USER9> Our product sucks because we have no vision, our process sucks because upper management is entangled in turfs wars, it's probably because our developers are unhappy.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Wow. What a low bar for an ICSE paper. Former software engineering PhD student.

<comment><USER11> It is in the poster track. That is a different (much, much lower) bar than research track papers.

<comment><USER12> How can you tell which track it's in? Is it in the categories? Or is the research track those who did it through an academic institution first?

<comment><USER13> The comments section says it's to appear as a poster. I don't know how it is for the organization hosting that event, but when I was a physics student, every member of the physical society was allowed at least one publication per year. So anybody who didn't get a paper or a talk, could do a poster, and their abstract was printed in the proceedings. I don't know if it was an official rule, but it's what happened in practice. I think it was not a bad approach, as it meant that nobody could say they were denied publication of their idea.

It was also fun to visit the crackpot posters. Some of the authors went to a huge effort, including having their own books printed, and so forth. Plus, there was usually beer at the afternoon posters.

<comment><USER14> In CS typically the poster track is peer-reviewed like the main track, just with different standards that are oriented towards allowing people to present preliminary work, minor experiments, etc. However it is still supposed to be interesting and competent work, and you can definitely get rejected even with a non-crackpot poster submission if it's one of the more competitive conferences. You usually have to submit a paper for peer review, but a short one, <4 pages. At some, it may also be a consolation prize for rejected full- track papers, where work that doesn't make the cut but is still interesting is offered a space at the conference if the authors are willing to submit a cut- down version as a poster paper.

<comment><USER12> Ah, I see. It's not arXiv specific.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> What an astounishing discovery! If a horse is unhappy it does not pull the plough well, no matter how hard you may beat it.</comment>


Manage your HTPC from anywhere - <AUTHOR> http://www.htpc.io

<comment><USER2> I've tried this software and find it doesn't quite stack up to the original HTPC frontend project, Maraschino ([http://www.maraschinoproject.com](http://www.maraschinoproject.com)) which offers more or less the same functionality. I prefer Maraschino mainly because of the integrated remote control which allows me to control XBMC with the keyboard from the web GUI. I'd recommend you try both and see what works for you.

<comment><USER3> I agree, Maraschino seems much nicer. Although at the end of the day, I don't really think I need a HTPC manager when each HTPC app I use has a nice web interface that all play well together. For a phone, there's a nice frontend but on PC/webapp, I find the tools offered by each work perfectly. Sickbeard to add shows, SANZBd to check downloads and nothing for XBMC/Plex as I just use it as a front-end.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> My HTPC setup at home is to have my content on my laptop, running Plex server and I connect my android phone to my TV with the Plex Android app.

Really, really good - in fact, I have seen people do the same with the 20$ android media sticks that you can buy off dealextreme or someplace.

A great alternative to chromecast.

<comment><USER5> Plex also has an interesting business model:

Free server software, in a dead simple installation package, with config and streaming through a pleasant html5 UI. Smart TV app also free. Small but not insignificant charge for iOS and Android clients. Small SaaS charge to provide dynamicdns /remote streaming.

It's so much of what Boxee aimed for and failed. I like hacking on things, but Plex works perfect out-of-the-box. Really impressed ever since I started using the software a year ago.

<comment><USER4> From what I understand, it used to be a fork of XMBC. I think the ability to do the client/server model is possible with XBMC, but very hard to do out of the box.

But I agree - plex was worth the purchase of the mobile app.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> What does 'HTPC' stand for? I've only ever heard 'Media Center PC' to describe that sort of appliance.

<comment><AUTHOR> 'Home theater pc' so your media-center description is quite accurate.

<comment><USER7> This looks very cool and I'll try it this week. I've got a new Raspberry Pi and I plan to replace a Popcorn Hour with it, if I can figure it all out (I'm brand new to Raspberry Pi & HTPCs).

One small suggestion, assuming this is your site? There are a couple typographical errors on the front page text, plus I might word the top line differently. The site looks great even if you ignore these suggestions though, and well done creating this project.

\- Manage your Htpc from everywhere -> Manage your HTPC from anywhere

\- Using multiple applications to control you htpc? No More! -> Using multiple applications to control your HTPC?

\- ...to controll them all -> ...to control them all

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you for the text corrections!

This project runs great on a raspberryPi (that is how i use it myself). I would recommend doing a git clone the get Htpc Manager running on the Pi. This makes auto-updating the htpc manager software a lot easier.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> So it's a tool that makes it easier to pirate TV shows?

I'd prefer a tool that would pull all the episodes from my legitimate DVDs, or automatically dropped the DRM from my iTunes season pass episodes and imported them into my HTPC.

<comment><USER9> After Requiem stopped being maintained, I don't think there's a way to drop DRM from any iTunes video content.

<comment><USER10> Can't you just use an older version of iTunes with it?

<comment><USER9> Yes, but Apple prevents you from getting HD content with an older version.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Question on the subject: Does anyone know an HTPC/Media Center software that, when I pop in a CD or DVD, it automatically gets ripped and stored? Is there a plugin as such for one of the common ones (XBMC, Plex, etc.?)

</comment><comment><USER12> Bonus points for integrating everything. But meh, another solution for controlling newsgroups. As a more casual downloader who thinks newsgroups are too much hassle, this doesn't really work for me.

<comment><USER13> It supports torrents too, though I'm not sure how reliable it is with public trackers.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> On slightly related topic, has anyone found some good Linux based tools to clean up your MP3 Library metadata?

<comment><USER15> Have you looked into Beets ([http://beets.radbox.org/](http://beets.radbox.org/)) or the classic Picard ([http://musicbrainz.org/doc/MusicBrainz_Picard](http://musicbrainz.org/doc/MusicBrainz_Picard))?

<comment><USER14> I think I used MusicBrainz before. It worked pretty well but I had a bunch of one off MP3's that were a single band/song that it just botched. So now when I go through I find artists that I have no clue who they are, and I listen to the song and realize it's wrong.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I just use XMBC's web interface and android application. Both work fine for me.

<comment><AUTHOR> Ofcourse, with only xbmc the default web interface and app are good enough, i agree. But when you have 5 programs running, on your htpc and for every one you have to use a different interface, HtpcManager can provide a solution by combining all programs into one interface.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Raspberry pi compatible? :)

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes! Just follow the linux install guide.</comment></comment>


Fast JavaScript Max/Min - <AUTHOR> http://ejohn.org/blog/fast-javascript-maxmin/ <comment><USER2> I used his technique for a while but then I had to find the max and min of an array of 1 million values which is more than the maximum number of arguments to a function in most javascript implementation so I rewrote it a such:

Array.prototype.min = function() {

      var increment = 50000;

      if(this.length > increment){

        var reduced_array = [];

        for(var i=0;i<this.length;i+=increment) {

          reduced_array.push(Math.min.apply(Math,

this.slice(i,i+increment-1))); }

      }else {

        return Math.min.apply(Math, this);

      }

      return reduced_array.min();

}; Array.prototype.max = function(array) {

      var increment = 50000;

      if(this.length > increment){

        var reduced_array = [];

        for(var i=0;i<this.length;i+=increment) {

          reduced_array.push(Math.max.apply(Math, this.slice(i,i+increment-1)));

        }

      }else {

        return Math.max.apply(Math, this);
      }

I'm sure someone can suggest a better way.

<comment><USER3> They way you've done it seems fine, although if you're trying to find minimums of such large arrays in javascript I'd assume you're doing something wrong.

Javascript really isn't a great choice of language for big processing tasks; stuff like that should be moved away where possible (granted it isn't always an option).

<comment><USER2> Yeah I would not be doing it unless it was necessary. When I wrote that I was parsing a large file using javascript (from the client filesystem) and the round trip to the server would have been longer than this little function takes.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> It might be faster to write the code, but it's definitely not the fastest way to find the minimum/maximum value. Some simple test cases I wrote show a simple for loop iterator over an array to be 2x faster than Math.min.apply in Firefox 4, and 3x faster in Chrome 10.

<http://jsperf.com/fastest-array-min-max>

<comment><USER5> If you take out the (currently unused: it is updated but never referred to afterwards) the first-index-of-the-smallest-value-was-found-at variable the difference in FF is even larger.

These are the results on FF 3.6.16 on my desktop:

        ~33.5 ops/sec (million test, using Array.min.apply)
        ~57.0 o/s     (with index var)
        ~86.5 o/s     (without index var)

I'm a little surprised it makes _that_ much difference (I assumed the two set operations, one of which I removed, would be less significant than that in the execution timings compared to the array object lookup in the comparison, given JS arrays aren't actually arrays strictly speaking). The difference may be less significant (zero, in fact) with a JS engine that does dead-code analysis that successfully works out that min_i is set in the loop but otherwise never used.

<comment><USER4> Ah yes, there was no need of using min_i in my benchmark.

That's a pretty big difference, and I wouldn't have expected that much of a difference for assigning one extra variable in the loop.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I started to feel pretty smug [0], at first. How could John Resig not know this? Then I saw that it was from 2007. Sheesh, I probably first learned about this trick from that post.

