Show HN: Godb is a simple Go ORM for PostgreSQL, MySQL, SQLite and SQL Server - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/samonzeweb/godb <comment><USER2> That's more of a query builder than an ORM: it doesn't actually use objects and only allows for expressing SQL queries in Go.

In that it is similar to LINQ or HQL or SQLAlchemy Core — at an even lower level really since things like conditions are provided as parameterised strings.

<comment><AUTHOR> I agree, it's a simple tool. As mentioned in the README, it's not a full- featured ORM, but it does more than building queries as it maps Go structs with databases content (on this point I disagree as it use objects).

The purpose is to be more productive than doing all this job manually.

Many things can be improved, it's sill a young project. This project is initially a learning one : doing stuff to improve my skill, on my spare time. I tried to build something clean, and used it on some real data. Perhaps it could be useful for somebody else. Nothing more ;)

<comment><USER2> > on this point I disagree as it use objects

That's a technicality, it just loads query data into objects which is what more or less every query builder does, the objects aren't involved in any of the logic. By the benchmark you use psycopg is an ORM (it really isn't, it isn't even a query builder).

Don't misunderstand, I'm not saying a query builder is bad, I'm just saying this is not an ORM, and shouldn't be sold as such: it's going to disappoint people looking for ORMs like Django's or Rails's and it's going to turn off people who object to ORMs[0] but would have been interested in a query builder.

Not to mention a good query builder is an excellent basis for a full-fledged ORM.

[0] and there are many people who think ORMs are a terrible idea

<comment><USER3> >> [0] and there are many people who think ORMs are a terrible idea

Do you have any links perchance? Because I can't shake the feeling that I'm a pariah among the developer community for thinking this way.

<comment><USER4> [https://blog.codinghorror.com/object-relational-mapping- is-t...](https://blog.codinghorror.com/object-relational-mapping-is-the- vietnam-of-computer-science/) for example :-)

<comment><USER3> Excellent, thank you!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Also, for others looking for a Go data layer / ORM`ish package, have a look at [https://github.com/upper/db](https://github.com/upper/db)

it's been in development for years, its used in production by many companies, and theres been a lot of work to keep it lean and powerful through lots of iteration.

<comment><USER6> Also [https://github.com/jinzhu/gorm](https://github.com/jinzhu/gorm) and [https://goa.design/](https://goa.design/)

<comment><USER7> I've had issues with gorm. I find it has quirks that bother enough for me to move away from it. I have yet to find something I'll like more than just pure sql.

Goa is just for generating apis. Not for databases?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I'm the author of a code-generation ORM in Go (real orm, does relationships fairly robustly) [https://github.com/vattle/sqlboiler](https://github.com/vattle/sqlboiler) and I'm curious why you needed to make another one despite something like this existing? Granted we don't support sqlite/mssql yet, but surely a PR to support it is easier than writing your own :(

<comment><AUTHOR> The projet started as a learning one. I made some independent and experimental component from time to time, and then glued them together, rewriting some parts, ...

Why this kind of project ? Because I used Active Record (Rails), Entity Framework, played with Django ORM, ... and regretted that nothing similar exist in Go world. Instead of complaining I choose to do something, not building a full ORM by myself, but at least build something allowing me to have a better comprehension of the constraints (except of the classic "no generic").

I didn't choose to build another Go library thinking I'll build something better than others. I learned, and I got a library ;)

<comment><USER8> Well, now that you're done learning I hope you'll become an sqlboiler user and maybe contribute to it to fit your use case too. Fragmentation in the sql world in Go is pretty bad right now, hence my reaction to seeing your lib, sorry for that :)

<comment><USER9> Why do you think "Fragmentation" is bad?

<comment><USER8> I want to see the Go community and it's libraries flourish. But having libraries like this around which provide extra confusing and probably poorly maintained choices for users is detrimental to it's overall health. There's already great examples of maintenance rot found even amongst the very popular libraries like go-yaml and httprouter.

One thing you can say about Go is it has 1000 Micro-frameworks, ORMs, Routers, and Logging libraries. Most of them are within a percent of giving the exact same feature set with the exact same approach and and ever so slightly different API. Lots of them share the same mistakes as they are a user's first project or a learning arena (though routing has been a pretty benchmarked area so that's been better than the others).

As someone who has open source libraries, and who uses Go in their day job and at home my personal opinion is that Go needs fewer, stronger libraries. Well supported, well maintained pieces rather than this illusion of choice that's presented today. I'm sorry if I came off as crass in my reply to the OP but that's simply the state I see in the community today.

Ideally there'd be 2-4 ORMs in Go that would be the goto. And half would use a code-generation approach, half would use the reflection based approach.

[https://github.com/astaxie/beego/tree/master/orm](https://github.com/astaxie/beego/tree/master/orm) [https://github.com/cosiner/gomodel](https://github.com/cosiner/gomodel) [https://github.com/jinzhu/gorm](https://github.com/jinzhu/gorm) [https://github.com/go-gorp/gorp](https://github.com/go-gorp/gorp) [https://github.com/coocood/qbs](https://github.com/coocood/qbs) [https://github.com/go-reform/reform](https://github.com/go-reform/reform) [https://github.com/vattle/sqlboiler](https://github.com/vattle/sqlboiler) [https://github.com/upper/db](https://github.com/upper/db) [https://github.com/astaxie/beedb](https://github.com/astaxie/beedb) [https://github.com/naoina/genmai](https://github.com/naoina/genmai) [https://github.com/monochromegane/argen](https://github.com/monochromegane/argen) [https://github.com/square/squalor](https://github.com/square/squalor) [https://github.com/theduke/go-dukedb](https://github.com/theduke/go-dukedb) [https://github.com/dropbox/godropbox/tree/master/database/sq...](https://github.com/dropbox/godropbox/tree/master/database/sqlbuilder) (...and more) And now: [https://github.com/samonzeweb/godb](https://github.com/samonzeweb/godb)

Do we truly need this? This one in particular feels a lot like upperdb. And if it's for learning only, don't publish it to things like hackers news which makes people seem like it's something you should use as opposed to the more mature libraries out there. This is what I meant by fragmentation, it's an illusion of choice. There are actually very few logging/routing/orm/micro- framework libraries you should really use if you're serious about a project.

<comment><USER10> Kindly: you are not the gatekeeper of other's efforts, contributions, and submissions. Saying "you shouldn't have written this, open sourced it, or submitted it to hnews because I think my library is much better" is obnoxious behavior that I think is far more damaging to a community than fragmentation. People will consolidate choice of libraries with time. We shouldn't be shutting down new contributions reflexively, and it's much more distasteful when it's because you're advocating for your alternative.

<comment><USER8> An incredibly rude post in reply to something I think is reasonable. My opinion is as I stated, NOT as you very loosely interpreted thank you very much. I don't think of myself of a gatekeeper of others, just my own things.

I have a very high bar for open source personally and I tend to view it "more hardcore". I think that if you're putting open source out there to a wide audience such as this that you have a contract with the people you're putting it out to that you're going to maintain what's there and ensure it's of high quality. And if you're going to go to that level of effort why not contribute to something that's already mountains of work ahead of you and effectively the same code anyway (upperdb/gorp/gorm/xorm in this case)?

I have many Go repositories on my Github account that I've used for learning - but I've never put any of them out there to wide audiences that were solved by a more popular project in the same way - the approach has always been radically different. When I couldn't find logging libraries I liked I tried using others and contributed to them. I've also never put anything out there that I don't intend on maintaining basically forever. So my behavior is consistent with my viewpoint for whatever that's worth.

My colleague suggests that other people use open source for different reasons and view it much differently than me, and that's possibly the misunderstanding here. I shouldn't try to reflect my opinion in that sense on others and I do apologize for that. I suppose "if it were me" I wouldn't have done what he has, and I was commenting as if people knew and understood that as a commonality - which isn't probably true.

Also - I think you hugely overstated my bias for my own library. I'd be just as happy if he had not posted this and worked on gorp instead. /shrug.

Also I've been waiting for a long time for Go's libraries to be converged on - hasn't happened yet :)

<comment><USER10> I don't believe I was rude but I'm happy to apologize if others concur.

<comment><USER11> No, you're right on. If others want to work on something, that's up to them. Tell them they're doing it wrong is toxic.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> One of the features listed is "Mapping with nested structs", but there's no example of this. Given that this would be a feature setting your project apart from many of the Go "ORMs" out there, it would be nice to have an example.

Maybe something with two tables: an "authors" table and a "books" table. Then an example of getting authors each struct of which has a `[]Book` of books.

<comment><AUTHOR> Nested structs are shown in the documentation : [https://godoc.org/github.com/samonzeweb/godb#hdr- Structs_map...](https://godoc.org/github.com/samonzeweb/godb#hdr- Structs_mapping)

It's composition tool, not a relational one. Sorry.

<comment><USER13> > It's composition tool, not a relational one. Sorry.

Isn't the R in ORM for relational?

<comment><AUTHOR> > > It's composition tool, not a relational one. Sorry.

> Isn't the R in ORM for relational?

I spoke about the nested structs. You can have nested structs for something else than relational mapping.

As I replied to masklinn , I was not sure how to qualify godb, and I admit that ORM is not a perfect qualifier.

<comment><USER14> Your library is a query builder, not an ORM.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> As it was stated, godb isn't really an ORM. The README and documentation was updated.

Now godb is just "a Go query builder and struct mapper".

Thanks for all comments :)

</comment><comment><USER15> Took me a moment to parse the name correctly. Perhaps GoDB would've been a better choice, although I assume naming conventions prevented that and so the second letter of the alphabet was declared a deity instead.

<comment><USER16> Coincidentally, something called "GodBolt" [0] is on the front page at the same time. At first glance I almost thought they were related posts.

[0] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13182726](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13182726)

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> The annoying thing about ORMs in Go is that since there are no macros / annotations you either have to use code generation or reflection.

Reflection is a real drag on performance.

