Headphone Specs Explained (2017) - <AUTHOR> https://www.themasterswitch.com/headphone-specs-explained <comment><USER2> Something alluded to but not said explicitly is that specs don't tell you if an audio product is "good." Very few people can look at a spec sheet for any product and tell you if it's "good" or "better" than something else. You need to listen to it.

Impedance/sensitivity just tell you how well it will play with your system. Stuff like "high impedance == more clarity" is snake oil.

I say this as a former pro audio specialist who has read and possibly written a bit of snake oil in their time.

Headphone specs are not straight up horseshit like the rest of their product page, but they are next to useless. Take your daily driver and a reference track you know and listen to the cans before you buy them.

<comment><USER3> Unless you do a blind listening test, most consumers will fool themselves into believing that the more expensive or attractive looking headphones sound "better".

<comment><USER4> Company idea (or maybe Consumer Reports is good enough):

Don't hire experts to review products. Do a double blind study with like 100 participants. I pay you $5 to access this years study of 80 different popular/common headphones. But of course do this for all kinds of products that need this kind of review.

I would happily pay for a sample of how the population feels about products and how they on average rank them.

Let me x/y plot things like rating vs. Price/warranty/whatever

Don't ruin your pages with advertising.

Be annoyingly clear and repetitive that you only make money from the fee and everything else is done in a way that reduces bias wherever possible.

And don't screw up the UX (looking at you, graphics cards and CPU sites stuck in 2003)

<comment><USER2> There are market research firms that do things like this, and their studies cost at least 100 times more than that. It's actually pretty lucrative to keep up to date on details like that if you consult for investment bankers on a particular product category/market segment but that can be difficult to break into.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This article is really inaccurate. The impedance isn't a good signal for how much power needs to be pumped into the headphone. The impedance also doesn't act as a good signal for what devices could generate enough volume. It also isn't a good signal for being able to "more accurately and vividly reproduce sound." Almost everything in this section isn't accurate.

Lower impedance headphones are "harder" to drive at the same voltage because they require more current. Often, amplifiers will have lower maximum outputs when driving into a lower impedance.

The sensitivity section isn't too bad but a lot of this article is pure snake oil and bad science. A lot of the amplifier talk in this article also doesn't hold up to scrutiny.

</comment><comment><USER6> >>> Impedance is electrical resistance – essentially, how well something resists an electrical current that passes through it. It's a "measure of the opposition that a circuit presents to a current when a voltage is applied." (Thanks, Wikipedia). Even if that makes no sense, headphone impedance is still very easy to interpret. It's measured in ohms (Ω) and what it tells you is how much power your headphones will need to get to a reasonable listening volume.

For someone who understands what voltage, current, impedance, and power are, this paragraph is going to look like someone either doesn't understand the subject matter at all, or that something has been lost in an attempt to simplify it for laypeople.

<comment><USER7> I agree. But how would you have phrased it?

<comment><USER8> The ratio of voltage and current in the complex plane.

Drop the "harder" and "easier" analogies with Ohmic resistors. They're confusing, with impedance you've gone up a level and the analogy breaks down. Even "matching" Z is kinda meaningless if you don't express it as a complex quantity: what you're trying to match is not |Z| but Z* (otherwise it is possible to match |Z| And deliver no power! In practice matching |Z| is good enough)

What if you don't know about phasors and Fourier transforms?

Doesn't matter, don't look down on people to over simplify. Use the magnitude and angle formulation of complex numbers and build on that with pretty pictures.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> In addition to understanding impedance and sensitivity, doing actual tests of the headphones to see how they match up with your hearing and tastes is important (and getting harder to do with high end headphones). I personally use the following:

[https://www.audiocheck.net/soundtests_headphones.php](https://www.audiocheck.net/soundtests_headphones.php)

<comment><USER10> The audio characteristics of headphones can also be objectively measured using test gear. rtings.com has a very nice database with comprehensive measurements for a large number of headphones.

<comment><USER11> I found rtings' database was good for regular consumer stuff like gaming headsets and noise cancelling stuff for planes but it was quite limited when it comes to "audiophile" brands.