[0] [http://stackoverflow.com/questions/5020954/adding- functions-...](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/5020954/adding-functions-to- javascripts-array-class-breaks-for-loops/5021375#5021375)

</comment><comment><USER7> Underscore.js is pretty good about delegating to built-in functions when available in its little utility functions. [http://documentcloud.github.com/underscore/docs/underscore.h...](http://documentcloud.github.com/underscore/docs/underscore.html#section-25)

<comment><USER8> They surely missed this one though.

as Underscore.js do this:

         _.max = function(obj, iterator, context) {
            if (!iterator && _.isArray(obj)) return Math.max.apply(Math, obj);
            var result = {computed : -Infinity};
            each(obj, function(value, index, list) {
              var computed = iterator ? iterator.call(context, value, index, list) : value;
              computed >= result.computed && (result = {value : value, computed : computed});
            });
            return result.value;
         };

         _.min = function(obj, iterator, context) {
            if (!iterator && _.isArray(obj)) return Math.min.apply(Math, obj);
            var result = {computed : Infinity};
            each(obj, function(value, index, list) {
              var computed = iterator ? iterator.call(context, value, index, list) : value;
              computed < result.computed && (result = {value : value, computed : computed});
            });
            return result.value;
         };

While John do that:

        Array.max = function( array ){
          return Math.max.apply( Math, array );
        };
        Array.min = function( array ){
          return Math.min.apply( Math, array );
        };

<comment><USER9> The Underscore functions do exactly the same as Resig's in the simple case (when passed just an array of numbers). They're longer because they accept custom iterators for non-numerical arrays.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> > Posted: January 13th, 2007

That's four years ago.

<comment><USER11> > 4 points by clvv 2 hours ago | link | parent | flag

That's 2 hours ago.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> In the post, he asks this question: "What's the fastest way to find the largest, or smallest, number in an array?"

I guess he means fastest code to write, not the fastest code to run. If you have, say, a million numbers, I'd try doing this using concurrency. If there are two CPUs (or cores), find the maximum in the bottom half of the array and the maximum in the top half in parallel. Then return the maximum of the two maximums.

I don't know much JavaScript - does it have built-in support for concurrency?

</comment><comment><USER13> I don't like it if it is not documented that Math.max can take more than two arguments. Can we count on all future implementations to accept more than two arguments?

<comment><USER14> It is documented everywhere I looked. Check out pg162 of [http://www.ecma- international.org/publications/files/ECMA-ST...](http://www.ecma- international.org/publications/files/ECMA-ST/ECMA-262.pdf), for example.

<comment><USER13> OK - in the article (or the comments) it said that the documentation everywhere says two arguments only.</comment></comment></comment>


Geeksphone Peak+ (Firefox OS) Available For Pre-Order - <AUTHOR> http://shop.geeksphone.com/en/phones/8-peak.html

<comment><AUTHOR> From the description, there doesn't seem like much difference compared to the Peak, except double the RAM (512MB vs 1GB).</comment>


Google forced to open up Android to rival search engines in Russia - <AUTHOR> https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/apr/18/google-android-settlement-rival-search-engines-russia-yandex <comment><USER2> > "Users will be able to change settings at any time and choose the default > search engine which suits their needs," the FAS said.

Seems like a good thing in my book.</comment>


The north pole moved to the North Pole in a single human lifetime - <AUTHOR> https://arstechnica.com/science/2014/10/the-north-pole-moved-to-the-north-pole-in-a-single-human-lifetime/ <comment><USER2> If the magnetic field protects us from the sun, then, when it shifts in some unexpected way, could that leave us unprotected?

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes. There will be some impacts due to cosmic rays. A bit more detail here

[https://phys.org/news/2018-12-earth-magnetic-poles- flip.html](https://phys.org/news/2018-12-earth-magnetic-poles-flip.html)</comment></comment>


Backblaze Hard Drive Stats Q2 2020 - <AUTHOR> https://www.backblaze.com/blog/backblaze-hard-drive-stats-q2-2020/ <comment><USER3> Andy at Backblaze here. To put a pin in it, the three main factors for which drives we use are cost, availability and reliability. We have control over reliability as our systems are designed to deal with drive failure. That leaves the market to decide on cost and availability. Assuming a competitive market we can buy the drives that optimize those factors.

<comment><USER4> My main concern with third party backups is the privacy aspect. I never want to worry that some silent TOS change means that ad companies are scanning all my documents. Does backboaze have any options for e2e encryption or some sort of iron clad privacy policy without a "we can change it at any time" clause?

<comment><USER5> Several backup tools have encryption in place so that your data can be encrypted before it leaves your device. Rclone for example has encryption and Backblaze B2 capability.

<comment><USER4> I looked at rclone once and didn't find any information about encryption. Thanks for mentioning it

<comment><USER6> Crypt will encrypt all files before they leave your device, yes.

<comment><USER7> To the non-rclone users, this refers to one of the targets of rclone; the crypt backend wraps the real backend by chaining them together, e.g. localdata <=> crypt <=> providerstorage (basically like a bi-directional filter). [https://rclone.org/crypt/](https://rclone.org/crypt/)

Edit: I use rclone as the backend for duplicity, so you can also chain it through another tool with different encryption and use rclone as just the transfer engine, getting all the benefits of rclone's providers with the benefits of duplicity's backup strategies.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I win. The 8TB drives I used to populate my NAS scored 0.10% better than the 0.81% average. That means my NAS is better than everyone else's.

This big takeaway from these numbers is how dramatically low they are in comparison to drives 5/10/25 years ago. If you treat them reasonably, modern drives are rock stable.

<comment><USER9> Tangential question: What NAS device and set up do you use? I'm thinking of buying one and would like to learn from a fellow (technically better acquainted) HN user. Thanks in advance!

<comment><USER8> Synology DS1019+

It might not be the cheapest, but 4+1 drives is more efficient than 3+1. Currently I have three 8TB drives: 1xWD Red and 2xIronwolfs (wolves?) with one running as parity (SHR). No complaints. It does everything I need it to do. The interface is simple and everything "just works" as anticipated. If/when I run out of space I plan on adding another 2x8TB drives, probably more ironwolves.

I wouldn't go bigger than 8TB as they already take DAYS to add to the array.

<comment><USER10> I have that same box. Very nice box.

Migrated from a 1512. It took probably about 3-4 days to migrate everything. The new box handled it easily. The old one was struggling a bit with rsync. As the default is ssh with it. Once I had to downgraded the encryption then it went a lot faster (from 30MB to 90MB which was close enough to the limit of the cable to not worry).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I really enjoy reading the Backblaze analysis on this every year, it's such a valuable and interesting data set. I do have one suggestion: it would be great to go one step further and add confidence intervals for the AFR estimates. E.g. if you see 0 drive failures, you don't really expect an AFR of 0 (that is not the maximum likelihood estimate), and the range of AFR's you expect for each drive decreases as a function of the number of drive days (e.g. if one drive has 1 day of use, we know basically nothing about AFR so confidence interval would be ~0-100% (not really, but still quite large), or it would be smaller if you wanted to add a prior on AFR).

It would also be interesting to see the time-dependence (i.e. does AFR really look U-shaped over the lifetime of a drive?). That would require a dataset with every drive used, along with (1) number of active drive days, and (2) a flag to indicate if the drive has failed and of course (3) which kind of drive it is. Does Backblaze offer this level of granularity?

EDIT: They offer the raw data dumps!

[https://www.backblaze.com/b2/hard-drive-test- data.html#downl...](https://www.backblaze.com/b2/hard-drive-test- data.html#downloading-the-raw-hard-drive-test-data)

Backblaze, god bless you.

</comment><comment><USER12> I never get tired of these reports, and if I ever again buy a drive with a high failure rate for Backblaze, somebody slap me!

<comment><USER13> Yev here -> Thanks! We love producing them - they are a lot of fun!

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I've recently joined the WD shucking crowd so, unfortunately, there are no stats for the drives I'm running. The cost/GB has just gotten too ridiculously low on shucked drives and my array large enough that a failure or two isn't the end of the world, oh and 3-2-1 backup rule.

I've always really enjoyed reading Backblaze's reports though and have made past buying decisions based on their information.

I wonder if it might be possible for a community sourced version of these reports? A small app that checks SMART data and sends it to a central repository for displaying stats? Many from the self-hosted/homelab crowd are running these shucked drives so there has to be a large pool of stats out there if it can be gathered?

<comment><USER3> Andy at Backblaze here. We've looked at this and the one "issue" is the consistency of the environments from the community data. In our DCs, the drives are kept a decent temperature, hardly ever moved, and our DC tech sing to them every night (OK, just kidding about that last one). Community drives will comes from all types of environments, from pristine to dust bunny hell. Still, it might be interesting to compare the two data sets if a community cohort could be collected.

<comment><USER14> Be careful not to sing too loud _at_ them [https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=tDacjrSCeq4](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=tDacjrSCeq4)

Incidentally I've tracked down a HDD (spinning rust) performance (and later breakage) problem to a very loud (and I mean awfully painful, intense vibration on your eardrums) alarm test every wednesday...

Do you monitor the noise in your DCs? Maybe for high peaks?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> This deserves to be cited:

HGST drives win the prize for predictability. Boring, yes, but a good kind of boring.