<comment><USER18> But code generation doesn't have to be painful. Consider [https://gopkg.in/reform.v1](https://gopkg.in/reform.v1), for example. It generates methods for your data types and uses then to cover 80% of typical usage and also does help you when you want to use SQL.

(disclosure: I'm the author)

<comment><USER14> Code generation is always painful. It's yet another compiler add-on one has to add to a pipeline. Because now If I use your executable I have to manage your tool and its versions,it becomes yet another dependency. At least real/reified macros (that go lacks) need no third party executable . Code generation with third party tools means language fragmentation. Suddenly people add their own DSL on top of Go in form of a manifest. Suddenly Go executes instructions in comments and other horrors ...

<comment><USER19> Yes that sucks. So I have written / am writing my own code generation tool which runs only once and does not rely on any fancy instructions in comments. Ah yes ... maybe `go generate`. I hate a slow compiler.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I've not really understood the gain you get out of using ORMs or query builders. Doesn't it just add a learning curve to a problem already solved by SQL?

I know these are meant to decouple you from the db implementation, but don't most projects of sufficient complexity end up getting tied to one db anyway?

<comment><USER21> I, as an author of such library, am a bit biased but still...

For one, you may get massive, massive developer productivity by eliminating loads of queries. In a lot of ORMs you do things like myObject.save() instead of generating a insert/update query for the particular state of myObject without taking into consideration which fields of the object is currently set. This reason alone enough for me to use them.

Second, bunch of additional functionality usually come out of the box with ORMs, such as JSON or arbitrary (de)serialization of columns, caching, logging etc which you would have to spend time on custom implementations of these otherwise.

Third, like you mentioned, some allow very easy change of database vendor.

Fourth, mental abstraction from the underlying data storage (you stay in your language's domain) which again contributes to the productivity.

Some other benefits include not seeing large SQL strings in your code which make it more difficult to read and maintain, security and ability to easily reason about what the code intends to do.

I don't want to sound arrogant (not my intention at all) but I believe those who don't understand or downright rejects the benefits of a decent ORM system are either the ones that never used one to see the productivity benefit or those who work on projects that need to squeeze the last bit of optimization. In a large enough project it is seriously pain and time consuming writing all those queries which could be elegantly avoided.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> How hard is it to just learn SQL?

<comment><USER23> Answer: not very! I don't know why people have such an aversion to it. SQL is a powerful, flexible, fun, and highly rewarding language to learn!

The only substitute I'd accept is a quasiquoter that checked my SQL syntax for me at compile time.

<comment><USER24> Powerful sorta, fun debateably, highly rewarding probably, flexible, absolutely not. By far one of the biggest reasons to use something other than raw SQL is because of SQL's near total lack of composability. Show me a valid SQL fragment that represents "the 'permission' field of the given table is set to true OR the joined-in user has the superuser flag", where the join is represented in the fragment itself such that any query I apply it to will have the requisite join added in if necessary. Then show me a fragment that represents "this email and all of its attachments". Then show me how to compose those fragments into a full query. You can't; if you're using raw SQL you have to manually interleave those things into every query you want to use them in. SQL basically _mandates_ copy and paste as the only abstraction available, and it isn't even all that great at that since there's no such thing as scopes within a query making it easy for your copy & pasted fragments to stomp on each other's names.

Some of the additional query languages might be able to do it (they could certainly do chunks of what I said), but they'd still be pretty klunky about it since they bodge it on the side, and still don't compose anywhere near as well as they could or should.

Mind you, I'm not sure this library can do it either; SQL is also quite difficult to wrap around because of its structural deficiencies. Trying to hack away foundational issues at higher levels is always messy, error-prone, and still filled with the quirks that shine through.

<comment><USER25> You can use VIEWs [1] as an abstraction mechanism. It's not perfect, but it can abstract certain things away. I think it would work for your first example.

Something like:

      CREATE VIEW permitted_X AS
      SELECT X.*
      FROM X, user
      WHERE X.user_id = user.user_id
            AND (X.permission OR user.is_super);

You second example doesn't have enough info for me to see if it can be accomplished by a VIEW.

Other abstraction mechanisms are user-defined functions.

[1] [https://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/static/sql- createvie...](https://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/static/sql- createview.html)

<comment><USER24> With your view I still think I can't _pass a table in_ ; your X is not a variable. That's my point. There's a lot of power in SQL and its associated technologies, _but_ there's also a _loooooot_ of places where in a modern system we'd have a variable or some other composition mechanism, but there's no first-class existence of that mechanism in SQL. For instance, in systems programming languages, "first-class functions" have won so thoroughly that it's hardly even a "feature" anymore, it's just part of the baseline for any new language, or it better have a _darned_ good reason they aren't present. SQL has not even remotely had that revolution.

Some of these things are fixed up by the product-specific languages, but only some of these things.

Here's another example; using your product-specific language, can you create a table for me with a variable number and types of columns based on the parameters passed in? I don't know them all, but I bet it's hard in most or all of them. No credit if your product-specific language lets you bash a string together and then somehow execute it; I'm calling for everything to be done via first-class mechanisms. (Also, I'm not asking for whether this is a good idea; it is obviously a tricky thing of dubious use. But that should be a software engineering determination, not a language restriction.)

<comment><USER22> If you want the table as a variable, you would need to use a prepared statement:

PREPARE stmt1 FROM 'SELECT X.* FROM ? X, user WHERE X.user_id = user.user_id AND (X.permission OR user.is_super)';

EXECUTE stmt1 USING 'yourtable';

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> As someone who is writing in go for some time (still deciding if i should learn something like C or JVM-based to get better at understanding big programms), i also want to get into Databases (never really learned to code. Everything is self tought). Do i need to approach a not-language specific way to really learn the SQL concept, and if yes, where do i start? In Chatroom i always read super complex stuff about databases and meanwhile i was never able to handle a SQL Database right, because i wasnt able to wrap my head around the documentation, and used something simple like bolt (in go) for my db needs.

<comment><USER27> I would recommend getting familiar with using your db from the command line. If you are in MySQL or Postgres, learn the basics. selects, inserts, updates, deletes, and joins. After you have a bead on those, get used to subqueries. Learn what denormalization is (might want to do that so you can play with joins). Learn what transactions are. At this point, you are probably better than most. After that, start digging into deeper parts by going through public docs and seeing what neat functions they provide.

After you know the above, you can use that SQL knowledge in any language you want when accessing the db. No need to learn a new ORM per language or anything.

Also, at this point, you are likely to start understanding more about scaling systems which involve intelligently choosing indexes, replication, and sharding. Now you are on your way to Jr. DBA status :)

That was my path at least. There are likely better ways.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> ORMs are almost always a bad idea. They add an unnecessary layer of complexity which will result in both speed and space inefficiencies. If your project is small just use SQL, it will be easier. If your project is large you will end up writing a lot of customized SQL anyway, so just use SQL. If your project is in the middle, will never become large, you won't have to support it later and you already know the ORM tool then you may benefit from ORM.

<comment><USER29> If your project cares at all about security you should at least be using some form of query builder. The bare minimum is a system that binds parameters of a query to user data without manual escaping.

From there the distinction between ORMs and query builders gets fuzzy, it's more of a spectrum than a bright line. I particularly like SQLAlchemy's model of a core SQL-building library with an ORM you can use piecemeal around it.

<comment><USER28> Probably every modern SQL API supports safe query construction with out a third-party query builder. Building queries with simple string concatination is a bad idea but that's not a justification for the complexity of ORM.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> I cannot see how to build nested SELECTs with Godb.

<comment><AUTHOR> It's not really implemented yet.

You can build nested queries, doing some extra work, but it's not elegant and will not work for any cases (especially with PostgreSQL) : [https://gist.github.com/samonzeweb/b1ae3e2d1f3203ee1722ac4bd...](https://gist.github.com/samonzeweb/b1ae3e2d1f3203ee1722ac4bd2cb95e9)

Some work to do to add proper nested queries into godb, but for a so simple example it doesn't seem to be extremely hard.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> Do you plan to make it work with CockroachDB?

<comment><USER7> I think that's more up to CockroachDB. They offer a postgres compatible interface so this _should be_ usable with CockroachDB already.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> Is there anything like this or sqlx but in C?

</comment><comment><USER33> Isn't CQRS the future?</comment>


Urban Gilgamesh: What the earliest epic tells us about living in an ancient city - <AUTHOR> https://www.laphamsquarterly.org/roundtable/urban-gilgamesh <comment><USER2> 3000-2500 BCE is such an interesting time period. Civilization and technology somewhat inexplicably pick up throughout the world within just a few centuries. For example, coinciding with the Gilgamesh time period (around 2800 BCE to 2500 BCE) the major pyramids in Egypt pop up, and so do the Caral / Norte Chico pyramids and cities in Peru.

<comment><USER3> History Channel says the only possible answer is aliens.

Or maybe it's an adjacent possible thing and the ancient world was far more connected by trade than we often think. It's easy to forget that these were "just" neighboring countries/kingdoms back then. A lot like today.

The illusion of linear progression we get from history class is largely an effect of "You can't learn everything at once"

<comment><USER4> I'm actually just watching Aliens in the History Channel, lol.

What would be the other plausible explanation though? Considering fermi paradox etc...

<comment><USER5> Anti-gradualist explanation of history is an alternative and more likely explanation.

Gradualism means a version of history in which civilisation progresses gradually from less to more civilised over time. The opposite is a history in which there could have been moments when human civilization was more advanced way before our notion of recorded history, but suffered a massive hit to its existence. Then the civilisation after got rebuilt but with the previous culture and technological knowledge forgotten.

One such theory is by Graham Hancock and Randall Carlson [1]. They present an explanation of history in which there could have been a more technologically advanced human culture even during ice age which got wiped out when ice age ended.