This website had much better coverage of those brands: [https://reference- audio-analyzer.pro/en/catalog-reports.php?...](https://reference-audio- analyzer.pro/en/catalog-reports.php?sp_1=1&tp=1)

The UI is a bit of a mess though, you need to select a "User" or "Pro" report on the device's page (which otherwise doesn't tell you anytihng). Here are some example reports:

User: [https://reference-audio-analyzer.pro/en/user- report.php?id=7...](https://reference-audio-analyzer.pro/en/user- report.php?id=789&page=hp-meze-99-classic)

Pro: [https://reference-audio- analyzer.pro/en/report/hp/meze-99-cl...](https://reference-audio- analyzer.pro/en/report/hp/meze-99-classic.php)

I honestly have no clue what I'm looking at here though.

While I'm at it, the AudioScienceReview forums ([http://audiosciencereview.com/](http://audiosciencereview.com/)) have nice comprehensive measurements of the other things you might find in an audio setup (e.g. amps, players, DACs etc., even USB-C dongles).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> >Why is this important? Because the higher the number in front of the Ω symbol, the more power-hungry the headphones will be.

The opposite really. The higher the impedance the less power they will consume for a particular input voltage.

<comment><AUTHOR> What is meant is this: if your headphones have high impedance, you need more input voltage to drive them to a given power level.

That's why lower-impedance headphones are used for mobile phones, and only "real" audio gear is used with higher impedance.

For example, the Beyerdynamic DT-880 is sold in three versions: 32 Ohm, 250 Ohm and 600 Ohm. The 600 Ohm on an iPhone won't make you happy.

<comment><USER13> >For example, the Beyerdynamic DT-880 is sold in three versions: 32 Ohm, 250 Ohm and 600 Ohm.

But which one is better? Should I go for a lower impedance or higher impedance?

<comment><USER14> The first thing you need to do is get one that matches your audio output.

In "theory", you get higher impedance as a result of thinner/lighter wires in your voice coil, which "could" result in better sound reproduction.

In practice, I don't think that's really relevant for most usecases (in any case, you would have to measure the performance of the specific hardware anyways). So the most important thing is just get something that your output driver can handle.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Inner Fidelity has some useful data for various (mostly expensive but not all) headphones. The frequency response graph is particularly helpful.

[https://www.innerfidelity.com/headphone- measurements](https://www.innerfidelity.com/headphone-measurements)

I like my NAD VISO HP50.

<comment><USER16> You can find a lot of similar data across a pretty wide array of headphones on the market on rtings.com as well. For instance, here's your HP50 headphones: [https://www.rtings.com/headphones/reviews/nad/viso- hp50](https://www.rtings.com/headphones/reviews/nad/viso-hp50)

I really like some of the non-sound related measurements they perform -- the clamping force and breathability are pretty important for comfort. For instance, as someone with glasses there's a good chance those HP50s would not be remotely comfortable as the high clamping force on the glasses arms tends to get pretty irritating after a while.

Their more thorough sound tests are really invaluable as well -- for instance, apparently the bass response goes down considerably with the HP50s when the cups can't form a good seal (e.g., if you're wearing glasses).

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Don't forget the more fundamental questions like "are they purple," or, "holy shit are those woodgrain?"

</comment><comment><USER13> Is there something equivalent for computer parts as in "computer parts specs explained"? Like it should explain how to choose a processor/RAM/(I/O)/battery and other components which make up a computer.

<comment><USER18> I mean, basically just read reviews and look at benchmarks on sites like anandtech. there's not a lot of mystery in computer hardware specs. find a benchmark that approximates your workload and buy the top scoring part that you can afford. in theory, you could delve into the architectural details of different CPUs but it will take a lot of knowledge for this to be a better use of your time than just looking at benchmarks.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: If you're a startup, do you use a CRM, why or why not? - <AUTHOR> Hi HN,<p>I'm working on a side project and am wondering if I should make the time commitment to use a CRM or just a spreadsheet.  I would love to get feedback from the community. <comment><USER2> The main benefit is activity logging. Compared to Sheets, you can sign up for HubSpot for free and just BCC an email address so everything is logged. Everything else is just basic CRUD.</comment>


Why the rich stay rich: they don't invest like the rest - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.com/capital/story/20140501-how-the-rich-stay-rich <comment><USER2> I was expecting evidence that the assets that rich people invest in actually give better returns. None was given.