<comment><USER16> Also worth calling out that the worst performer, Western Digital, acquired HGST, now let's see if WD improves or HGST gets worse :)

Edit: See comment below, looks like this happened a while ago, so not likely a real factor :)

<comment><USER17> WD acquired HGST in 2012, but was strictly independent until 2015.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HGST](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HGST)

<comment><USER16> Thanks a bunch for the correction, I guess the answer is that potentially the acquisition has helped WD drives a little bit :)

<comment><USER17> FWIW I wonder if they're still run as something of a separate group, but given that the article says the HGST brand was removed in 2018, who knows what speed the long term merge might occur upon.

Explains why HGST brand drives are harder to come by I think.

<comment><USER16> Yeah, this wouldn't surprise me, and it's not super uncommon. Similar things happened with Cisco and Meraki, though I've heard over time that's started to erode.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> One of my main questions is how different these stats are for hard drives that are not running all the time. Personal experience over a decade in an underfunded lab was that if you took a drive offline and left it for couple years, you had 10-40% chance of it failing.

<comment><USER19> I had a couple drives that no longer worked after leaving the computer dormant for a few months. most of my drive failures have occurred immediately after hardware upgrades though. seems like I lose at least one drive every time I replace a mobo. I'm always surprised that breaks them, but they always survived trips to/from college in the trunk of my car.

<comment><USER20> I'd give those drives a reformat... Some motherboards have firmware that does odd things to drives, like hiding the first or last sectors to store its own data or for various OEM recovery techniques.

That can make your data look corrupt. Yet reformatting (or just putting the drive in with the old motherboard) will magically fix them.

</comment></comment></comment><comment> java-man Interesting how HGST has consistently low failure rates [0]. What makes these drives so reliable? Japanese fixation on quality? Specifics of Hitachi design?

[0] [https://www.backblaze.com/blog/wp- content/uploads/2020/08/Ch...](https://www.backblaze.com/blog/wp- content/uploads/2020/08/Chart-Q2-2020-MFR-AFR-1024x679.jpg)

<comment><USER21> Interesting to note that this wasn't always the case - The Hitachi Deskstar line used to have the nickname "Deathstar" due to their low reliability (this was maybe 15-20 years ago)

<comment><USER22> The DeathStar name was never used when Hitachi made the drives. Deathstar was used omwhen IBM used to make the drives

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Why wouldn't backblaze use only HGST then? What's the purpose of buying seagates which was the most unreliable hard drives from 15-20 years ago and their stats show higher failure rates. (Still I don't buy them because of the bad taste left.)

<comment><USER13> Yev from Backblaze here -> Some of the responses down below are correct - <USER2> really does come down to price. We run a fairly lean ship and so the price per gigabyte is weighed pretty heavily when we make our purchasing decisions. We have a post where we go into the cost of hard drives over time, it's about 3 years old now, but still a good read -> [https://www.backblaze.com/blog/hard- drive-cost-per-gigabyte/](https://www.backblaze.com/blog/hard-drive-cost-per- gigabyte/).

<comment><USER24> Do you have an algorithm of sorts that takes into account price and historical failure rate by drive model and gives you an easy "yea or nay" for purchase decisions? Seems like you might be able to automate drive purchases with such a system (similar to limit orders on financial securities).

<comment><USER13> Yev here -> It's less of an algorithm and more of a purchasing department with lots of spreadsheets that tie into the AFR data as a data point - but yes, it's possible we could automate it, but there's some factors that our supply- chain team would need to be involved in anyway (like vendor diversity, no large batches of single drives etc...) that make outputting that algorithm a bit harder.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> It's interesting that, despite Seagate being relatively bad compared to HGST, Backblaze keeps installing more and more Seagate drives and not that many HGST drives. I guess the analysis that's missing here is the cost per drive hour?

<comment> kube-system It sounds like cost is the primary factor, but diversity can also help mitigate the risk of unknown bugs.

Lets say you found that HPE SSDs were super reliable over your test period so you decided to put everything on a bunch of new drives.

Then this hits, and 100% of your drives fail at the same time: [https://www.pcmag.com/news/time-to-patch-hpe-ssds-will- fail-...](https://www.pcmag.com/news/time-to-patch-hpe-ssds-will-fail- after-32768-hours)

While these stats are a great analysis of random failures -- that's only one type of risk.

<comment><USER26> I have seen homogeneity 'kill' twice in my career. The first time was unprovisioned hardware, then second time we lost half of the hard drives assigned for dev machines in the space of about 9 weeks. I had so many processes in place by that point that it was a huge inconvenience (mostly due to whole disk encryption) but zero data loss.

The worst thing you can do is to put all of your eggs into one basket. And bulk ordering might get you a set of drives all from the same batch. Bad batches will tend to all fail for a similar reason. Drives fail on a bell curve, right? So the first drive may fail way before any others, but in a RAID array, rebuilds are stressful. Eventually you will hit a statistical cluster. Multiple drives failing close together. If that happens during a rebuild, you will lose a RAID 5 array. If you are very lucky, your RAID 10 array loses two drives in the same mirror. If you have two failures during a long rebuild, even RAID 6 won't save you.

I just bought a Synology box for home. This is my third and probably final RAID enclosure for personal use. I was having trouble finding Backblaze-tested drive models to populate it, so I filled it with drives from a Drobo and kept looking. Initially I had populated the Drobo with 4 drives I bought at once. When one failed, I bought 2 HGST drives and replaced a pair. When the new drives arrived, I started trying to cycle them through, and one of the drobo drives failed. I'll give you two guesses which one.

There is, as far as I can tell, no prosumer multi-disk filesystem that uses consistent hashing to stripe+mirror files across an arbitrary number of disks, instead of the heavy linear algebra RAID5 relies on. It requires touching the whole disk on every rebuild, and I believe that's why Object Storage is slowly taking over from the top end. It's a simpler form of redundancy.

I hope that it's worked its way down to my price range by the time the motherboard on the Synology burns out.

<comment><USER3> Andy from Backblaze here. Nice thinking about the bulk ordering and considerations for RAID. All things we have considered. We use our own Reed- Solomon encoding with a 17/3 set-up across 20 drives across 20 different systems, we call that a Tome. Then we have a specific protocol we follow as drives fail in a Tome to protect the data at all costs. We have the luxury for example to stop writing to a given Tome as we have plenty of others available. This takes a lot of the stress off of the system. Your thoughts on bulk buys and bad drive batches/models is solid. We test drives in small batches first, and we follow drive failures so we don't get to the point of hitting the wall. It would be great to mix and match drives, but you end up with a system that maxes out at the least performant drive. So not optimal.

<comment><USER26> I recall reading about your triple redundancy with R-S codes, but it's good to restate it for each audience.

From the behavior of my RAID (which also uses Reed Solomon, doesn't it?) it feels like repairing an array takes time proportional to the size of the drive, not the size of the contents, and it feels like a waste. But it's possible that my comfort levels for available disk space are a lot more conservative than other people's, and so the difference is less pronounced in a 'normal' storage situation.

For instance, an array that's at 80% capacity takes 25% longer to rebuild than I wish it would, whereas an array that's at 66% capacity takes 50% longer.

<comment><USER27> > it feels like repairing an array takes time proportional to the size of the > drive, not the size of the contents

This is only true for drive-level raid rather than filesystem level raid, or a non-raid solution like ceph's replication.

ZFS's filesystem raid can repair a raid in time proportional to the amount of data stored in it.

mdadm and raid controllers aren't aware of which parts of the block device are in use or not, and thus have to repair the whole drive.

It's exceedingly likely that backblaze's solution does not require repairing entire block devices, but rather is likely to be closer to ceph, where only the in-use portion of a failed drive must be considered / must find a new home.

I think raid and distributed storage systems (like backblaze or ceph) are more different than they are alike.

> From the behavior of my RAID (which also uses Reed Solomon, doesn't it?)

Maybe. mdadm raid5 doesn't, nor does mdadm raid1 or raid10. I think mdadm's raid6 does.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Are there trends for AFR by drive age? ie. for a specific drive or manufacturer, what is the failure rate for drives that have been in use _n_ years? It'd be interesting to see how the failure rate go up/down as they get older.

<comment><USER29> Electronics typically follow a "bathtub" reliability curve. You'll have a large number of early failures (unflatteringly called "infant mortality") then the curve levels off for a long period of time, and then starts rising again as the items start wearing out.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bathtub_curve](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bathtub_curve)

It'd be interesting to see if BackBlaze sees this in their drive populations.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> Why did they stop buying WDC drives? Is there a known issue with them?

Also, why can't I find HGST drives for decent prices? On Amazon they are either refurbished drives or crazy expensive prices for new ones?

<comment><USER31> > they are either refurbished drives

Just a heads up: there's no such thing as a refurbished hard drive. It's not economical. Instead, those drives are actually just used drives with the SMART counters cleared.

I've been personally burned by this.

<comment><USER32> So they're just rolling back the odometer, and destroying records of accidents (errors)?

<comment><USER33> Yes and no. It's more like they're "recertified". It's pretty easy and non- invasive to replace the logic board, which can fix many problems that might warrant an RMA. I've also gotten refurbs back from Seagate and WDC RMA's that have new top covers on the drive (evidenced by a new, non-retail sticker, no old sticker underneath it). Presumably they're doing some inspection of the platters and heads before sending them out. These drives came with a 30day warranty and cleared SMART data. But I would argue that its fair to reset the SMART data after this kind of refurbishment/re-certification.