The end of ice age was completely sudden, which they explain by a meteor crash into the huge ice sheets causing large tsunamis and sudden ocean level increase which wiped out majority of advanced population living in cities right by the sea - same as today. Causing the advanced culture and its knowledge to cease to exist with remains being picked up or reused by more primitive people living in mainlands and forming cultures which are now basis of our civilisation.

Their version explains currently unexplained phenomena such as

1\. sudden extinction of ice age animal species. Hordes of mammoths found dead with broken femur bones (killed by massive tsunami vs killed by mammoth hunters as explained by current dogma)

2\. Big Flood myths found consistently across many independent cultures around the world

3\. Technological regress in Egyptian culture - pyramids and pottery way more advanced in older periods than in later periods (forgotten technology)

4\. Way more advanced technology of construction in older structures in Latin America (Cusco, Machu Picchu, Sacsayhuamán, Pumapunku) with advanced construction techniques unexplained still until today

5\. Geological evidence of massive tsunamis such as large travelling stones (sliding on melting ice sheets) deep into mainland North America or massive water erosion corridors also possibly explained by large tsunamis

[1] [https://youtu.be/0H5LCLljJho](https://youtu.be/0H5LCLljJho)

<comment><USER6> Graham Hancock is a fun fictionalist, the Erik Von Danikan of our time.

<comment><USER7> Some of his claims are quite far-fetched and esoteric. However, even Michael Shermer, head of Skeptic magazine, recently admitted ([https://twitter.com/michaelshermer/status/123755946996742144...](https://twitter.com/michaelshermer/status/1237559469967421440)) that there is some plausibility for the younger dryas impact hypothesis, which is currently an important part of Hancock's lost civilization claims. Such a major catastrophe would of course have a reset effect on any existing advanced civilization. This alone is not proof that there was one, of course.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> It's interesting to consider the centrality of the city in ancient literature, and the equation of civilization with urban life. In modern American political discourse, it feels as if the city is constantly slandered or considered alien or "un"-American, in contrast to purported "authentic" rural areas. The city is seen as debauched and somehow apart

<comment><USER9> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One_man,_one_vote#Historical_b...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One_man,_one_vote#Historical_background_2)

"Alabama's state legislature resisted redistricting from 1910 to 1972 (when forced by federal court order). As a result, rural residents retained a wildly disproportionate amount of power in a time when other areas of the state became urbanized and industrialized, attracting greater populations. Such urban areas were under-represented in the state legislature and underserved; their residents had difficulty getting needed funding for infrastructure and services. They paid far more in taxes to the state than they received in benefits in relation to the population."

<comment><USER10> Taking that a step farther, the entire bicameral federal legislature could be seen as a weighting of rural over urban in the US.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Don't throw a steak, you're barbecuing, at the face of the Goddess of love. They'll be consequences.

12 beers, and 12 prostitutes, repeated for 12 nights, is the civilizing process. As Enkidu discovered and Gilgamesh already knew.

Take the stairway of a bygone era, draw near to Eanna, the seat of Ishtar the goddess, that no later king could ever copy! Climb Uruk's wall and walk back and forth! Survey its foundations, examine the brickwork! Were its bricks not fired in an oven? Did the Seven Sages not lay its foundations? [A square mile is] city, [a square mile] date-grove, a square mile is clay-pit, half a square mile the temple of Ishtar: [three square miles] and a half is Uruk's expanse.

</comment><comment><USER12> The thing that always stuck with me about the Gilgamesh story was the way gilg and enkidu fought.

All of my best friends were people i had tension with first.

Familiarity or something</comment>


Ask HN: Dealing with Constant Browser Upgrades - <AUTHOR>

There have been small discussions in many threads about the "brave new world" of web development caused by the rapid release cycles of Chrome and Firefox.  I'm currently working on a web app to be used a highly regulated industry that typically requires buckets of QC.  My group is struggling with both settling on a list of accepted browsers and dealing with testing those browsers.  How are others dealing with this?  I've suggested that we define a "current" list of browsers (say, FF 3 to 7, and Chrome 14), test against those, and let our user base find bugs in later versions. <comment><USER2> "Highly regulated" implies to me you should be testing against certain IE versions, and a Firefox 4.0 or something would be in addition to that.

What's the breakdown on customer browser usage? You could be supporting FF7 when actually only FF3.6 is installed on these systems.</comment>


An ALS patient's dilemma: End his own life, or die slowly of the disease? - <AUTHOR> https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/als-patient-s-dilemma-end-his-own-life-or-die-n993421 <comment><USER2> Thank you for posting this article. ALS may seem quite rare, but it is a strange disease.

It shares properties with many other diseases, including Alzheimer's and FTD. They are proteinopathies. And Parkinson seems to be at the other end of the spectrum compared to ALS.

There would be no single SLA, but several diseases, regardless of the criteria selected: physical (UMN, LMN, PLS) or genetic (SOD1, FUS, TDP-43, C9orf72).

Each case is different.

There have been more than 50 unsuccessful clinical trials, which would be a record.</comment>


Show HN We just launched forking for your Minecraft worlds - <AUTHOR> http://blog.minefold.com/post/16987166800/gorgeous-maps-cloning-worlds-pro-accounts

<comment><USER2> hey, I've seen your project around a few times and at Minecon. I love the idea and I think you have a lot of potential and while I absolutely love your interface I don't think you'll have much success with "normal" users when they use it. The reason your service is absolutely fantastic is because it addresses the biggest problem Minecraft servers have right now (it's not plug and play -- daunting to inexperienced users) but your interface, although pretty, feels... confusing. It feels like it's designed for people who understand Minecraft, which is not your core audience!

Still, great work, good luck :-)

<comment><AUTHOR> Hey Sam! Great to talk to you finally (we had an awesome time with @wedtm at Waza). We're primarily targeting existing Minecraft users at the moment because there is less teaching needed (and therefore less work). However we know that there's still a _massive_ potential in reaching people who have never played (or even heard of) Minecraft before.

I'm really curious to hear specifically how you thought it was confusing. We've spent a lot of time trying to make the interface as simple as possible and would appreciate all the criticism we can get :) Fancy shooting an email to firstname.lastname@example.com?

<comment><USER2> Yes, Miles mentioned he had spoken to you at the conference he attended, although Miles is no longer with the company and has no involvement with MCF or MCW any longer, just so you know.

The confusion I had came from the lack of hand holding. The individual pages (well most) make sense and are well designed and explained, but the process of using them feels disjointed. I'm not sure how much sense that makes, but I'm trying to imagine it from the point of view of someone who only understands a basic idea of how to play Minecraft.

For example, after signing up I click "create a world" and I'm presented with a well designed screen with lots of configuration options, but at no point does it explain what a world is. It's devoid of any information, it assumes I understand what you mean by world. Some sort of introduction on this page that says something like "A Minefold world is a minecraft world that you can invite your friends to, once created you add our server address to your multiplayer server list and add your friends to your access list and you're ready to play" would do wonders.

Next: the individual world management page. If I create a new world it shows "playing here" greyed out, what does this mean? After investigating the system I've worked out that you can only play on 1 world at a time and "playing on a world" is which world you've configured via the control panel to be accessed when you log in to pluto.minefold.com, not the world you're _actually_ connected to, this isn't explained anywhere and I believe it will confuse users. If I click through the the "members" page there's no explanation here of what these people listed mean, I added my other account "samuel" and there was no explanation of how they can now join my world, or what the account needs to be (minecraft? minefold?). It makes sense they'd need a Minefold account when thinking about it and how the service works but users don't think, they expect the service to do that for them.

I could go on and on, although the interface is very pretty and simple which is what you aimed for, it is not straight forward, you need to hold your users hands and let them know exactly what to do and provide examples of exactly how to achieve the most popular use cases (creating a server for a friend and then getting a friend into the server is the main one).

edit: my comment seems a bit abrasive, apologies, tired, mean well :-D

<comment><AUTHOR> No, this is awesome. Everything has been duly noted! We definitely owe you a beer :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Has some bugs.

So I was wowed by your maps and signed up to try the free account. I uploaded my world (I had to do it twice because the upload timed out once, and the second time it took several minutes). After logging in to pluto.minefold.com, it didn't put me in my world (My world's seed: -6543031652815246039 vs what the seed on pluto is: 1328309103 if you want to follow up)

Also, I'm hesitant to play on anything that doesn't have bukkit/WorldGuard. I'm not sure what your access control/griefing rollback mechanisms are. That should probably go in your FAQ.

<comment><AUTHOR> Addressing a couple of your issues:

1.) Our uploads go straight to S3, so the first one timing out may (?) have just been a connection problem? We checked our logs and we didn't receive notification of the upload finishing. If you upload more worlds in the future and they keep failing, email them to firstname.lastname@example.com and I'll hook you up.

2.) The seed changing is a bug. We're working on fixing that now, but in the mean time if you send your username and the world to email@example.com I'll manually fix your seed for you.

3.) We've had lots of requests for Bukkit but were hesitant to support it because we thought it would be replaced by the Mod API. Now that it looks like the Mod API will just be Bucket, well… I don't want to commit to anything but it's something we're "investigating" :)

4.) At the moment griefing is controlled as all worlds are whitelist only. Only let your friends play in a world :) We're also saving snapshots every 10 minutes exposed a mechanism to rollback yet. I might sound like a broken record, but if you email email@example.com we can manually rollback your world for you.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> This is a stroke of genius: <http://screencast.com/t/v2e0i31sAC> (Pro accounts)

You nailed it. Perfect value-add, perfect price point.

</comment><comment><USER5> I like it! Just one thing: a more prominent (header?) link to your main site from your blog and a sign up link within the blog post (since it talks about accounts) would probably help convert HN/Twitter viewers into customers. Maybe I'm just blind, but I had to navigate manually to your homepage and again to see plans, and the only links I saw in the blog post were to individual maps.