There were some vague claims of "alpha" to be found in specialty asset classes. But then, if your job is to find "alpha", then you are probably going to claim that it is out there somewhere.

In the absence of any new evidence, I'm going to stick to my previous opinion, which is that there are no superior investment opportunities available to the rich. People might get rich by luck, skill, or political influence. But having lots of money doesn't guarantee higher average returns on that money.

<comment><USER3> It doesn't guarantee it, but I've noticed even with myself (by no means "rich") that as soon as the money didn't matter (in any near-term sense), I became a better investor.

It's the same as playing no-limit poker. If I'm playing my best, I'm playing in a way that I think of the chips (money) as a tool. As soon as I start thinking about it as spendable money, I might as well get up, because I'm not going to be playing at my best.

I can readily imagine that the rich get superior returns by finding solid financial prospects that aren't accessible to Joe Main Street who can't afford to tie up $1MM for years.

What I see happening in the Florida real estate market, where PE/hedge funds are vacuuming up foreclosed properties is exactly the type of "smart money" investments differentially available to rich people. (Sure, there are REITs, which are accessible, but there someone is already fattening themselves up on part of the profits from the activity.)

So, not all of these are guaranteed high-alpha investments, but I find it hard to imagine that there aren't pockets of alpha out there that are preferentially accessible to the rich.

The article is a media play-pageviews and ad shows is the primary purpose, not winning a Pulitzer Prize...

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Wow, the rich can get returns of 9% and 4% on high-risk undiversified investments. Big deal. Average Joes can invest in farmland and equipment lease through stocks, ETFs, REITs, etc. anyways.</comment>


Applied Mathematical Programming (1977) - <AUTHOR> http://web.mit.edu/15.053/www/ <comment><USER2> I'm glad there's more free material online for optimization modeling and algorithms. Personally, here's my favorite list for algorithms and modeling for optimization:

For learning the simplex method, Linear Programming by Vasek Chvatal (first 10 chapters): [https://books.google.com/books?id=DN20_tW_BV0C&printsec=fron...](https://books.google.com/books?id=DN20_tW_BV0C&printsec=frontcover)

For learning branch and bound, Integer Programming by Laurence A. Wolsey [https://books.google.com/books?id=x7RvQgAACAAJ](https://books.google.com/books?id=x7RvQgAACAAJ)

For odd modeling tricks for integer programming, Logic and Integer Programming by Williams, H. Paul [https://www.springer.com/us/book/9780387922799](https://www.springer.com/us/book/9780387922799)

For modeling tricks for convex programming, Convex Optimization by Stephen Boyd and Lieven Vandenberghe [https://stanford.edu/~boyd/cvxbook/](https://stanford.edu/~boyd/cvxbook/)

For basic nonlinear optimization algorithms, Numerical Optimization by Nocedal, Jorge, Wright, S. [https://www.springer.com/us/book/9780387303031](https://www.springer.com/us/book/9780387303031)

I've never really found the ultimate optimization book, but the references above tend to have the right modeling techniques, algorithms, and references. I've found they're a good place to get the right idea and the right words to search for more material.

<comment><USER3> Just to add, the book "AMPL: A Modeling Language for Mathematical Programming" by Robert Fourer, David M. Gay, and Brian W. Kernighan (yes, the "K" in K&R) is also freely available online: [http://ampl.com/resources/the-ampl- book/chapter-downloads/](http://ampl.com/resources/the-ampl-book/chapter- downloads/) . It is not only a reference for the AMPL modeling language, but also a great introduction to mathematical optimization.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> 'Programming' as in linear programming, dynamic programming, etc, not 'programming' as in computer programming.