That being said, there are definitely some sketchy drive resellers on marketplaces like Amazon who just clear the smart data on old drives and sell them as refurbished, or even new.

<comment><USER34> Recertified/Refurbished drives are never worth it IMHO.

<comment><USER35> I wouldn't pay for them, but I haven't found them especially unreliable when receiving recertified drives for RMAs of my drives.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> The volumes of units are high enough I think this is north of 'too small sample size for statistical validity' So the question in my mind is, how _significant_ is the variance in the failure rates?

Is this underlying manufacturing error tolerances, or is this shipping/deployment effects, or is this .. Aliens?

</comment><comment><USER37> What is Wasabi doing different where they're able to outprice B2, and get better throughput?

<comment><USER38> I'm guessing you work at Wasabi and already know :)

Just looking at the pricing pages, pure storage is cheaper at B2, but the API calls and egress are not free.

<comment><USER37> No I don't. I'm genuinely curious how they might be saving money.

<comment><USER39> Wasabi has a minimum retention time of 3 months. So if you create a 1GB bucket and delete it 5 minutes later you still pay for it for 3 months.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Trump faces 'biggest decision' on re-opening economy - <AUTHOR> https://uk.reuters.com/article/uk-health-coronavirus-usa/u-s-covid-19-cases-surpass-half-a-million-trump-faces-biggest-decision-on-re-opening-economy-idUKKCN21T0K9 <comment><AUTHOR> _Asked what metrics he would use to make his judgment, he pointed at his forehead: "The metrics right here, that's my metrics."_

It is comforting to be so reassured.

</comment><comment><USER2> He will use his hunches and risk millions of people's lives. I for one don't appreciate this one bit.</comment>


Mark Cuban's rules for startups - <AUTHOR> http://valleywag.com/365792/mark-cubans-rules-for-startups <comment><USER2> How much weight does this actually carry for the YC readers?</comment>


Show HN: Collage - Combine and frame your photos using Filepicker.io - <AUTHOR> http://fpcollage.herokuapp.com/

<comment><USER2> All I can see is a photo with the caption "Make brilliant collages with your pictures. Any pictures from Facebook, ? and Instagram". Clicking everywhere does nothing, scrolling up or down does not reveal anything. I'm using Firefox on a widescreen laptop.

Going full-screen shows "Try it with Chrome or Safari on your desktop". Aha!

So I load it up on Chromium. It does work there, and the interface is pretty. There doesn't seem to be a way to make a collage without publishing it. It doesn't seem to be something I'd use a lot, but then again, I don't have a camera.

</comment><comment><USER3> Fully open source - code at <https://github.com/Filepicker/collage></comment>


Linode under DDOS attack again - <AUTHOR> http://status.linode.com/incidents/dpdldmhgjbhl <comment><USER2> Why are they only being attacked in Atlanta? Are the attackers targeting a specific site or do the other data centers have a way to mitigate the attacks?

</comment><comment><USER3> Why are they being attacked so much?

<comment><AUTHOR> This is what I'm wondering? Since Christmas, it's been consistent. According to their main status page, they've identified over 30 different attacks. WTF.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: For hackers based in India, would you work for a startup located in Goa? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> Of course (but I don't consider myself a hacker :))

</comment><comment><USER3>
      "(-‿-)"

</comment><comment><USER4> Work?

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, work only</comment></comment>


Show HN: A 50k and above upwork where you hire a team of 5 - <AUTHOR> http://i.imgur.com/GDP88Eq.png <comment><USER2> nice try, but no.

Top row, center (guy with the scowl). That man invented the blog. He's a friend and ex-coworker of mine. I doubt you could get lunch with him for less than $50K.

<comment><AUTHOR> all people's faces are legal images from [http://uifaces.com](http://uifaces.com)

<comment><USER2> ah I see -- it was meant to be stock photography.

<comment><AUTHOR> yeah. so the idea is like [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Series_of_Poker](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Series_of_Poker) but for teams of engineers than can build any web app, mobile app, VR app, you name it. The best of the best. You want to hire them, go ahead, they are worth it. And once a year they compete in a tournament and crown the winning team for 2017, 2018, etc.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> awesome!</comment>


How to handle long-running queries in MySQL - <AUTHOR> http://www.mysqlperformanceblog.com/2013/10/11/handling-long-running-queries-in-mysql-with-percona-xtrabackup/

<comment><USER2> Wouldn't it make more sense to run the long running SQL on its on slave and the backups on a different slave? The long running queries in the example were reads so this would make more sense? Maybe it's a cost issue?</comment>


Tell All: Forget 'SVBTLE' and 'Medium'. Here is a nice tumblr alternative. - <AUTHOR>

I was waiting for my invites from SVBTLE and Medium. I found a nice alternative
Optica Tumblr Theme: http://www.tumblr.com/theme/37310
Example 1: http://blog.k-create.com/ (the creator of the theme i believe)
Example 2: http://teslachat.tumblr.com/ (i work here)
Example 3: http://nerdydata.tumblr.com/post/57308630996/how-we-found-all-of-optimizleys-clients (just saw this on HN) <comment><USER2> If you think those are alternatives then you have missed the point of Svbtle and Medium; those services have nothing to do with the way the blogs look.

Medium is about networks of related information and discovery. Svbtle is(was?) curated bloggers and never open to just everyone. Yes, they happen to look nice as well.

</comment><comment><USER3> Better >> [https://github.com/themeskult/wp- svbtle](https://github.com/themeskult/wp-svbtle)</comment>


Show HN: Manage job applications and research companies - <AUTHOR> https://findwork.co/ <comment><AUTHOR> Hey HN, I've been working on this for the past year (designed + developed from scratch). I'm here to answer any questions you have</comment>


100 Year Starship Initiative - <AUTHOR> http://100yss.org/about

<comment><USER2> i love this project, it has had me transfixed for some time now. in my head i created a whole story around it. imagine either being on board the ship when it leaves and travels across part of the galaxy, or when it returns. you have the equivalent of a ford model t showing up at your doorstep. i also try and use what knowledge i have of sea faring explorers for insight into how this might go. the time scale and the constraints are just so far beyond anything we've ever done, however, so it has no real historical precedent.

this project is so immense, it requires so much thinking: air, food and water prodiction and recycling, population genetics and management (both biological as well as sociological), materials management, energy production, navigation, communications back to earth, etc. you can't just stop and fix something, you have to actually manage it while you fly.

in my night time thinking about this you'd have designs tested in multi-year experiments first under the sea (no new air, sun light, etc), then a small (10-12 year) mission to mars or something, and then finally you launch for the stars. where do you go? frankly, 100 years isn't very much to explore too far beyond the solar system and the next one (as i understand it you'd wind up in the middle of nowhere if you made a straight trajectory out of our solar system). so what do you find and where would you go?

then think about being on that craft. what if you're a kid who was whisked away by exploring parents, would you resent them for taking you away from everything you knew forever? imagine being the last person alive who could recall earth. imagine the governments that would form on the ship and how they would manage things, i imagine euthanasia would become realistic sine your resources are so visibly constrained. imagine how that would fly when you came back to earth.

i find this whole thing fascinating, it's such rich fodder for the imagination. i love it.</comment>


Ask HN: Courses or Books in Better Writing - <AUTHOR> Hi All,
I am looking for any good Courses or Books on better writing. I have been writing a few pre-read documents for pitches/proposal for my startup and I don't feel they quite hit the mark. I asked someone to help me write what I was thinking and the output was fantastic but they wouldn't really tell me how they did it. They said it was just repetition of doing documents. However, I kinda need something to start with.
Has anyone read any good technical documents aimed at business or done any good courses?
Thanks Oliver <comment><USER2> I have a few tips:

1\. What you start with: Do a first draft! It's supposed to be terrible. Once you get something (bad) down on paper, it's not hard to make it better, reorganize, clarify, simplify. Repeat. No-one writes a great first draft. It's just about getting something on paper to start editing.

2\. Draw, sketch. Use diagrams in working out the relationships between parts, stages, plans, people etc that you want to talk about–maybe even in the finished document.

3\. Read Zinsser's _On Writing Well_. It's about non-fiction prose of all kinds. A wonderful book.

[http://gen.lib.rus.ec/search.php?req=zinsser+on+writing+well](http://gen.lib.rus.ec/search.php?req=zinsser+on+writing+well)

<comment> massimo-nazaria Totally agree with point 3 about Zinsser's "On Writing Well". BTW, great tips!! :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I can't provide exactly what you're looking for, but I would disagree with outright repetition as a means of learning to do any kind of writing. If you repeat bad practices due to inexperience you will be training to a bad job with confidence. Hemingway said that being a good writer means being a dedicated reader and that reading is the activity of training to write (heavily paraphrased from A Moveable Feast). If you want to write good technical documentation, there is nothing that will prepare you as well as experiencing the difference between good and bad examples. If you can get your hands on some real-world examples of what you want to write then you will develop a critical eye as you read them. I am sure that there are some that would make you eager to throw your money in the ring and there are probably some that would embarrass you if you were a part of the pitch.

For a more minute suggestion, look into cognitive ease and how it is affected by language (Thinking Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman is a personal and HN favorite). If you are trying to be persuasive, don't use weird words like people do when they are writing their first resume, forgo words that you have trouble pronouncing and use jargon judiciously to inspire a positive and confident reaction.