I noticed that the "pricing" screenshot links to the pricing page, but there's nothing there to indicate the screenshot is a link.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hey thanks for the feedback. We haven't spend too much time on the blog yet (building!) but I just added a signup link to the end of the post.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Sorry I don't really know minecraft, but it isn't open source right? if so how did they manage to technically do this

<comment><USER2> The Minecraft Server protocol has been documented by the community since 2009, there are a wide variety of custom servers in existence today, for example Myne which is open source: <https://bitbucket.org/andrewgodwin/myne2/src>

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Tweeted at you guys, but this is absolutely amazingly awesome. I used to own/run MinecraftServers.com and I thought that was awesome but this blew me away, especially since this is all running on node.js, eventmachine and redis! Keep it up!

</comment><comment><USER8> Wait, each person pays individually?

<comment><USER9> Looks like it: <https://minefold.com/help>

That's $17 per month for a 4 people server (with the $25 plan, $15 per month with the $45 plan). I don't think that's a competitive price (but don't quote me on that, I have zero experience setting up or shopping for Minecraft servers). They also don't support any plugins. It, however, looks like the service is incredibly easy to set up and use.

Just like with Dropbox, you pay more but you (are supposed to get) ease of use in return. I think that can work if done correctly. (There are also other advantages: You don't need one gracious person to set up everything and pay, you don't need to collect donations, …)

Edit: Wow, the experience really is smooth. It took me not much more than a minute from their homepage to running around in my own multiplayer world. I have never set up any Minecraft server anywhere and zero experience with all of that. Nice work!

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Fantastic work guys... can't wait to see what you craft next!

</comment><comment><USER11> Wow the maps are indeed gorgeous! Makes me want to play.

</comment><comment><USER12> Kickin' ass fellas. What's next?

</comment><comment><USER13> Well done dudes</comment>


Voice Selfie with Private In-Browser AI - <AUTHOR> https://picovoice.ai/selfie/ <comment><USER2> It asks for permission to use my camera, with no detail of what the site does. I'm assuming it would also need access to the microphone, but with no indication as to what it is, I'm far less inclined to give these permissions.

Perhaps you could add some sort of description.</comment>


AT&T Cleared by Judge to Buy Time Warner - <AUTHOR> https://variety.com/2018/biz/news/att-time-warner-merger-approved-1202840369/ <comment><USER3> The DOJ had tried to stop the deal[1] but it appears that the court ruled it could carry on [2].

      Assistant Attorney General Makan Delrahim said in a statement the DOJ was "disappointed
      with the Court's decision today. We continue to believe that the pay-TV market will be
      less competitive and less innovative as a result of the proposed merger between AT&T and
      Time Warner. We will closely review the Court's opinion and consider next steps in light
      of our commitment to preserving competition for the benefit of American consumers."

[1]: [https://www.reuters.com/article/us-time-warner-m-a- at-t/u-s-...](https://www.reuters.com/article/us-time-warner-m-a-at-t/u-s- justice-dept-att-settlement-talks-failed-court-filing-idUSKBN1E92RS)

[2]: [https://www.cbsnews.com/news/judge-rules-on-att-time- warner-...](https://www.cbsnews.com/news/judge-rules-on-att-time-warner- merger-live-stream/)

<comment><USER4> The irony is, their monopoly power and the conflicts of interest could be much less worrisome if net neutrality were in place.

<comment><USER5> Wrong Time Warner. This is the entertainment part, not the internet service.

<comment><USER6> Parent is correct. The worry is AT&T giving preferential treatment to their new Time Warner content on their own network...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Merging the threads now. Submitted URLs so far, besides this one:

[https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/12/business/dealbook/att- tim...](https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/12/business/dealbook/att-time-warner- ruling-antitrust-case.html)

[https://www.cnbc.com/2018/06/12/att-time-warner- ruling.html](https://www.cnbc.com/2018/06/12/att-time-warner-ruling.html)

[https://www.dallasnews.com/business/att/2018/06/12/att- wins-...](https://www.dallasnews.com/business/att/2018/06/12/att-wins- antitrust-battle-time-warner)

[http://about.att.com/story/att_to_acquire_time_warner.html](http://about.att.com/story/att_to_acquire_time_warner.html)

If anyone knows a significantly better URL for this submission, let us know and we can change it again.

<comment><USER4> [https://variety.com/2018/biz/news/att-time-warner-merger- app...](https://variety.com/2018/biz/news/att-time-warner-merger- approved-1202840369/)

More details, especially where it matters. and a more analytic language.

<comment><USER7> Ok, we'll change to that from [https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-06-12/at-t- wins...](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-06-12/at-t-wins- antitrust-ruling-allowing-takeover-of-time-warner). Thanks!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Yet more media consolidation. And this one has the inherent conflicts of interest you get when a distributor buys out a producer.

And of course the idea of protecting the public interest isn't a thing anymore in DC.

<comment><USER9> > And this one has the inherent conflicts of interest you get when a > distributor buys out a producer.

I'm not sure I understand the conflicts. Isn't Netflix essentially doing the same thing? Consolidating production and distribution?

<comment><USER10> Netflix isn't your ISP. Netflix doesn't control the means of delivery/distribution. They rely on Verizon, Comcast, AT&T, etc to deliver their data.

Netflix can't just decide that they don't want to compete with Hulu and therefore throttle or block Hulu from their customers.

We know that controlling the means of production and the means of distribution is highly anti-competitive. All you have to do is look at rockefeller and standard oil in the 1800s. Rockefeller bought or threatened his way into controlling the railroads which allowed him to put most of his competitors out of business or forced them to sell to Standard Oil. Controlling the means of delivery allowed rockefeller to monopolize the oil industry in the US.

With the repeal of net neutrality, we are getting to the point where verizon, comcast, at&t, etc can be their own little "internet". And this really hampers future entrepreneurs. If you wanted to start a netflix, youtube or twitch today, but you can't rely on verizon, comcast, at&t, etc to give you fair access to their network, then why bother and who will invest in your company?

But this is the overall direction of the internet and social media the past few years. Less freedom, less openness and a move towards more of a corporate tv/news format.

<comment><USER11> > But this is the overall direction of the internet and social media the past > few years. Less freedom, less openness and a move towards more of a > corporate tv/news format.

So when are we nerds getting together to make a new internet?

<comment><USER8> Internet2[1] has been around for years, but it's very restrictive and you aren't invited.

[1] [https://www.internet2.edu/](https://www.internet2.edu/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> > The judge indicated during the trial that he wasn't buying Shapiro's > projection. After his testimony, Leon said he was "confused." Further > explanation from Shapiro didn't help. "I'm not sure I got it, but it's too > late and too hot to belabor the point any further," the judge said.

Amazing on so many different levels.

(Shapiro is the economist whose model the DOJ based their case off of).

<comment><USER13> Absolutely shameful. AI judges can't come soon enough.

<comment><USER14> Where do you think the training data for AI judges would come from?

<comment><USER15> evaluations of historical judgements made and what the consequences were.

How to define good/bad consequences becomes the problem then, but thats the nature of it.

<comment><USER16> Such evaluations are useless as a training set because they inherit the biases of whoever wrote the evaluations. Of course, if fairness isn't a desired property, feel free to carry on.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> FYI, this isn't the internet Time Warner. This is the entertainment Time Warner. The internet Time Warner is run by Spectrum these days.

<comment><USER18> Does that really matter? Just because it isn't becoming an Internet monopoly, it's still a content+distribution mega-corp that can squeeze its competitors and limit options for consumers.

<comment><USER19> It matters when ~50% of the comments are talking about net neutrality and Time Warner Cable hasn't existed for more than two years.

<comment><USER20> This is a major net neutrality issue.

AT&T can now say all of time warner's content is free for mobile devices. Major blow to their competitors.

<comment><USER21> Sounds pro-consumer to me. Whats the big deal? It will just force the other providers to up their game and offer their own freebies.

<comment><USER22> Great if you like the provider's content. Quite bad if you like any content not owned by one of the few Internet providers, who can't offer such freebies.

<comment><USER21> Everyone agrees we are moving towards a world of platforms. Each big platform holder will buy or ally with an isp and smaller content owners will pay 30% rev to use those platforms, just like today with google play store, app store, steam (for games), etc. thats reality, why be a luddite about it?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> NB this is "Time Warner the media company", not Time Warner Cable (which is now Spectrum.) This isn't broadband consolidation but rather media/entertainment consolidation.

The deal is most closely comparable to Comcast's acquisition of NBCUniversal in 2011.

<comment><USER24> Which is what a lot of ex telecoms monopolies are doing as they cant really grow organically anymore another example is BT sport funny how Murdoch's press started bashing BT after they started competing with Sky

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> The acquisition target is 'Time Warner Inc.', primarily a television and film company, whose products and subvisions include HBO and Cinemax, the TV networks CNN, TBS, Turner Classic Movies, TNT, and various joint ventures with US sports leagues, and Warner Bros, which now includes DC Comics/DC Entertainment. Meanwhile, AT&T is largely a telecom and satellite broadcast company, which under its various subsidiaries offers bulk telecom interconnect, and satellite television, and is a wired and wireless ISP.

Therefore, this sounds more like vertical integration of an infrastructure- and-ISP company buying a media company in much the same vein as Comcast acquiring full ownership of NBCUniversal in 2013, or Verizon acquiring AOL -- which in 2001 bought Time Warner, then AOL got spun out in 2009 -- and Yahoo.

<comment><USER26> The part that bothers me about each of those acquisitions is that none of those utility companies are well-liked by their customers (instead being the most hated companies). The fact that they all have the ability to acquire these other large entities which aren't reviled shows that they really are scalping their customers. And it isn't just Comcast or AT&T or Verizon, it's all of them. That is highly irregular for them to all be so despised and successful.