<comment><USER3> People outside of this field are often confused by this. That's why the term "mathematical optimization" is often used instead of "mathematical programming" nowadays.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Mathematical programming (optimization) has so many useful applications and I am very pleased to see this classical book on the topic available online.

Unfortunately because it has been written a while ago it doesn't cover algebraic modeling languages and examples are in Excel which is not an adequate optimization or teaching tool (even XKCD has something to say about it in his webcomic [https://xkcd.com/1667/](https://xkcd.com/1667/)).

</comment><comment><USER5> Old, but after skimming it for an hour, it seems very applicable. I had been researching genetic algorithms to do scheduling optimization in the past based on a 1996 thesis 'A Genetic Algorithm for Resource-Constrained Scheduling' [1] (PDF download alert).

I am not an operations manager, but I seem to always have a need to perform similar analyses or be in a position to comment on others. Operations management texts tend to be very broad, or geared to a non-mathematical manager, so I am finding more texts like this one to be more enjoyable and informative for my purposes.

The last optimization problem WRT to OM I worked on was to review an OEM's recommended spares list for validity given lead times on certain items, and the FMEA (Failure Modes and Effects Analysis) to see how many of each spare, and when we should order replenishments to achieve a 95% or greater confidence level that we would have stock of a particular item, and not have any downtime.

There is huge software that automatically does this for large companies, but for little to mid-level companies, it is great to be able to dig in to the algorithms to gain a better understanding, and heck, just for the fun and learning experience especially when said company doesn't see the benefit of the larger software.

Thanks for the link!

[1] [http://lancet.mit.edu/~mbwall/phd/thesis/thesis.pdf](http://lancet.mit.edu/~mbwall/phd/thesis/thesis.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER6> The link to the Excel Excercises is currently 403, but they are on archive.org:

[http://wayback.archive.org/web/20150309105904/http://web.mit...](http://wayback.archive.org/web/20150309105904/http://web.mit.edu/15.053/www/ExcelExercises/)

</comment><comment><USER7> management science is a great topic and is one of the important applications of various optimization algorithms in mathematics. it's roughly the same field as industrial engineering.

most people get by just figuring out how to put problems in excel and hit "SOLVER" (or Matlab and fmincon) but there is some value in figuring out the algorithm works. then it's a hop skip and jump away from the other classes of optimization that you see in machine learning.

<comment><USER8> In practice, the real problems don't have to get very large or complicated before just typing the problem into AMPL or clicking on SOLVE won't work -- that is, _solver_ capacities may be exceeded or the running time can become absurdly long.

Then you must exploit whatever special structure you can find in your problem and dig into the algorithms to make refined usage. So, maybe do some Lagrangian relaxation. Maybe find an embedded network flow problem and use a network flow version of the simplex algorithm.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> This book is comparatively old, but the authors are experts, and likely the material is still surprisingly current.

But I will insert another point, call it the "Dirty Little Secrets of Optimization Your Books and Professors Don't Tell You."

Here is a bottom line, bold, summary fact of life about such _optimization_ , _mathematical programming_ , _operations research_ : It's super tough to find real world problems where can apply such material, do well on the problems, please the customers, and get paid well enough to have a career. Trying such work either as a consultant or an employee is tough.

There are exceptions, but they are rare. If you can find an exception, terrific, but, did I mention, they are rare. Nearly anything else you can do with a BS, MS, or Ph.D. in a STEM field will be an easier way to make a living.

In practice, the field has a bad reputation: Early on there was a lot of hype and a lot of projects that failed. Leading reasons for project failure were (1) the basic data was too difficult to collect, (2) some custom software was needed, and it was too difficult to write, (3) the available optimization software was not powerful enough, (4) the mathematical techniques were not powerful enough, at least not without a lot of special work unique to the particular practical problem, (5) the computer run times were too long, too often days or weeks.

In addition there were various _social_ problems: So, the optimization people were seen as wizards with tall, conical black hats decorated with stars and moons and were not really welcome, were not understood, were threatening, etc.