Also, here's a Quora thread[1] that suggests the exact opposite approach and also gives a book recommendation. While I disagree with that advice it may not matter because, as pointed out there, these documents are proprietary.

1\. [https://www.quora.com/Where-can-I-view-real-world- business-p...](https://www.quora.com/Where-can-I-view-real-world-business- plans-not-sample-plans)

</comment><comment><USER4> I'm going to piggy back on this so if you find the most accurate answer, I'd like to know too.

In my attempt to help, one of the most helpful books for writing (traditional fiction/nonfiction) is "Self-Editing for Fiction Writers" \- the maxim, "Show, don't tell" is the central theme and what I would recommend you consider, but tailor it to a technical aspect. Here's an example of telling vs showing -

That night, the father was very nervous while he waited while he waited for his daughter.

VS

He checked his watch. 1:03 a.m. The father noted his nail was almost chewed to the nub. He got up and walked to the window and peered out. He checked his watch again, still chewing on his raw finger. It was still 1:03 a.m.

See the difference? Showing typically takes more effort and time which makes it challenge for engineer-types whose livelihood often depends on efficiency and saving time. But the result is more powerful as you begin to empathize with the character.

I struggle with technical writing too so the only other advice I could add is to get OTHER eyes on your writing as much as possible, that fresh perspective is invaluable.

Also, amazon mturk has surveys that you can have strangers do quick surveys for like 25-50 cents a head (it's mercenary work so the survey needs to be quick)... but you can consider using it if you want to test clarity in your message - mind you, these will NOT be investors but if you are trying to explain a technical concept to outsiders, (investors probably won't understand why your pitch is so important) then chances are if you get 50 strangers on the internet to all understand your technical statement, you are probably in good shape.

</comment><comment><USER5> If your looking for a good book on writing as far as logical structure, I would highly recommend The Pyramid Principle

[https://www.amazon.com/Pyramid-Principle-Logic-Writing- Think...](https://www.amazon.com/Pyramid-Principle-Logic-Writing- Thinking/dp/0273710516)

</comment><comment><USER6> On writing well by W. Zinsser is a classic.</comment>


On the Value of Not Knowing Everything - <AUTHOR> http://www.iasc-culture.org/THR/THR_article_2015_Summer_McWilliams.php

<comment><USER3> _" If, after all, Nagel is proven wrong—that is, if subjectivity is in fact reducible to an identifiable network of neural synapses—what is the point of investigating the human condition through a humanistic lens? If what it is like to be human, much less a bat, turns out to be empirically situated in the dense switchboard of the brain, what happens to Shakespeare, Swift, Woolf, or Wittgenstein when it comes to explaining ourselves to ourselves?"_

Nothing, of course. Thinking that believing reductionism will somehow transform human minds into mathematics is like thinking that believing evolution will transform humans into chimps. And whether or not you believe in reductionism, the reality of humanity won't change. The only thing that changes is that the non-reductionist philosophers lose and the neurobiologists, cognitive scientists, and AI researchers win. Which seems to be happening, in any case.

</comment><comment><USER4> There can only be one truth, because, ultimately, there is only one reality; what is a circle for one person will never be a square for another.

If there is value in trying to learn something, surely that value must be present in the knowledge when it's finally gathered. To argue that answers are negative because they deprives us of questions is self-defeating - if the answers are worthless, then the questions themselves were worthless in the first place.

FWIW I've found that STEM students can be as good or better than humanities students at the parts of the humanities I value - that sense of wonder. I've read great articles and novels, seen beautiful paintings and photographs, by people with STEM degrees. But the reverse is less true; it's a rare humanities graduate who can write a proof, or a program, or test a hypothesis empirically.

Ultimately, there is fair competition in the marketplace of ideas. If people find the humanities offer something valuable, they will find a way to express that - that is, to pay for them. If not, not.

<comment><USER5> Your statements are based on assumptions that, in turn, are based on _values_ that I think you'll have a hard time finding ultimate justifications for.

Let's start with the simple stuff: the value in knowledge. First, you assume that the value of a question is determined by the value of the answer. But that assumes that the value is inherent in the answer all along. Also, what is the value of knowledge? Sure, you could say something like, knowledge helps people live longer or die less or something. But what's the value in that? Surely your "one truth" cares not a jot about human existence, and therefore human knowledge. And if it us and who we are who give value to knowledge, then surely we might value the questions regardless of the answer. I think you'll find that Buddhists see value in questions much more than in answers.

Second, the "only one truth" statement. You base it on the assumption that there is only one reality. Now, suppose that were true (although you'll find no proof of that; that is simply an assumption of science, but nothing we can prove). Other realities can still exist _within_ that reality that cannot be meaningfully reduced (see my comment about universal computation and reduction of the human mind). To the character in Minecraft, the world of Minecraft is real, and even you can't say it's any less real than our world simply because it's simulated (and, for all we know, our world may be simulated too). If the human mind is a computer creating an inner world, an inner experience, for each of us, how can anyone say it's less real than the physical universe? Mathematically it certainly isn't, and in fact, they may both be simulations. It is subjective -- but it's just as real. A computer scientist must understand that there is no mathematical distinction between an illusion -- i.e. a simulation -- and measurement.

Yes, it's true that if you die in your dream you're not really dead, and that if you die in real life then you can never dream, but that is just an implementation detail. If the CPU blows up the program stops and not vice- versa, but that doesn't make the program any less real than the CPU.

So who said finding objective truth is more valuable than subjective truth? Yes, it helps more people, OK. But who says _that_ is more valuable? Once you start assigning values, you'll find no objective justification.

Finally, even the question of what constitutes knowledge is very tricky. The famous Gettier problem clearly shows that if we agree on a complete, robust definition of knowledge, we find that nothing we believe we know actually meets the definition.

Now, I'm not really disagreeing with you, because science and humanities exist on two separate plains. One in the physical world, and one in the simulated world -- neither is any more real than the other. I think it is Protestantism (especially its American manifestations) that makes people who are victims of its harsh culture so insistent on reconciling everything into a single paradigm. Catholics (and Jews) have no problem believing that God created the world in seven days while at the same time believing it was created in the Big Bang. They believe God created Adam and Eve in the garden of Eden, while at the same time accept evolution as fact. All those stories can be real and true simultaneously, but Protestants just don't get it.

As to your statement about STEM vs. humanities people, I could debate your assertions from my own personal experience all day long, but the mere fact that you chose to make it tells a lot about you and your priorities. What's your point? That STEM people are smarter? Let's suppose that they are. So what? Does that make them more valuable?

You seem to offload your personal judgement on value to the market, but you don't get off so easy. Who said that what the market finds valuable is indeed valuable? And if not, who really determines value? I think that is one question that is far more valuable than any answer you can find :)

<comment><USER4> > So who said finding objective truth is more valuable than subjective truth? > Yes, it helps more people, OK. But who says that is more valuable? Once you > start assigning values, you'll find no objective justification.

I think there is consensus (at least among people, philosophers included, in their ordinary lives) on the value of helping more people. I can't persuade someone who has different values from me to change them, and I wouldn't try. But I think disagreements like the one I seem to have with the original post are more likely to be cases where we have similar values, but either disagree about the empirical facts, or one or other of us has made an error of reasoning.

> Finally, even the question of what constitutes knowledge is very tricky. The > famous Gettier problem clearly shows that if we agree on a complete, robust > definition of knowledge, we find that nothing we believe we know actually > meets the definition.

Which is a flaw in philosophies that try to work with definitions. If we restrict ourselves to empirical predictions, Gettier's examples cease to be paradoxical.

> As to your statement about STEM vs. humanities people, I could debate your > assertions from my own personal experience all day long, but the mere fact > that you chose to make it tells a lot about you and your priorities. What's > your point? That STEM people are smarter? Let's suppose that they are. So > what? Does that make them more valuable?

Actually my assumption was that they're equally smart and my point was the opposite: that STEM education seems to impart some valuable abilities that those without STEM education do not have, whereas people without a humanities education seem to still have the supposed benefits of one. So my claim would be that an STEM education is more valuable than a humanities one.

> I think that is one question that is far more valuable than any answer you > can find :)

Maybe we really do have different values. All I can say is that in ordinary, everyday life, I suspect you find questions (ordinary everyday questions like "where are my car keys?") to be only as valuable as their answers. And that in ordinary, everyday life, you find things valuable only insofar as they connect to ordinary, everyday life. You can construct a whole anti-inductive edifice of beliefs that stand alone, but if they're completely disconnected from anything in real life... well, I find I'm better off without them, and I expect you would too.

<comment><USER5> > I think there is consensus (at least among people, philosophers included, in > their ordinary lives) on the value of helping more people.

There may be consensus, but the source of the consensus is not some objective fact, but a mere convergence of various simulated worlds.

> If we restrict ourselves to empirical predictions, Gettier's examples cease > to be paradoxical.

They're not paradoxical, they simply challenge the meaning of knowledge. But who says we want to restrict ourselves to empirical predictions? The problem in your reasoning is that everything in the real world is mediated for us by the simulated, subjective world. A click on the mouse in the "real world" might have some effect on the world of Minecraft, but the nature of that effect is determined by the rules of the simulated world -- not objective, physical reality. We should limit ourselves to empiricism when _we want_ (subjective) to do stuff that interacts with physical reality, like build an airplane. But what if we want to laugh? Is a joke less real than an airplane?