<comment><USER27> What do you mean highly irregular? They all have regional monopolies. Of course they have crap service and high prices.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Cognitive dissonance is interesting. For example, tech folks generally love Japan and Hong Kong's railroads. But those systems work so well because of the exact sort of vertical integration techies get apoplectic about when it comes to the Internet: [https://www.mckinsey.com/industries/capital-projects-and- inf...](https://www.mckinsey.com/industries/capital-projects-and- infrastructure/our-insights/the-rail-plus-property-model). JR and MTR not only are private companies that own and operate the railroads, they own a ton of the land around the rail stations. They thus can capture value from both sides of a two-sided market--the customers going to a business near a rail station, and the business that benefits from having a rail station near it. That greatly increases incentive to invest in rail compared to a system where value can only be captured from the rider.

Interestingly, vertical integration also _increases_ competition, as is the case in urban areas of Japan. If you can leverage your low-margin transit product to sell your high-margin real estate product, you have vastly more incentive to compete with other firms on the transit product.

Indeed, the vastly lower deployment costs enabled by 5G suggest an alternative vision of the future. We may end up with a system where you subscribe to "Google 5G" or "Facebook 5G" or even "Netflix 5G" service. It will be abhorrent to those who visualize a platonic model of infrastructure separated from content, but may in practice work a lot better than heavy government involvement in the infrastructure layer.

<comment><USER29> Lots of trolly transportation systems were built in the US with the same model. Build a line out to the cheep farmland you own near a city/town, charge low fairs (not nearly enough to cover your capital costs and running costs), but now you can sell lots for housing at 10x or 20x the price you bought the land for. Once all the lots are sold, having the trolly pay for itself is difficult, especially after people can buy cars(hello model T) and not pay your monopoly trolly ride price. Almost all those trolly lines were shut down.

<comment><USER30> That's a pretty simplistic conclusion that ignores one of the biggest technological and cultural life-altering inventions in human history: the automobile.

<comment><USER29> "Once all the lots are sold, having the trolly pay for itself is difficult, especially after people can buy cars"?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> >Judge Leon limited how DOJ lawyers questioned certain witnesses and expressed visible skepticism of testimony by the government's chief economic witness, who presented an empirical model that predicted the deal would lead to small but significant price increases in monthly cable bills. AT&T countered with its own academic economist who said it wouldn't.

Yeah, I'm sure this won't lead to _small_ price increases for consumers.

<comment><USER32> This is a gross oversimplification of the issue. Here is the judge's opinion which actually explains his rationale: [http://www.dcd.uscourts.gov/sites/dcd/files/17-2511opinion.p...](http://www.dcd.uscourts.gov/sites/dcd/files/17-2511opinion.pdf)

His rationale on this particular is over 30 pages long. It starts at page 57-ish.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> It's crazy to me how one judge gets to decide the fate of a 100 billion dollar merger. Humans are fallible.

<comment><USER34> Well, the judge has to base the decision on a whole bunch of laws. It's not like judges get to decide this on their own.

<comment><USER35> >Well, the judge has to base the decision on a whole bunch of laws. It's not like judges get to decide this on their own.

This is a weird opinion to hold when you take the fact that two judges can come to two completely separate conclusions on a single issue, while drawing from the same laws.

<comment><USER36> Judging is the act of applying law (general) to a particular case (specific). Since laws can't anticipate every future situation at their time of writing, no matter what there will _always_ be some disconnect between these two -- i.e. vagueness/generality in law, leading to edge cases.

Which is why two judges can come to two completely separate conclusions on a single issue, while drawing from the same laws, based on their own personal methods of interpretation and biases.

<comment><USER37> Judges in the lower circuits are also held accountable to higher circuit judges if they don't interpret the law while taking past case judgement into consideration.

A lower district judge can't overrule a higher judge's opinions.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> For those who cut the cord, some things that may come out of this:

1\. AT&T announced they were launching an entertainment only live streaming service for $15 (or free to AT&T subscribers) which will compete with Philo.

2\. They will continue to give away free or cheap HBO to AT&T or DIRECTV NOW customers

3\. Comcast will more aggressively bid for FOX which means either Disney or Comcast will become the majority stakeholder for Hulu

[https://medium.com/fomopop/what-at-t-time-warner-deal- means-...](https://medium.com/fomopop/what-at-t-time-warner-deal-means-for- cord-cutting-d68bd3f8b81)

<comment><USER39> HBO is currently $5/mo for DirecTV Now customers, which is well below the regular price. Also FWIW, it was free for the first year to early subscribers of DirecTV Now.

<comment><USER38> It's also free for AT&T Unlimited subscribers.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> >to lead the next generation in innovation.

Meanwhile I have 300k internet in Pasadena, CA. That's the fastest they offer. My roommate doesn't care and won't upgrade to Spectrum.

Why is it whenever I read the above it means the opposite?

<comment><USER41> Also have bad internet in LA. I grew up in North Dakota though, and back there my family is getting 1 gigabit internet for $100/mo from Midcontinent.

Absolutely bizarre and ridiculous that North Dakota, a state that has far less developed infrastructure than either coast, has better internet than Los Angeles.

<comment><USER28> Is it? I've got two fiber lines into my house in a Maryland county where most people are on septic and well. Unsurprisingly, Big California cities have Big California impediments to broadband deployment.

<comment><USER42> The biggest impediment is corrupt corporate capital not investing in their infrastructure. Some have taken government subsidies and threw elaborate parties and went on luxury cruises while not building anything. There's court cases about it, such as [https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20151022/09232532594/fcc-h...](https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20151022/09232532594/fcc- has-to-remind-isps-not-to-spend-taxpayer-subsidies-booze-trips-to-disney- world.shtml)

The _companies_ take that money and do things like buy multi-billion dollar companies with it instead.

The market in this sense is free from competition, free to block municipal broadband (illegal in 20 states), free from the consequences of providing terrible service, free from the risk of losing customers, and free from the social obligations of providing a civic service.

It's classic profiteering, capital extraction, dodging responsibility, and engineering the marketplace that leads to California's and the US's subpar system.

And it stays that way because hoards of people either apologize for it or just refuse to see what it is regardless of the evidence, because they have a larger commitment to their ideas of how things are supposed to be then there reality of how things actually are.

Until people break their mythical love affair with the idea that there is no sustained abuse or corruption in a manufactured free market, we will forever be shackled by reading to address its glaring and obvious issues.

<comment><USER28> > The biggest impediment is corrupt corporate capital not investing in their > infrastructure.

This is easily disprovable. Broadband providers invest tens of billions a year in infrastructure. The fastest cable or wireless connection available to you is probably 10x faster than it was a decade ago. By comparison, your Intel laptop is maybe 3-4 times faster, maybe less. That cost gobs of money-- building cell towers, pushing fiber deeper into the cable network, reducing users per HFC node by a factor of 10, etc. This is all incredibly labor intensive and expensive; it's not just a matter of downloading "DOCSIS 3.1" onto some head ends and calling it a day.

> Some have taken government subsidies and threw elaborate parties and went on > luxury cruises while not building anything.

Note also that the "government subsidies" are anything but. The article you link to is talking about Universal Service Fund money, which is actually taken from ISPs and given to other ISPs. It doesn't come out of general tax dollars.

> leads to California's and the US's subpar system.

According to Akamai, U.S. broadband is among the fastest in the world, faster than all the large EU countries: [https://www.akamai.com/fr/fr/multimedia/documents/state- of-t...](https://www.akamai.com/fr/fr/multimedia/documents/state-of-the- internet/q1-2017-state-of-the-internet-connectivity-report.pdf). We're in the top 10, right after Denmark, and ahead of the U.K., France, Germany, Spain, Italy, etc. (the countries comprising 70% of the EU population).

> And it stays that way because hoards of people either apologize for it or > just refuse to see what it is regardless of the evidence

Exactly the opposite is true. The actual _evidence_ shows that the 1996 deregulation has been a monumental success in terms of amount of money invested and actual broadband speeds achieved. Proponents of heavy regulation have to deny the actual evidence (dollars spent, speeds achieved) because it suggests a shocking result: even deregulation that resulted in much less competition than anticipated is still better than the prior, heavily-regulated system. (I'm writing this as my awesome government-funded train system is stuck between Annapolis and D.C. for no apparent reason.)

What's holding us back from being even better (and which is why I have fiber but much of Silicon Valley does not) is state & local broadband regulation. Red tape that makes it hard to string up fiber (or forces you to bury it, at much higher cost), hard to create an "minimal viable ISP," etc. When I lived in Baltimore, for example, Verizon wanted to come in and compete with Comcast. The city literally wouldn't let them do it, and pleaded with Google to come build Fiber instead. Which Google wouldn't do, because, quite reasonably, Google only builds Fiber in places where cities are willing to waive requirements municipalities uniformly require for other providers: [https://crosscut.com/2014/12/google-fiber-never-come- seattle...](https://crosscut.com/2014/12/google-fiber-never-come-seattle- broadband-internet-2).

<comment><USER42> There's a lot here. Thanks for responding. I'll hopefully have the time to read that document and get back to you later.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> I had forgotten of this until I read this article on the Atlantic, but there is an organization dedicated to breaking up the new form of monopolies like AT&T+Time Warner, Google, Amazon, Facebook, originally funded by Google, the Open Markets Institute

[https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2018/07/lina- kh...](https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2018/07/lina-khan- antitrust/561743/)

</comment><comment><USER44> The courts seem to be letting telecoms consolidate to a degree that is unprecedented (Bell, at least, had a fairly narrow scope), because they think the internet means these companies have competition. I think they're severely under-estimating the power these companies have and the risk that these mergers create to both consumers and our democracy.

<comment><USER45> That or they don't care. I'd be very interested to know what kind of positions the friends & families of these judges hold related to the mergers they approve.

</comment></comment><comment><USER46> Can't we have a system where the bigger the merger, the more compelling the arguments for it should be?

Like a $10M merger should have 1 strong argument in favor of the consumer, a $100M merger should have 2 strong arguments, and a $100B merger should have 5 strong arguments in favor of the consumer (and I'm being forgiving by using a logarithmic scale here).

<comment><USER47> Hot take: An $X m merger should never go through.

(I haven't thought about the downsides, but I can't see anything obvious?)

<comment><USER48> It could be split up into several mergers below $X.