Here is a larger problem: The optimization people did not have a recognized profession. Lawyers, physicians, insurance actuaries, and more do have a recognized profession, maybe with government licensing, a code of ethics, professional peer review, legal liability, graduate education which is not just academic but also professional, likely with practical apprenticeship, a serious professional society, professional certification, etc. That way, a generalist line manager can hire a respected professional, as an employee or consultant, with relatively low risk to his career. Without professional status, such a line manager is reluctant and for good reason.

Then there's another secret: Early on, when there was a lot of optimism, there were two ideas, maybe just implicit but, still, powerful:

The first idea was that such optimization would, to borrow a more recent phrase, "eat the world". That is, essentially every economic activity in the world would be directed by such optimization.

The second idea was that the _optimal solution_ was the absolute goal. Accepting a solution that was 10 cents away from optimal was seen as a moral lapse. The word _optimal_ was a stick used to beat up on everything and everyone else.

Then reality set in: The applied math available was nowhere nearly powerful enough to solve just any practical problems that could be found in routine operations. And that was just the clouds before the hurricane:

The hurricane happened when the question P versus NP was formulated and, then, it was seen that large, practical problems in NP-complete were as common as pebbles in a stream bed. Darned near every problem in scheduling, routing, logistics, resource allocation, and more could want at least something as difficult as integer linear programming, but that problem is in NP-complete. Then considering non-linear aspects gave a storm that made a hurricane look like a gentle rain. Then it got worse: A lot of real problems had a lot of randomness. Okay, a lot of those problems can be formulated as stochastic optimal control problems, maybe continuous time, maybe discrete time, but then get bad news right away: First don't have enough data on either the system _dynamics_ or the probability distributions of the random effects. Second on realistic problems, stochastic optimal control can eat super computer time by the months per problem.

The worst of the chuckholes in the road was the struggle of P versus NP. And with the moral attitude that _optimal_ was to be obtained made the P versus NP challenge much worse. Indeed the US economy went for decades declining to implement solutions that could save 15% of operating costs because saving 16% for an optimal solution was too difficult for the math and the computing. That is, commonly saving that last 10 cents is by far the hardest. Or there might be millions of dollars to be saved, but still could not save the last 10 cents, and people gave up due to the difficulty of that last 10 cents.

And there was a huge cultural problem: Various universities set up professorships, sometimes departments, concentrating on optimization. Well, there the professors concentrated on publishing papers and largely ignored real problems. And anything like professional education was pushed out as inferior to the research agenda. Then, sure, the students got relatively little benefit in non-academic careers -- e.g., they were not in a profession.

For a while, there was an eager customer who did put up with a lot of the hype and poor or failed projects -- the US DoD.

So, bottom line: A lot of very good applied math has been done for optimization. And there is a lot of high quality software. But real problems that can be attacked successfully with these tools and where the benefits are really worth the _botheration_ , time, money, and effort are rare.

If you can find suitable real problems and make a living, you will be very rare, but good for you.

What will likely happen is that occasionally some optimization will become part of some software that is sold as, say, SaaS. And, in some fields where optimization is known to be effective, say, feed mixing, we can expect that optimization is an accepted tool in that field.

So, what was the biggest result of the academic research? Sure, they identified the problem of P versus NP. Gads, I should have started a pizza shop!

<comment><USER9> For what it's worth, my experience thus far has been quite different:

\- I agree that operations research has a brand problem, but the problem is that nobody recognizes the name. Every week I have this conversation: "What do you do?" "I'm a PhD student in operations research at MIT." [blank look] "Have you heard of OR? I wouldn't blame you; most people haven't." "No, what is it?" "It's something of a mix between computer science, applied math, and statistics, and in particular we do a lot of optimization work." "Wow, that's really useful!"

So no, we don't have the brand of computer science, but I get a uniformly positive reception when I describe what I do. From technical people there's a fair amount of "Oh! I have this optimization problem in my work, do you think..."

\- People graduating from MIT operations research seem to have 100% success in finding good jobs, both in academia and industry. I think we'll be surprised to learn that finding good jobs is tough.

Yes, we all benefit tremendously from the name MIT, no doubt. Nonetheless, if everyone graduating from my program has an excellent offer lined up by the time they cross the stage...that doesn't suggest a congested market with few opportunities.