> whereas people without a humanities education seem to still have the > supposed benefits of one.

That is not true. People without humanities education have humanities knowledge comparable to grade-school math. It's more than nothing, sure, but it's far from making one knowledgeable. It is an extreme example, but there's a fascinating fringe group (mostly centered in and about Silicon Valley) called the Dark Enlightenment or neo-reactionism. They are similar in many ways to other historical groups, but different in others. In any case, they are mostly STEM people who have some historical beliefs that are completely erroneous, precisely because they believe what you just said (and that makes the movement all the more interesting).

> All I can say is that in ordinary, everyday life, I suspect you find > questions (ordinary everyday questions like "where are my car keys?") to be > only as valuable as their answers.

Sure, but why restrict ourselves to ordinary, everyday life? Do you think that human existence lies solely at that level?

> You can construct a whole anti-inductive edifice of beliefs that stand > alone, but if they're completely disconnected from anything in real life

Here's that word again: real. Is a joke not real? What makes physical reality any more real than simulated reality? Is euclidean geometry any more real than non-euclidean geometry simply because we find the former in objective physical reality? Is, say, Call of Duty any more real than Minecraft or Super Mario simply because it imitates physical reality better? They're both simulations. Certainly some things are more _physical_ than others, but whether that gives them any more value is completely subjective.

<comment><USER4> > There may be consensus, but the source of the consensus is not some > objective fact, but a mere convergence of various simulated worlds.

Is there a difference?

> They're not paradoxical, they simply challenge the meaning of knowledge.

But the challenge is to the word, not the reality. Wondering whether belief under particular circumstances is "really" knowledge is as meaningless as wondering whether a glider is really an aeroplane - or whether an amusing quote is really a joke. When you get down to empirical predictions (and empirical predictions inside the world of Minecraft are no less empirical) - Will someone predict correctly? Will this object fly? Will my friend laugh at this quote? - the confusion goes away.

> People without humanities education have humanities knowledge comparable to > grade-school math. It's more than nothing, sure, but it's far from making > one knowledgeable.

I deliberately didn't say anything about knowledge, because the article doesn't; the article talks about beauty, about wonder, about things that touch the innermost parts of our mind. If that's its defense of the humanities, then it's on those criteria that I will judge a humanities education - and my experience is that humanities graduates are no better at producing those things than those who are not.

> In any case, they are mostly STEM people who have some historical beliefs > that are completely erroneous

What is it that they're erroneous about? Surely not the subjective parts, by definition; it's only on the objective, empirical parts of history - the parts that, in the article's classification, belong on the STEM side of "Humanities vs. STEM" \- that one can even have erroneousness (and perhaps indeed knowledge).

> Sure, but why restrict ourselves to ordinary, everyday life? Do you think > that human existence lies solely at that level?

I think that we think more clearly and make better decisions at that level.

> Here's that word again: real. Is a joke not real? What makes physical > reality any more real than simulated reality? Is euclidean geometry any more > real than non-euclidean geometry simply because we find the former in > objective physical reality? Is, say, Call of Duty any more real than > Minecraft or Super Mario simply because it imitates physical reality better? > They're both simulations. Certainly some things are more physical than > others, but whether that gives them any more value is completely subjective.

And yet, in ordinary, everyday life, no-one finds the word confusing. We know immediately which things are real and which things are not (and sure, we find that some things straddle the borderline - but that only means that language is imprecise, not that we don't understand those things), and we find that there is consensus, that realness is objective.

<comment><USER5> > Is there a difference?

Of course there is. A consensus may shift, or be challenged. In some societies there was a consensus that harming many people -- of a particular race -- is a good thing. In many other societies it was widely held that some people are subhuman, and therefore may, and should, be subjugated.

> Wondering whether belief under particular circumstances is "really" > knowledge is as meaningless as wondering whether a glider is really an > aeroplane

Why is that meaningless? Because it has no physical consequences? Again, you _assume_ that physical consequences are more meaningful than mental games, but it is you who gives them that meaning, and you can change the rules.

> When you get down to empirical predictions (and empirical predictions inside > the world of Minecraft are no less empirical) - Will someone predict > correctly? Will this object fly? Will my friend laugh at this quote? - <USER2> > confusion goes away.

True, because there is only one (presumably) physical reality. But why does that matter that the confusion goes away? It is we who are confused, and we who make the predictions. You've decided that less confusion is better. But those are your rules, not some objective truth. I fully agree that when you want to build an airplane, you'd better use the scientific method if you want it to fly. But when you want to ponder the morality of something, confusion might be helpful. And it is you who decides how meaningful pondering ethics is vs. flying in an airplane, and those value preferences may change in one person, or vary from one person to another.

> and my experience is that humanities graduates are no better at producing > those things than those who are not.

That's because the thing that produce wonder or beauty in your simulated world are things that reduce confusion. Many other people are not like that. I don't think we, as a society, would be better off if only one of those groups existed, or if one of them were to be much larger than the other. These are not new ideas, BTW. The struggle of humanities vs. science is part of a bigger struggle of empiricism vs. mystery that has been one of the defining features of modernity. Thomas Mann wrote a masterpiece about it: _The Magic Mountain_.

> What is it that they're erroneous about? Surely not the subjective parts, by > definition; it's only on the objective, ...

It's more complicated than that (not in their case; they're wrong about pretty much everything, but it the general sense). Yes, you can be wrong about the objective parts, but you can also be wrong -- or, rather, primitive -- about the subjective parts. There are levels of refinement of thought in the humanities. It's like a child's drawing -- it's not _wrong_ per se but it won't be put in the museum either (unless it's an exhibition about how children view the world). It's why some people in these parts are angry that Ayn Rand has never been considered a serious philosopher. But her thoughts were adolescent and unrefined, and so, like a child's drawing, are not worthy of serious consideration (maybe serious psychological consideration -- like a child's drawing -- but not philosophical considerations).

I can tell you one thing. It is often the people with the more primitive thinking who are less confused and less tormented, precisely because they've never learned to consider questions from various perspectives (even if they've learned to do so in math). Many scientists were very easily swayed by notions of racial inferiority, and quickly proceeded to find ample "scientific" evidence for that. They were very much certain and un-confused, yet not any less wrong. Of course, you might say that their fault was not truly engaging the _true_ scientific method and their critical thinking -- and I agree. But things mesh together and every one of us -- including scientists -- view physical reality only as it is reflected in our simulated worlds, and sometimes the simulation can really twist things.

Would it be better if our simulated worlds were more regular and more precise? That's an unanswerable question. Better for what? And for whom? We certainly wouldn't be the same beings.

> I think that we think more clearly and make better decisions at that level.

You may be right, but so what? Who says that's better? Dostoyevsky wrote _Notes from Underground_ about that (the protagonist is a man, a very neurotic man, who finds freedom -- or convinces himself so -- only in spite and self- harm). It is we who decide what's meaningful for us, and what we want our inner world to contain.

> And yet, in ordinary, everyday life, no-one finds the word confusing.

Sure, because we normally use that world as a synonym for physical reality. I don't find that word confusing either. But you imbue it with _intrinsic_ , rather than functional _value_ , and that's why it deserves closer examination. Physical reality is extremely useful -- to build an airplane, find a cure, or testify in court -- but to us as human beings a feeling of, say, betrayal, is real and meaningful whether it's objective or not.

There is an interesting duality between objective and subjective reality. What is meaningful for one can be seen as a psychological pathology to an outside observer, and it is often useful to look at things from both perspectives. As you seem to like everyday life so much, I can tell you that scientific facts have rarely motivated people to action -- or changed consensus -- as much as abstract, subjective ideas (like fascism or communism). You can view this from the outside and say that we have a physical psychology that works this way and can be manipulated or "hacked", or from the inside, and say that in each of our simulated worlds, some imagined realities play a bigger role than physical reality.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The question of reduction of the human mind is something many humanists, as well as many STEM people get wrong, but it is quite easy to explain to software developers. The key is this: computation breaks reduction. And by reduction I mean _explaining_ something as the sum of its components, rather than simply describing it as such (although the word _explaining_ requires a definition here which I cannot give). The intractability of simple aggregation of variables makes reduction nigh impossible -- which is why we have physicists, chemists and biologists rather than just physicists -- but computation does so in a much more fundamental way (though it can be said that computation is involved, or emerges, in those aggregations, too). So while an algorithm running on a computer could be _described_ as the physical interactions of electrons in the CPU, explaining and studying the algorithm as a physical process is nearly useless. No computer scientist would reduce a sorting algorithm to physics, and would probably claim that the reduction -- even though it is theoretically possible -- is completely meaningless, as the algorithm transcends the hardware it runs on.

The concept of universal computation says that a machine that is able to perform just a few simple operations, can not only simulate the entire universe it is in, but any universe at all -- with any natural laws. The physical world can therefore contain something that is more general than the world itself. Of course, this is not quite so but only an approximation. As the machine needs to be actually built of earthly materials, it does not have enough degrees of freedom to describe the exact universe it resides in, but even as a bounded approximation, reduction is severely limited.