<comment><USER47> I'd assume there would be a rule to prevent structuring

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER49> This is a distribution company -- internet, cable TV, satellite -- acquiring a content company (the communications portion of Time Warner was spun off as Spectrum). Isn't this just a vertical integration?

<comment><USER50> Time Warner's cable business was spun off as _Time Warner Cable_ , which Charter Communications later acquired. Charter's cable/internet/tv brand is Spectrum.

<comment><USER49> You are right -- I stand corrected.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER51> Media consolidation infographic from 2011. Back then, six companies controlled 90% of the market. I wonder where we're at now?

[http://www.businessinsider.com/these-6-corporations- control-...](http://www.businessinsider.com/these-6-corporations- control-90-of-the-media-in-america-2012-6)

<comment><USER52> through the rise of original content production from Amazon and Netflix and the overall shift to internet delivery (including Youtube and Podcasts) I'd argue we're in a less concentrated situation today.

<comment><USER51> Yes and no. I agree 100% for podcasts. However, while Youtube and Netflix are encouraging more producers they retain veto power on their platforms. This is key.

In the case of Netflix, it's obvious they only host what they want on their platform. In the case of Youtube, they are increasingly banning videos.

This isn't my particular hobbyhorse issue, but it was the first result for "youtube ban political videos" and it has a huge constituency.

"Youtube to Ban Videos Promoting Gun Sales"

[https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/22/business/youtube-gun- ban....](https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/22/business/youtube-gun-ban.html)

VICE Motherboard chronicles Youtube's history of escalating censorship.

[https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/59jgka/a-brief- hi...](https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/59jgka/a-brief-history-of- youtube-censorship)

On a decentralized platform (i.e. the real web) this would be impossible or nearly so.

You might disagree with or laugh at the people losing money or literally being censored on one of the biggest public squares in the world, but it's not democratic and media consolidation will never ever result in something compatible with the free and open exchange of ideas.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER53> Got some sharp legal minds at work in this discussion. Really digging into the relevant parts of vertical vs horizontal anti-trust enforcement in a free market for media and a regulated one for content delivery. I especially love the nuanced extrapolation into healthcare and social media. Super work, just super.

</comment><comment><USER54> Why does the date on the article say 2016?

<comment><USER55> The article is probably the original announcement. The merger was approved today [1].

[https://www.wsj.com/articles/judge-is-set-to-decide- whether-...](https://www.wsj.com/articles/judge-is-set-to-decide-whether-at-t- and-time-warner-can-merge-1528832942)

</comment></comment><comment><USER56> Great. More and bigger monopolies forming in networks/media.

</comment><comment><USER57> Anything related to ATT is doomed. I've dealt with that company both professionally and personally and it's a mess. How it's managed to get this big and survive is beyond me. Their services are horrible, expensive, and you spend more time fixing their billing errors and getting a rep on the phone than you do anything else.

It's a sad day for the modern age.

</comment><comment><USER58> In the context of net neutrality ending, this looks like AT&T acquiring the means to exploit discriminatory traffic routing. It seems like there will be a gold rush of sorts, towards building walled gardens, segmenting the Internet into fiefs.

Does ending NN allow an ISP to completely block a website? I.e. to what extent does this also open up the door to overt political censorship?

<comment><USER59> Time Warner the ISP was bought years ago. This is Time Warner the entertainment company.

<comment><USER60> AT&T is an ISP. They also own DirecTV, and now CNN and associated media entities.

<comment><USER59> I'm well aware. My point was that people were talking about the issue like it was Time Warner the ISP. It isn't.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER61> Perfect time to rename the company to "usher in a new era of innovation". How about calling the new AT&T Bell? Because this merged company will be way worse an anticompetitive monopoly than the exploitative operator of the US switched phone network ever could have been.

</comment><comment><USER62> It seems like every commercial actor wants to _be_ the platform (add "value" as an integrator/provider), and avoid being abstracted out under the platform.

"Internet is just a dumb pipe" "Why dont all PCs ship with just a vanilla Windows install" OR "Why don't all smartphones just install vanilla Android" "The programmer is irrelevant" "The OS is irrelevant" "The browser used is irrelevant" "Cable providers are irrelevant"

etc.. etc

<comment><USER63> In many cases that's known as "commoditizing your complement."

[https://www.gwern.net/Complement](https://www.gwern.net/Complement)

</comment></comment><comment><USER64> Neither of these companies really affects me as a non-American. But it feels like it just paves the way for mergers of companies that do.

I started thinking of international examples, which got me thinking about Google and Apple. Who in a way feel like they're post-colossal-merger companies already. And I mean... It kind of sucks but it's not nearly as awful as I feared it might look like.

</comment><comment><USER65> The only good that can come of this all is that the Time Warner name will finally go away. (yes i know this is the media company vs. the cable company but this is the end of it!) the rest of the deal, is not so great.

edit: not vs.* but 2 different entities with similar names.

</comment><comment><USER66> I want to give an unconventional view that supports this decision.

The two companies merging are walking into a trap.

Their size makes them an attractive target for nationalization. ATT started off as a private company. It's size however lead to it being effectively taken over by the government. The resulting monopoly came to employ 1 million people at its height. Adjusted for population growth, that's be like the entirety of all the military branches today.

Before anyone mentions anything about automation though, let me say, there are plenty of jobs. If any of you have had the pleasure of a company giving you a secretary, you know that many jobs that have supposedly been automated, we are just doing without.

Also as cyber security becomes more of a concern, none of these jobs can be outsourced. Can you imagine whatever company builds our 5G network having their NOC in say Costa Rica (assuming world relations continue to deteriorate), or customer support outsourcing to the Philippines?

I know my views are wrong in some areas, but I hope they open a few new ways of viewing things.

<comment><USER20> > Their size makes them an attractive target for nationalization

Sure, except this is America.

</comment></comment><comment><USER67> Link to the court's ruling: [https://assets.documentcloud.org/documents/4502506/U-S-v- AT-...](https://assets.documentcloud.org/documents/4502506/U-S-v-AT-amp-T- Decision.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER68> So is anyone actually trying to write legislation to bar ISPs from co-owning content creation companies? Is there a basis for this? Or is there some other type of anti-media/connectivity consolidation on the horizon even as a thought experiment?

</comment><comment> a-dub "we want the cca deal stopped now! we want the cca deal stopped now!"

meanwhile, didn't trump make a campaign promise to prevent this exact merger? interesting timing.

<comment><USER32> The plaintiff trying to block the merger is Trump's administration's DOJ.

</comment></comment><comment><USER69> consumer protection: what is it

<comment><USER70> [https://i.imgflip.com/2c40f3.jpg](https://i.imgflip.com/2c40f3.jpg)

(I know, I'm sorry)

<comment><USER71> Then don't post it. Sigh.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER72> Looking like AT&T needs to be broken up again.

</comment><comment><USER73> Anti-trust is truly dead. We're re-doing the gilded age everyone, strap in. This'll be great this time, we promise.

</comment><comment><USER74> "AT&T Cleared by Judge to Buy Time Warner, Judge Buys Boat"

</comment><comment><USER75> Does anyone have a link the the analysis done by Carl Shapiro?

</comment><comment><USER76> Hot on the heels of FCC repealing net neutrality?

</comment><comment><USER77> It's interesting that the Trump administration was eager to block this deal (Trump has made statements in favor of preventing this merger), while enthusiastically repealing net neutrality. Maybe expecting consistency here is reading too much into the tea leaves.

At the same time, AT&T stock is down in after hours trading. Does this mean that investors believe this merger will be bad for AT&T, or at least for short-term profits?

Maybe tomorrow's reaction will be different as the entire market will weigh in on the decision.

<comment><USER78> The fundamental philosophy at play here, I think - so far as there is one - <USER2> that government regulation cannot and should not be used to try and regulate away the negative effects of lack of competition, that instead it should ensure that a competitive marketplace exists and let the market take care of it.

If I recall correctly, there's an explanation of this position from Ajit Pai's FCC, which in particular references the NBC Universal-Comcast merger and explains why the FCC no longer wishes to allow such mergers.

<comment><USER77> That makes sense. Thanks for the insight.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER79> Since the government already logs the content of all internet pipes, I think that they should nationalize all ISPs... it would be much cheaper.

</comment><comment><USER80> this is from 2016, when the terms of the merger were agreed upon but still required government approval.

<comment><USER81> "AT&T's Time Warner Takeover Wins Judge's Approval in Defeat for Justice Dept."

[https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/12/business/dealbook/att- tim...](https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/12/business/dealbook/att-time-warner- ruling-antitrust-case.html)

What does that sound like to you bud?

</comment></comment><comment><USER82> i wonder what this means for our privacy. could this somehow be a step toward national surveillance?

</comment><comment><USER83> Good grief. Why can't we stop all this consolidation already?

This is only good for shareholders. The cons clearly outweigh the pros for consumers.

</comment><comment><USER84> So, will anti-trust please bust this monster? And split Comcast along the way too (media from ISP), for good measure.

<comment><USER18> No, this is the result of that failure. ATT/TW wanted to do this in 2016 as the other comments state. This was the approval.

<comment><USER84> Anti-trust is so royally messed up in US. It hurts the economy.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER85> Nationalize'em.

</comment><comment><USER86> Hello, Ma Bell.

</comment><comment><USER87> I'm so glad the end of Net Neutrality has ushered in an era of unprecedented competition in the broadband market.

EDIT: Yes, this acquisition is of the content division of Time Warner, not the ISP, which was previously acquired — _by another broadband provider_ , mooting my general point how, again?

<comment><USER88> This has nothing to do with the broadband market. Time Warner Cable was spun off from Time Warner in 2009 and subsequently bought up by Spectrum in 2016.

<comment><USER87> It has plenty to do with the broadband market, if you happen to be an AT&T subscriber, and especially if they're your only choice. This, coupled with their no longer being restrained from the kinds of shenanigans that NN barred, positions them to force preferential choices on their subscribers and wring more money out of them for the privilege of accessing competing services.