\- Yes, integer programming is Hard in the technical sense. However, with overwhelmingly high probability, the problem you actually care about is not hard at all. Write down the first formulation that comes to mind, throw it at Gurobi or CPLEX, go for a coffee, and when you come back you'll have an answer with tiny optimality gap, perhaps certifiably optimal.

Integer programming in particular is one of the great academic success stories; the combined speedup of hardware and algorithms in the last ~30 years has made IP solvers ~10e9 faster.

___

You write as someone who has personal experience and knows what they're talking about, so perhaps I should update my priors. But suffice to say I think OR and its practitioners are in a fantastic spot right now.

<comment><USER8> MIT? Yup, D. Bertsekas! And his student S. Shreve! And, of course, T. Magnanti!

Right: Magnanti gave a Goldman lecture at Johns Hopkins on design of internet networks. Sure, it was network design at Bell Labs that got Garey and Johnson at Bell Labs to write that first, important book on NP-completeness. At about the time of Magnanti's lecture, I was also looking into the same problem, especially for the core of the Internet with multi-protocol label switching, border gateway protocol, etc. I couldn't get any VCs interested in funding me (since then I learned more about what VCs want -- not a problem posed in a lecture by the Dean of Science at MIT and attacked by a Ph.D. in optimization).

So, soon I heard of a venture funded startup doing network design and sent them a resume. They flew me down. The CEO met me at the door; I hadn't looked up his name; that was a fatal social flub; and he refused his interview slot with me.

But, some of his venture funders were there, very concerned, nicer to me, liked that I'd been the first Director of Operations Research at FedEx and with my work on scheduling the fleet had saved the company -- literally.

The CEO of that startup had been an IBM executive, and I'd been at the IBM Watson lab. Mostly the team I was on worked in AI, but I worked also in some mathematical statistics and some optimization. My optimization work knocked off an old problem in the Kuhn-Tucker conditions and solved a problem stated but not solved in the famous Arrow, Hurwicz, Uzawa paper in mathematical economics. My statistic paper was quite different.

It was that CEO's error: Since I was also from IBM, apparently he expected me to have a good IBM style executive handshake. Sorry 'bout that.

His company was in deep trouble; no doubt that is why his VCs were right there. Solving integer linear programming problems was just crucial for his business, essentially as in Magnanti's lecture.

Their head applied mathematician had just left to return to his university slot. Again, the CEO was in deep, smelly, sticky stuff.

I met with their team. What they really cared about were software object oriented inheritance hierarchies. Gads. Next to irrelevant for solving the integer programming problems, but okay by me -- I'd be glad to write in C++ and their hierarchy if they wanted.

Then we got to optimization: I said that my most recent work was on a commercial problem in marketing resource allocation where I found a feasible solution to a 0-1 integer linear programming problem with 40,000 constraints and 600,000 variables in 905 seconds on a 90 MHz PC. From the primal-dual bounding, my feasible solution was within 0.025% of optimality. That work should be a good initial qualification!

Alas, they had heard that 0-1 integer linear programming was in NP-complete, thus believed that only small, trivial problems could be attacked (a serious mistake that is far too common), and concluded that I was lying! Gads.

Well, they told me about their approach -- enumeration. They confessed that it was running too long, for days. Gads.

In a back room they had a high end PC and a copy of C-PLEX, but they were not touching it.

I didn't get an offer, and soon the startup went out of business. Sorry, guys. Looks like Darwin was on he case.

That experience was a good example of the _cultural,_ _social,_ or _professional_ problem: The CEO was in a business that desperately depended on getting good results from integer linear programming. But the CEO was a traditional, blue suit, white shirt, polished shoes, strong handshake, no nonsense, tough, results-oriented manager, focused on the bottom line, ... who however didn't know the first thing about optimization or how to hire a team that did and didn't recognize a good optimization guy when one walked in the door.

And I didn't come in with enough professional status, say, like that of a lawyer advising on an IPO or some such, for him to swallow his pride in knowing everything and take me seriously.