Of course, much of the "reductionst" study of the mind indeed operates at the "software" level, the algorithm level -- not the hardware level. But the thing about universal computation is that even that is not enough. A computer software can simulate another computer, and the simulated computer cannot be reduced to the workings of the "virtual machine" it runs in. The number of levels of simulation is, of course, bounded by computing resources, but I think it's quite possible that there is at least one simulation layer in the brain.

So while reduction is always necessary to understand the foundations of the next level of abstractions, it can never be a full explanation or even a full explanation mechanism. This is doubly so when computation is involved.

"Reducing" the mind to neurobiology, therefore, does not change Shakespeare being a better explanation to human behavior than neural networks. The two might well operate at two irreducible levels of abstractions, and even if one gives rise to the other, it does not form a sufficient "explanation" (whatever that means).

Dismissing the "reality" or applicability of "literary logic" (e.g. the moon is made of cheese) makes as much sense as dismissing software as less real or less fundamental than the hardware it runs on -- even if the software is simulation a world ruled by laws very different from those governing matter.

<comment><USER6> While some of your post is hard for me to read, I really like the explanation of the human brain using various levels of abstraction for the purpose of tractability.</comment></comment>


Deep comparison Google+ vs Facebook - <AUTHOR> http://www.pcworld.com/article/234825/9_reasons_to_switch_from_facebook_to_google.html#tk.nl_dnx_h_crawl

<comment><USER2> _Facebook, on the other hand, does not make an effort to warn people the they've been tagged (possibly in an unflattering or compromising photo) and give them an immediate chance to remove the tag._

What? It definitely does. I get an email every time someone adds a picture of me. I also think a lot of us make an effort not to delete unflattering photos. Not every picture posted is nice, but it adds new dimensions to your online personality. If you don't like people adding your pictures, you can always change your privacy settings.

Most of these reasons other than data liberation are very one-sided. Facial recognition can be seen as a bad thing, but some would argue it's a nice feature. Although, honestly, what information on my Facebook would I want to liberate anyway? My years-old wall posts of "Omg I miss you" and "lol up!!!" that I never even look at?

<comment><USER3> I'll admit that I'm deeply biased by being a Facebook intern, but why is Data Liberation better than the equivalent feature on Facebook?

<comment><USER2> Because we're actually aware of it. I've been using Facebook since 2006, and I've never heard of such a feature on Facebook... and I know all about privacy settings and other features. Does Facebook actually have an export feature?

<comment><USER4> Account settings -> Security -> 'Click here to download a copy of the data you've put on Facebook.'

This downloads a .zip file with a static html human-browsable index of all your photos, notes, posts, friends' names, etc.

<comment><USER5> Does it download your friends' public email addresses and phone numbers?

If no, why not?

<comment><USER6> No.

Facebook's explanation is that because they respect your privacy, they think you should be able to withdraw access to contact information whenever you see fit.

In order for that to work, it goes, your friends should only be able to access contact information from within FB's walled garden, and never be able to export it. (Also the reason contact scraping Apps are met with cease and desist letters.)

BTW, you _can_ export your friends' birthdays from the events page. This data is not included in the aforementioned bundle.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> This article would be more believable if they removed the word "deep" from the title. A deep analysis would show that other than the Google platform integration, these so-called differentiators fall apart.

Hangouts is unique -- for now. I'm pretty sure Facebook is already working on something similar.

The only real differentiation I have seen is the UI. The Facebook UI is getting very hairy. It is hard to find things. You shouldn't have to Google (oh, the irony) to find out "how do I do X on Facebook?".

So Facebook's real vulnerability, as I see it, is platform creep. It's due for a major re-write, but of course they then risk alienating their user base at the worse possible time. Google's move is therefore quite strategic.

<comment><USER8> I've heard others describe the difference as a UI issue and I can't disagree more. It takes an engineer to realize, but the dynamic real-time updating of Google+ is /not/ a UI issue. You can't just sprinkle some front-end magic on a system to make it work this way. It takes major backend work to allow that to happen.

Minor point, but the photo quality of Picasa is truly making the experience for me. Facebook's photos are low-quality and built to scale massively, while Picasa has been built as a Flickr competitor. The quality difference and design tradeoffs really show. I'm a photography nerd though, so maybe this does not matter to others as much.

Also, as many have said I think the major hook for Google+ is that notifications are integrated in every Google property.

<comment><USER9> For the benefit of those of us who aren't familiar with both platforms, can you explain what "dynamic real-time updating" features Google+ has and what Facebook does instead?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> s/deep/overtly biased/

I'm not really a big fan of Facebook; it's gotten to a point where I resent it for how locked into it I am right now [1]. I'm very much rooting for someone to come up with a product good enough to reduce the Facebook effect.

That said, this article is shallow, disputable and occasionally wrong. And it reaks of link bait. If you haven't clicked the link yet, don't waste your attention.

[1]: [http://www.gq.com/news-politics/big-issues/201012/viral- me-s...](http://www.gq.com/news-politics/big-issues/201012/viral-me-silicon- valley-social-networking-devin-friedman?printable=true) Ctrl+F friction

</comment><comment><USER10> "For the most part, Google has lived up to its "Don't Be Evil" slogan. Which company would you rather have as the steward of your personally identifiable information?"

Well, I'm not sure. I don't think either of them would do anything EVIL (sell my personal information to some person to come threaten my family), but don't both of them use all of our info to sell to advertising companies (which in a way, is practical, and kind of evil?)

<comment><USER11> How is them targeting advertisements at you in any way evil? First of all, it lets you use Facebook/Google+ FOR FREE. Secondly, well-targeted advertisements are far-and-away better for both consumer and advertiser than blind advertising. Several times on Facebook I've seen an ad that was so perfectly targeted, it meant a new good experience for me, and a conversion for that advertiser.</comment></comment>


Printing and customizing your own graph paper - <AUTHOR> https://gist.github.com/mcnees/f82fae1a2a386045bcf6f98413658598 <comment><AUTHOR> Examples can be found in a tweet [1] of the author.

[1] [https://twitter.com/mcnees/status/1030997697078145026](https://twitter.com/mcnees/status/1030997697078145026)</comment>


Hack your conference attendance with this toolbox - <AUTHOR> https://xtensio.com/conference/ <comment><USER2> Free Tool.

Make the most out of your conference, expo, convention or trade show attendance. Let the world's best document creator help you before, during and after the big event.

Create user personas, one pagers, lean canvases, competitive analysis, media kits, press releases and more...</comment>


Ask HN: What comes after social networks? - <AUTHOR> Specifically, all the current social networks are starting to feel long in the tooth. Facebook (+Instagram, +WhatsApp), Twitter, LinkedIn... these have been around for a relatively long time, they're approaching (or have passed) the top of their growth bell curves... one might generously call them mature.<p>What's next? <comment><USER2> My belief is that every company listed there, plus quite a few more, can be wholesale replaced by a single generalized platform that distills and incorporates patterns from each. Probably something more in the idealized spirit of what the internet was originally intended to be.

Of course, when you boil raw sewage the end result isn't usually potable water.

Nevermind that overcoming the network effects of existing platforms is also nothing short of a herculean feat. Definitely possible, though.

</comment><comment><USER3> Social networks are THE feature of the web and will always be. It started with usenet, geocities etc., followed by MySpace, now twitter and Facebook. A trend in this (e.g. Switch to private chat groups) would still qualify these applications as social networks.

In what directions social software will evolve is another question. What will be the next big revenue generating business model is yet another one.

<comment><AUTHOR> That's an interesting way of looking at it.

Got an opinion on what the next great leap in social networking might be? Is it private chat groups, as others have mentioned too?

I'm asking because for the first time in a long time, I don't have any sense of where we're heading, of what shows great promise.

Feels more like we're seeing small refinements rather than truly big ideas for the future.

Is it just me?

<comment><USER3> I guess temporary shares (like in Instagram stories or Snapchat) could be a good trade-off between the desire of 15 minutes of fame and privacy. Future social networks will probably put an emphasis on this.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Private group chats. Already happening now.

</comment><comment><USER5> I hope I'm wrong but my guess is payment/lending networks.

<comment><AUTHOR> Oy, that seems about right, but that's a very enticing future.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Virtual life (Not necessarily VR) game like Second life where people connect, learn and do things which they don't normally do.

Looking at Pokemon Go success, I am pretty sure a mobile based Virtual Life simulation game with chat feature can go mainstream.

</comment><comment><USER7> I expect some kind of social currency system like China or Black Mirror. Wouldnt surprise me if they already exist in the west

</comment><comment><USER8> Snap, back to reality, I hope.

I think there will be a new generation of fluid social networks in competition over business models and interfaces.

<comment><AUTHOR> What do you mean by "fluid social networks"?

<comment><USER8> Ease of switching, like if ActivityPub takes off, you have a backend SN you join, but can switch at any time, because the data is all the same format. Networks can consume each other's content. Interface is decoupled from the network.

<comment><USER3> I don't see that happen as long as the non technical people don't care.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Shared Virtual Reality...with haptic interface, nudge nudge, wink wink.