This is only good for people holding T and TWX, and probably not even _most of them_.

<comment><USER88> I would certainly agree with that but your original comment was specifically about _competition in the broadband market_ , which this deal has absolutely zero effect on and your post seemed to be based on the common misunderstanding of TWC still being part of TW.

<comment><USER87> Sloppy and emotionally-driven phrasing on my part, sorry. I hope my edit and follow-up to yours have clarified my position.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER89> Dislike

</comment><comment><USER37> Maybe this will cause Trump to retaliate by bringing back net neutrality?

</comment><comment><USER90> Mergers like this are required to keep competition and the free market alive.

<comment><USER7> Could you please not post unsubstantive comments to Hacker News?

</comment></comment><comment><USER91> Lenin wrote about the inevitability of monopoly in 1916. He would not have been surprised that the 1911 break up of Standard Oil would be undone in 1999 with the ExxonMobil, nor the slow reconsolidation of the Baby Bells, nor the other monopolies bringing us back to the gilded age.

[http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1916/imp- hsc/ch0...](http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1916/imp-hsc/ch01.htm)

<comment><USER92> Funny, at the same time he took money from the Warburg family to fund his revolution that killed millions, the Warburg family went on to be part ownership of Standard Oil during the same period.

</comment></comment><comment><USER93> Technology will help the citizenry destroy these evil megacorps. It's just a matter of time and some improvements in technology. The world where ABC/CBS/NBC/NYTimes/Time/etc could control what people think is over. In the near future we will have a much more educated populace. They will flex their power in ways that seem unimaginable now. When the information revolution finally arrives, these megacorps will be the first against the wall

<comment><USER94> You put too much faith into the average person's desire for education.

Most people don't know and/or don't care.

<comment><USER95> This is sadly my experience too. Both my parents are educators and life long learners.

It still floors me how many conversations they had with my younger siblings friends parents (I was present) were it more or less went. Friend parent makes baseless or incorrect assertion my history buff father retorted and they just said well I don't care anyways.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER96> This is nuts. This means there is now only one last-mile broadband provider in plenty of big markets. Milwaukee, for example, now no longer has any competition in the broadband space.

<comment><USER97> Despite the name, Time Warner doesn't own Time Warner Cable. They split years ago.

</comment></comment><comment><USER98> Here's a neutral article (as opposed to a press release) with some more of the history and significance: [https://www.dallasnews.com/business/att/2018/06/12/att- wins-...](https://www.dallasnews.com/business/att/2018/06/12/att-wins- antitrust-battle-time-warner)

<comment><USER99> That link is not available from Europe #GDPR.

<comment><USER97> I made an archive link for you: [https://archive.fo/qVRU1](https://archive.fo/qVRU1)</comment></comment></comment>


Everything you wanted to know about initial coin offering but were afraid to ask - <AUTHOR> https://www.techinasia.com/ico-overview <comment><USER2> > There's also little legal protection for crowdsale supporters, if any. Last > June, one of the largest crowdfunding projects in blockchain history called > the DAO (Distributed Autonomous Organization) was hacked. The perpetrator > managed to extract about US$50 million in ether, according to currency > exchanges at the time, before core developers of Ethereum stepped in. In the > aftermath of the DAO, there was no legal recourse, only a technical reset of > Ethereum's code.

Depending on their opinion on the subject of "the code the law", some would consider those responsible for the resetting of ETH (to undo the DAO losses) as the perpetrators.

<comment><USER3> "hacked" is definitely subjective. For anyone interested checkout the"attackers" legal threat right before the fork. [https://pastebin.com/CcGUBgDG](https://pastebin.com/CcGUBgDG)

Here is the HN discussion about it. [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11927891](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11927891)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Not everything I wanted to know about ICOs.

Every article I've read is from the speculator perspective, perhaps for potential speculators. I am more interested in knowing about ICOs from the organizational perspective:

After completion of the ICO, how are the crypto-currencies converted to cash in the bank, so you can put the capital to work.

Is there percentage loss of capital when converting to cash, and is this accounted for in the ICO model.

Does converting 10 to 50 million in crypto-currency to cash cause fluctuations in the market value of the crypto-currency.

The project may require resources that only can be purchased with fiat currency. And I assume people working on the project have bills to pay.

Has anyone documented how an organization deals with the crypto-currency that as been raised via a token sale? I suspect that each organization has their own method of converting crypto-currency to working capital.

<comment><USER5> Sounds like a problem to solve. Reach out at r/Catallax subredit if you want to talk about this more.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> > a web browser called Brave pulled in US$51 million in less than 30 seconds

I highly suspect money of that volume was raised by a few of the early adopters that are sitting on hundreds of millions of dollars of crypto currency. No way was that crowd funding at work.

</comment><comment><USER7> Interesting to see a market based alternative, one step above crowdfunding for trinkets and yet not quite crowdfunding equity as defined by the SEC. Blockchains definitely reduce the cost to "purchase" these tokens from a company.

Still a duck is a duck is a duck right? I can't see why the SEC would not step in and regulate these blockchain tokens. This is probably the reason to have a primary utility argument for the tokens.

You can also see how the blockchain is going to eat the world.

</comment><comment><USER8> This returns 403 Forbidden for me.</comment>


Show HN: BuzzFeed open source SSO - <AUTHOR> https://tech.buzzfeed.com/unleashing-the-a6a1a5da39d6 <comment><AUTHOR> GitHub repo: [https://github.com/buzzfeed/sso](https://github.com/buzzfeed/sso)

This is our identity aware proxy, which we've been using internally for a year.

The blog post explains our motivations behind creating it, and open-sourcing it. It's available today, under MIT license.

We'll be keeping an eye on the thread, and happy to follow up to any questions!

<comment><USER2> Have you contracted an independent pen-testing company to assess your design and implementation?

<comment><USER3> This is mentioned in the article

> In preparation for open sourcing we also engaged with Security Innovation, a > widely respected agency who count Microsoft, Symantec, and Amazon as > clients, to do a more in-depth, week long assessment, with full access to > source code and design documents. This found no major issues, which gives us > the confidence to open source sso today.

<comment><USER4> It was only a week long assessment though, I don't know Security Innovation but I'm sure they would have appreciated more time.

<comment><AUTHOR> That is understood, and is always why we engaged with some of the top researchers who contribute to our bug bounty program, from the start with this project.

For example offering increased bounties during certain windows, or providing early access to the source code.

We highly value our bug bounty program, and find it to be a very effective mechanism for continuous security validation.

I'll write a tech blog post in the near future about how we facilitate our program.

<comment><USER5> Looking forward to read about it. Thank you for the project!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> We took a slightly different approach to solving a similar problem: [https://github.com/thomseddon/traefik-forward- auth](https://github.com/thomseddon/traefik-forward-auth)

We were already using traefik as a proxy for our docker/swarm clusters and this is a single container drop in to add authentication to every traefik request.

It's still missing a few key features but it can get you started, we're testing the use of a single auth domain (so you don't have to add every internal service domain as a refirect_uri in Google - looks similar to how sso works) internally and we expect to release this shortly once finished.

Additionally, if you want an even lighter weight option, we also use, with great success, cloudflare's lua script on a few services we don't run with docker/traefik: [https://github.com/cloudflare/nginx-google- oauth](https://github.com/cloudflare/nginx-google-oauth)

</comment><comment><USER7> GApps supports Custom SAML app. What's the benefit of using this Oauth2 over SAML2 protocol?

[https://support.google.com/a/answer/6087519?hl=en](https://support.google.com/a/answer/6087519?hl=en)

<comment><AUTHOR> Great question. We found that SAML doesn't typically have great support on mobile devices [edit: had originally written browser here, hence the comments below], and since BuzzFeed has many remote employees around the world, we needed to support those workflows, so OAuth2 made more sense.

<comment><USER7> IMO That's opposite of what I understand. The selling point of Oauth2 is SAML works great on web (mobile browsers included) but not so on apps.

<comment><AUTHOR> I'll correct my post above. I meant to say `mobile devices`, not `mobile browsers` . My bad.

The other reason, which I didn't mention above, but is talked about in the blog post, is we decided to use bitly's oauth2_proxy as a basis for our solution. This had been widely used in BuzzFeed (we had over 100 auth proxies in place prior to rolling out sso), and so the OAuth flow was something everyone was familiar with.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Looks super interesting. I'm looking to do something like this for my personal stuff, but I'd rather avoid the dependency on Google. Does anyone have suggestions for how to set something like that?

<comment><AUTHOR> Right now we have a dependency on Google as an OAuth2 provider, as that's what we use internally at BuzzFeed. However we've designed sso to allow us to easily add other providers.

For example, there's this task ( [https://github.com/buzzfeed/sso/issues/9](https://github.com/buzzfeed/sso/issues/9) ) to create a default provider without Google dependencies for test purposes.

We'd also welcome PRs adding other providers and believe any OAuth2 provider should be straight forward to add.

<comment><USER8> Cool, thanks for letting me know. I'll have to research this more.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> a bit ignorant in this area, but how is this functionally different than Google Cloud IAP?

<comment><AUTHOR> It's not. We acknowledge that in our blog post, and our approach was definitely influenced by the BeyondCorp philosophy.

However google IAP requires that your infrastructure is all in Google cloud.

Whilst we do use GCP, most of BuzzFeed's infra is in AWS, we needed a solution which worked for both.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> never expected BuzzFeed on HN frontpage (:

<comment><USER11> BuzzFeed has been on the HN homepage quite frequently.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=buzzfeednews.com](https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=buzzfeednews.com)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=buzzfeed.com](https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=buzzfeed.com)

<comment><USER12> Buzzfeed news is ... surprisingly good. The Buzzfeed name is just associated with painfully stupid content.

<comment><USER13> > Buzzfeed news is ... surprisingly good.