Actually, that problem of 40,000 constraints, etc. was another example: I'd found some guys who had some customers high in banking and had talked the customers into letting these guys attack problems in optimization, or anything else they could get paid to work on.

Well, the bank had a resource allocation optimization problem. Well the head guy was a salesman type, but he had a technical guy he liked. The technical guy knew next to nothing about optimization but had heard about simulated annealing. And, maybe to his credit, he did formulate the banking problem as the 0-1 integer linear programming (ILP) problem I mentioned.

So, I met those two guys over coffee, and they sent me e-mail with the 0-1 ILP formulation.

I looked at the formulation, derived some non-linear duality for essentially Lagrangian relaxation, considered several approaches, knew that since the primal problem was a minimization, the dual problem was a maximization of a concave function that could be approximated with supporting hyper planes. The dual problem was in 16 dimensions, that is, there were 16 Lagrange multipliers.

In this case, given values of the Lagrange multipliers, the primal problem was just trivial to solve exactly, just with a page or so of simple code for some simple arithmetic. So, all that was left was to maximize the concave dual problem in 16 variables.

So, I wrote them back that I thought I saw a path. So, I wrote the code and for the linear programming part for the concave maximization called the IBM Optimization Subroutine Library (OSL), went through 500 primal-dual iterations, and found the feasible solution within 0.025% of optimality. So, after two weeks, I sent them e-mail on my success.

They went silent. There had been hints: The technical guy had been trying simulated annealing, running for days, and stopping when he gave up, of course, maybe without being feasible and certainly with no indication of how close he was to optimality. He didn't like me and was pinging on his CEO buddy to keep me away from the work.

So, from my distant view of the political situation through a glass darkly, my work, 905 seconds and 0.025%, just totally pissed off and humiliated the technical guy, let the CEO know that he'd picked an incompetent for his lead technical guy, didn't want to admit his need for me, and just gave up.

So, again, as lawyers have learned: A working professional technical specialist should report only to a person with such qualifications and never to a generalist line manager. That is, the CEO guy needed a professional that he could respect for his professionalism, and he was not yet ready to do that with me.

Really, in real business, darned few generalist middle managers want to have to manage someone doing important technical work the manager does not understand. It's almost like, if he had a heart attack, he'd rather go to a nurse than a high end cardiologist. The key is, the cardiologist has a lot of professional status.

There was another case similar to the banking thingy: Some guys were selling to some companies with a big sales force and wanted to use optimization to get better sales results. They had a problem formulation that was a good start. So, they hired me, and soon I found that the 0-1 ILP really was a case of min cost network flows. I typed up the math using TeX and sent them a nice paper. So, I reviewed W. Cunningham's paper on _strongly feasible basic solutions_ and started writing code. Again the CEO guy had a jealous technical guy who knew next to nothing about optimization and talked the CEO guy out letting me finish the code. I got fired.

And, there are other examples.

I gave up -- tough to sell optimization in business. The business guys would rather do without optimization, even if it puts them out of business. That is, the CEO guys want to do it their way or the way of some not very good technical guy they have a _personal relationship_ with or not at all.

Net, the people I knew just didn't much care for optimization. They didn't want it.

Maybe now some people do want some optimization. Maybe.

Yup, I can believe that Bixby's latest software is terrific. Last I heard, he was working with Ellis Johnson and George Nemhauser and/or some of their students at Georgia Tech. Of course, Johnson helped get the OSL going and did some good things with it at American Airlines.

Gee, maybe I'll send another 1000 resumes on applied optimization, stochastic processes, statistics! Maybe.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Any easy-to-understand materials?

</comment><comment><USER11> I won't assume that someone on HN wouldn't potentially benefit from this, but it honestly seems like OP submit this without reading the first sentence of the first page. That, or this was blatant trolling of some benign fashion.