<comment><AUTHOR> Say no more</comment></comment>


Crawl a website with scrapy and store extracted results with MongoDB - <AUTHOR> http://isbullsh.it/2012/04/Web-crawling-with-scrapy/ <comment><USER2> For really quick one-off scraping, httplib2+lxml+PyQuery is a pretty neat combination:

      import httplib2, lxml, pyquery
      h = httplib2.Http(".cache")
      def get(url):
          resp, content = h.request(  url, headers={'cache-control':'max-age=3600'})
          return pyquery.PyQuery( lxml.etree.HTML(content) )

This gives you a little function that fetches any URL as a jquery-like object:

      pq = get("http://foo.com/bar")
      checkboxes = pq('form input[type=checkbox]')
      nextpage = pq('a.next').attr('href')

And of course all of the requests are cached using whatever cache headers you want, so repeated requests will load instantly as you iterate.

Just something else to throw in the toolbelt ...

<comment><USER3> Have checked out kenneth reitz's requests? Its fantastic, you might like it

<comment><USER4> Link, for the interested:

<https://github.com/kennethreitz/requests>

<comment><USER3> thanks, i should have included a code sample too:

        import requests
        from lxml import etree

        jquery_like_page = etree.HTML(requests.get('url').text)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Also check this out for a pretty good discussion on scraping [http://pyvideo.org/video/609/web-scraping-reliably-and- effic...](http://pyvideo.org/video/609/web-scraping-reliably-and-efficiently- pull-data)

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah, I actually learnt scraping from Asheesh :) He's awesome.

<comment><USER5> I have been playing with scraping for quite some time now and have my own scripts and stuff, but I found that video informing and there were a few useful snippets I had missed.

Keep meaning to check out more of the Pycon vids

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Here's the same functionality written in Ruby using Chris Kite's crawler called Anemone[1]. Gist: <https://gist.github.com/2475824>. Screenshot: <http://i.imgur.com/cbv9A.png>

[1]: <http://anemone.rubyforge.org/doc/index.html>

</comment><comment><USER7> Cool. BTW, is there a reason for naming the file "isullshit_spiders.py" and not as "is _b_ ullshit_spiders.py"? :)

<comment><AUTHOR> Oh, that's just a typo. My bad. Edit: there, corrected.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I really want to read. Topic is right down my alley.

Unfortunately, the page is literally broken and unreadable on Android ICS with Chrome :(

<comment><USER9> Same using mobile safari

<comment><USER10> Same using chrome on windows unless I resize the browser and make the width about 1000px

<comment><USER11> Yes, it's true for any viewport with a width of less than 940px. I'll do my best to fix this too.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


King of the Hill on Rosetta Code - <AUTHOR> http://blog.racket-lang.org/2015/05/king-of-hill-on-rosetta-code.html <comment><USER2> Well I guess they did a great job. I now know what the programming language Racket is. I had never even heard of it till now.

</comment><comment><USER3> Great job, Bobby</comment>


The FDA's perpetual process machine - <AUTHOR> https://paulromer.net/fda_perpetual_process_machine/ <comment><USER2> There are number of conflated regulatory problems in this piece:

1) FDA needs to move its data ingestion into the 21st century (note: large industry can be as resistant to changing current process as bureaucracy). In no rational universe should we have to mail data in 2020

2) In vitro diagnostic regulation is a mess and needs to be revamped top to bottom. Either exempt all Lab Developed Tests, rewrite the law to make them all subject to oversight, or come up with a 3rd path.

3) Emergency Use Authorization needs to be rethought with the ability for either political leadership or FDA to have broad capability to expand the category of what gets covered

<comment><USER3> I don't think "conflated" is the right word. Romer doesn't imply that these problems have the same cause, or are even correlated (although I suspect they are).

He just lays them out as stark examples of FDA getting in the way of the public interest in this pandemic.

<comment><USER2> That's a fair point. I was responding to this idea of all of these being part of a single "process machine".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> The sorry state of the FDA and drug development and deployment as a whole is in my opinion due to a preponderance of two types of people: Type A will happily bankrupt their customers while giving them heart failure in order to reduce allergy symptoms by 10%, and Type B would rather let ten thousand people die in unmedicated screaming agony than have a drug show up in a news story saying it killed three of them, regardless of how many hundreds of lives it saved.

<comment><USER5> The FDA is largely composed of Type B people. They are very risk averse and will often delay a new technology simply because there might be unknown risks. There are technologies widely used in European ventilators such as automatic alarm control or adaptive alarm limits which the FDA views as unsafe based on their fear that the alarm system might fail somehow.

It doesn't surprise me that they tried to slow the approval process down. Anyone that believes the FDAs mandate is to foster progress is severely misinformed. Their actual mandate as I understand it is specifically to protect the public from injury by making progress really slow and making sure there are enough barriers to prevent someone selling a product which makes patients worse off than competitors.

In this case they probably caused a lot more damage than they prevented.

<comment><USER6> I work with the FDA as a part of my job and I disagree they are overly risk adverse. When we previewed our development plan with the FDA, they actually asked us "can't you move faster?". When a safety signal showed up, they were more than willing to work with us to develop a protocol to reduce the risk while still providing patients with drugs.

I don't disagree that the FDA is very concerned about safety, but in situations where there is a very strong need, the FDA is willing to move quickly and accept a level of risk.

<comment><USER7> It's nice that they offered to slightly tweak the protocol for you. How very generous and magnanimous of them.

On the other hand: coronavirus.

<comment><USER6> I honestly don't think it's fair to crap all over the FDA for Covid. One day we read that people become immune, the next day they lose it. One day hydroxychloroquine works, then next day it doesn't.

It's hard enough managing drug approvals when you have all the data and plenty of time.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I still don't understand why the FDA was telling labs not to develop their own tests. After publication of the primers, it's standard work to create an rtPCR. And being a lab developed test it should be out of the jurisdiction of the FDA.

<comment><USER9> If I recall correctly, it is due to the declaration of a state of emergency. Usually only a lab would need certification, but the emergency made it necessary for every test to be certified. Don't quote me on this though, I'll try and find a source.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Unfortunately, we need to be skeptical about almost every decision and communication from the CDC, FDA, and a number of other federal agencies. The current administration has done a remarkably effective job of bending these agencies to their will and forcing out anyone who doesn't fall in line.

<comment><USER11> I think this is one of the great side tragedies of the coronavirus. The US generally had a lot of trust in these federal agencies. They've always been susceptible to political interference, as demonstrated now. But it's never (?) gotten to the point it has now, where you simply can't trust the CDC to provide accurate information, or information that every other country has accepted months ago.

Will the next administration provide a V-shaped recovery in trust? Or is it just gone forever?

<comment><USER12> It's not the administration. It's just the general ineptitude of many government processes. The current crisis has just laid inadequacies bare.

<comment> throw-away_42 It is this Republican administration. They were left a playbook for this scenario. They threw it out, and then lied about it.

[https://www.mercurynews.com/2020/05/12/fact-check-obama- left...](https://www.mercurynews.com/2020/05/12/fact-check-obama-left-trump-a- pandemic-response-playbook/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I find this interesting as the FDA basically fell over themselves to sign off in treatments. They gave chloroquine the ok based on less than nothing and other drugs have been given breakthrough treatment status without trials.

I can see an arguement to "try anything" in an emergency. But how did the fda end up being BOTH to lose and too tight with their regulation?

<comment><USER14> Chloroquine and hyrdorchloroquine have been in use for decades (70 years for chloroquine!) with millions taking them daily and a very well known safety profile. It was already FDA approved, could have been used by any doctor for COVID as an off-label treatment already. Everything about CQ/HCQ has been ridiculously politicized to the point that the facts have become very hard to find.

In fact, given the huge number of people taking them for lupus and other diseases (a significant fraction of a percent of the population, having autoimmune disorders and poor health and thus at greater COVID risk), we've basically had a biased but ultra-informative experiemnt already: What percentage of them got covid and what severity, as compared to general population, and compared to other comparable populations (autoimmune that isn't treated by CQ/HCQ)? It's not perfect, but it would have been very informative. CDC _has_ this info. No ethical issues about it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> The main economic function of employees of agencies in DC is the transfer of risk away from the DC housing market, onto the American people. The career employees of the military, as a particularly extreme example, exist to transfer risk away from the DC housing market as far away as possible, which ultimately ends with special forces personnel deployed to hostile territory.

Similarly, the main economic function of employees of big tech companies is transferring risk away from the West Coast housing markets, onto their users.

In my experience, the only way to handle the government side of this is to "not waste the crisis" and execute under conditions where they will see stopping you as more risky than not stopping you.

The only way I know of to manage large corporations is to get the government to create incentives that make it riskier for them to transfer risk onto their customers. That's what financial penalities and anti-trust law are for. The trick is you have to go back to the point about the government: you have to make action less risky for the government actors than non-action.</comment>


XmlSerializer Memory Leaks - <AUTHOR> http://www.idevforfun.com/index.php/2012/09/27/xml-serlializer-memory-leaks/

<comment><USER2> In my experience, one should just plain avoid the xmlserialzer all together. It's extremely unreliable sometes. The data contract serializer works much better.</comment>


Someone named Kevin Rose forked Reddit on GitHub... - <AUTHOR> http://github.com/kevinrose/diggit

<comment><USER2> Yeah, it looks like him: <http://github.com/kevinrose>

<comment><USER3> It looks more like someone having a bit of fun with global find and replace and a picture they found on the internet of Kevin.</comment></comment>