This is literally news to me...</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Why is linguistics such a magnet for dilettantes and crackpots? - <AUTHOR> https://aeon.co/essays/why-is-linguistics-such-a-magnet-for-dilettantes-and-crackpots <comment><USER2> Interesting article. The sort of bad linguistics it covers though seems pretty different from the sort of bad amateur linguistics I'm used to seeing. I don't have time right now to try to do any sort of full explication, but it involves mistakes like: 1\. Identifying the language with the written language, or thinking of the written language as primary 2\. Confusing statements about language with statements about the actual world the language is meant to describe (see also: "linguification") 3\. Various prescriptivist crap

People just seem to have a really hard time thinking about language, and in particular keeping separate things separate while doing so, and if I may speculate, I think it has a lot to do with the fact that people largely think _in_ language. (And, assuming you're literate, often in written language.) Everyone knows that the word "tiger" is not in fact a tiger, but you take more complex examples and people can't process it all and the indirection just collapses, is what it seems like roughly. That's my speculation, anyway...

</comment><comment><USER3> Choice quote. We're going to see a lot more of this in the years ahead as more people get their hands on machine learning tools.

[...] The fantasists and dilettantes trawl through source after source in the hope of pulling aboard what seem to be relations and other connections. But in fact, the more documents they sift through, the more likely they are to find chance similarities and connections and draw spurious conclusions. [...]

</comment><comment><USER4> Not sure about how well it answers the question, but it's definitely light and entertaining to read :)

</comment><comment><USER5> Why is Physics such a magnet for dilettantes and crackpots?

</comment><comment><USER6> Because because arguing linguistics is a step below arguing semantics?</comment>


Horror special effects artist arrested because of outdated Canadian law - <AUTHOR> http://www.supportremy.com/en/index.html

<comment><AUTHOR> Disclaimer : I am in no way related to Remy and I am not doing this to get people to donate.

I think many people can find this event interesting especially since we talk a lot about freedom of expression and internet privacy here, that someone was arrested for producing horror movies online is a story worth telling.</comment>


Genetics play less of a role in lifespan than we thought - <AUTHOR> https://arstechnica.com/science/2018/11/genetics-play-less-of-a-role-in-lifespan-than-we-thought/ <comment><USER2> Ars technica covered this in a well written, well explained article [1] yesterday. Worth a read for folks who don't necessarily have the right background to understand the significance and / or importance.

To quote one of the many good excerpts:

"They looked at siblings-in-law, and first-cousins-in-law, and then further afield, at relationships like "the sibling of a sibling's spouse" (your brother's wife's sister) and "the spouse of a spouse's sibling" (your husband's sister's husband). Even at these distant relationships, lifespans were correlated—if your spouse's sibling's spouse lived to a ripe old age, that means you're a bit more likely to do the same."

Worth reading, IMHO.

[1] [https://arstechnica.com/science/2018/11/genetics-play- less-o...](https://arstechnica.com/science/2018/11/genetics-play-less-of-a- role-in-lifespan-than-we-thought/)

<comment><USER3> Thanks; we changed the link to that from [http://www.genetics.org/content/210/3/1109](http://www.genetics.org/content/210/3/1109). We try to stick with the best popular article when a technical paper is outside most HN readers' specialty. In that case it's standard to link to the paper from the comments, for anyone who wants to go further.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Never heard the term assortative mating. From Wikipedia [1]:

Assortative mating is a mating pattern and a form of sexual selection in which individuals with similar phenotypes mate with one another more frequently than would be expected under a random mating pattern...

1\. [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assortative_mating](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assortative_mating)

<comment><USER5> Is there any evidence people prefer assortative mating given enough racial heterogeneity (i.e. people who look like you aren't the only choice)? I'm personally mostly sexually attracted to people who look nothing like me, and anecdotally I think most people I know are like this too? In my experience people are appealed to assortative mating since they don't live with people from other racial/ethnic backgrounds so there are cultural barriers (language, prejudice, differences in social class, education, slang etc). But in multiracial areas (e.g. the Bay Area), it seems to me that people do prefer mating with individuals from other races. Am I wrong? Any papers investigating this question?

<comment><USER6> In modern usage, assortative mating is less about race and more about socioeconomic group. Would you marry a woman (or man) significantly poorer than you, from a poor family, etc. I mean, my wife and I are by no means the same race, but we're absolutely the same in socioeconomic strata, which means our children will be resultingly advantaged.

<comment><USER7> Also, there tends to be assortative mating in terms of attractiveness.

<comment><USER8> Which is partly a genetic trait. This is getting complicated...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Not interested at all in derailing good conversation here but let's give a shoutout to the authors for bucking up the $1500 to Genetics [1] to make this article Open Access. It's fortunate that this work was funded by Calico and Ancestry, because otherwise that likely wouldn't have happened.

[1]: [http://www.genetics.org/content/after- acceptance](http://www.genetics.org/content/after-acceptance)

<comment><USER10> First, all the authors work for Calico or Ancestry. One could view this as a 'published whitepaper', in which case they obviously want to have their paper available broadly.

> because otherwise that likely wouldn't have happened

This is not true - there are open access fees at many publishers, and grant- funded labs regularly choose to pay these fees.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> It was interesting to see them mention shared environments between closely related persons, which was something I hadn't thought about before as another sort of "heritability".

(Where "shared environments" could be things like multi-generational poverty or a dangerous family profession or living somewhere with a long history of excess carcinogenic pollution. You get it from your parent and share it with your siblings, but it's not genetic.)

<comment><USER9> Well, being precise here (sorry, biologist talking)––the _whole point_ of this article is that the "shared environments between closely related persons" is precisely _not_ heritability.

The issue at stake here is that genetics play a far lesser role in determining longevity than other non-genetic inheritable factors (like the "shared environment" examples you give); e.g. the _heritability_ of longevity is considerably lower than previously thought.

<comment><USER11> Firstly I will admit that the article was a bit much for me to process as a non-biologist, and that it didn't register that that was the entire point of the article until you said so :-)

But to be a little defensive, yeah, I know shared environmental factors aren't really "heritable", I'm just saying that it honestly hadn't occurred to me before reading this article that they would be confused for heritable genetic factors, even though it does kind of seem obvious once it's pointed out.

<comment><USER9> Yeah, that's the important takeaway regardless of the pedantic terminology of genetics for certain.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Is it likely that the same factors have led to inflated numbers for the heritability of other attributes as well? Or is this something specific to longevity?

<comment><USER13> Yes. Particularly because we "assort" by phenotype (appearance.) We are more attracted to those who look like us, even if illness has affected our appearance. (For example a genetic collagen disorder.) What may be one of two similar illnesses being inherited (most of the time) is mistaken for one illness being dominantly inherited. for example.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> In case, like myself, you come looking for the punchline: "...concluded that the true heritability of human longevity for birth cohorts across the 1800s and early 1900s was well below 10%"

</comment><comment><USER15> I read a study a while back that concluded that fruit flies who reproduce at an older age tend to have offspring who live longer lives.

</comment><comment><USER16> I think the authors are thoroughly confused. The presence of assortative mating in no way reduces the potential narrow-sense heritability of a trait.

<comment><USER17> I think _you_ are thoroughly confused. They are not saying assortative mating changes heritability, they are saying assortative mating is messing with our techniques to estimate heritability, and so the true number is less than we thought, while still stable. We need better statistical techniques to infer heritability in the face of this problem.

<comment><USER16> Yes, that's what they're saying. It's not true.

<comment><USER18> rich people tend to live longer (completely irrespective of genetics), rich people marry rich people.

In case you didn't understand what the article was trying to say.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Coding: It's Just Writing - <AUTHOR> http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/001184.html

<comment><USER2> It's the same, except when it is different.

As a single example, it is often useful to repeat a point when writing to hammer it home. Doing this in code just creates maintainability issues.

I know this wasn't the core of Jeff's point. I think his point can be more clearly stated:

It is important to be clear first and terse second when writing and coding.

<comment><USER3> If writing were required to be maintained, you wouldn't want to repeat yourself there, either. (Think of wiki articles.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> When I started getting in to coding and started focusing on refactoring, it amused me how close that was to the process of writing poetry (at least the way I was taught). Write it all out. Then cut some, add less, cut some more, move some things around.

</comment><comment><USER5> I think Atwood is missing the bigger picture that both writing and programming are forms of _creating_. They are both textual, sure, but they fall better under this bigger umbrella of design.

So I wouldn't say coding is just writing, they just both happen to involve text.

<comment><USER6> However, every art form (by "art" I refer loosely to anything that requires practice to master) is judged based on its method of transmitting information. The Elements of Style wouldn't help a painter. It absolutely would help a programmer. It would help a screenwriter, a lyricist, a playwright.

The fact that both programming and writing deal with text mean that they have text in common. And learning how to write is something that helps you in both scenarios.

Coding IS just writing. However, it's writing with a different purpose than journalism or novel-writing or poetry. Doesn't change the fact that all of them rely on text and ONLY text as a medium.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Code is read more often than it is written, so readability counts.

No, I'm totally not language-evangelizing :)

</comment><comment><USER8> Programming is writing. It's not _just_ writing. One can think of many great writers who would have made lousy programmers.

<comment><USER6> That's a silly argument. Programming Is _just_ writing. It is not, however, novel-writing. Or poetry-writing. It's code-writing.

Doesn't make it not writing.</comment></comment>


Show HN: A framework for freelancers operating outside platforms - <AUTHOR> https://www.freelancerprotocol.com/?showHN <comment><AUTHOR> Hi Hackers,

Freelancers on platforms can trust they'll be paid for projects and that paperwork like invoices gets generated in the backend.

However, those with their own clients and that operate outside platforms have to do all these things manually, and usually get paid late (or not at all, 7.5% of the time!)

That's why a couple of freelancer friends and I built Freelancer Protocol, to ensure freelancers outside platforms get paid on time, every time and have the paperwork they need generated.

Please do give feedback, thanks for checking it out! :)</comment>