<comment><USER12> It was recently commented on a different thread. [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11845604](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11845604)</comment></comment>


Tell HN: The site was offline. What changed? - <AUTHOR> Obviously things took longer than intended and expected, but in the end:
Items moved from /12345 to /12/34/12345. HN now starts in one fifth the time, and better utilizes the filesystem cache. Backup speeds are also improved.
Profiles moved from /kogir to /ko/gi/kogir, and from /KogIr to /%k/og/%kog%ir, which works on case-insensitive filesystems. Similar performance improvements were observed.
Passwords moved from a 45MB user->hash mapping file into user profiles themselves. Previously, this mapping file was re-written in its entirety every time a new account was created, and is why the site went down on May 18th. New account creation is now incredibly lightweight, and should allow us to further limit and possibly eliminate our use of captchas.
There were additional changes to support new features currently in the pipeline, but which we're not yet ready to announce.
I'm sorry that we were offline for so long. Nothing else we currently have planned should require anything more than a simple restart, so with any luck this will be the last major disruption the quarter, and maybe even this year. <comment><USER3> I know it's crazy talk, but glancing at my own profile, I count maybe 100 bytes of data? Yet to represent that data in memory, it's going to blow up to 4096 bytes plus structs to represent the inode and directory entry/entries because you put each profile in its own file.

By that count, you might get somewhere near a 40x cache utilization improvement if you just used a real database like the rest of us do - <USER2> just an embedded database.

This of course before saying anything about transactional safety of writing directly to the filesystem

<comment><AUTHOR> We're on the same page. First you stay up, then you improve with the time you bought.

<comment><USER4> Sometimes it isn't worth the effort to fix the old, and instead just go to the new and improved.

When the load balancer for reddit broke once, we did't bother fixing it, we just replaced it with better (though untested) technology on the assumption it would work better. We figured it couldn't be any _worse_ than it was, and we'd rather spend our limited time moving forward instead of treading water.

<comment><AUTHOR> We considered this pretty seriously, and it might be required some day, but we think we'll be able to incrementally move toward a more highly available, better performing architecture without a continuity break.

<comment><USER5> Why not just port to the Reddit codebase? The functionality seems similar.

<comment><USER6> reddit.com/r/hackernews the new hacker news.

<comment><USER7> You might be joking, but in case not: reddit's code base is open source, so others can use it without moving the community under the reddit umbrella.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Can someone explain why "Items moved from /12345 to /12/34/12345\. HN now starts in one fifth the time" that increases performance? why is it better?

<comment><USER9> Directory scans suck. So if you break up the space into sets of prefixes you limit the number of files in each dir and traversal gets much faster. Ditto adding/removing items.

Some filesystems are worse at this than others (xfs... let's not go there).

<comment><USER10> Wasn't the big miracle of Reiser4 supposed to usher in an era where this was no longer a problem?

<comment><USER11> I think Hans killed that era.

<comment><USER12> _rimshot_

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Wow that's interesting that you use files to store the data. Is there any sharding across machines or is it all just one machine? Do you use big SSDs or old spinning disks?

<comment><USER14> It's a single machine.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Newbie question here - I'm just curious. Is it quicker to store the data this way in loads of files or to use Postgres?

<comment><AUTHOR> For new development I'd recommend PostgreSQL over flat files for most projects.

Really depends on what you're trying to store though. For large data (images, audio) that can't fit in a table row, the filesystem is _way_ better.

In our case we started with flat files, and buying breathing room is the first step to move past them.

<comment><USER16> Curiosity: Why did you start with flat files? It looks like hackernews was started in 2007, relational databases had been around for quite some time at that point, and were the standard way to store such forum data (see: every popular forum framework at the time)... the decision to store this sort of data (news/link forum with comments, 100% text) as flat files is very confusing to me.

<comment><USER17>
      My guess is that Arc - the lisp language running HN created by Paul Graham - was new, and coding and maintaining a database driver was out of question.

     Today, perhaps the way to go would be to use some sort of json webservice interface to a database written in another language rather than writing a driver.

<comment><USER18> That would be my guess as well. It's one thing to decide you want a simple forum and have it coded within a couple of days. It's entirely another to spend months creating a stable database library and keep it upto date with all the latest changes.

<comment><USER19> Or you could, you know, use a more popular language.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I just don't get one thing.. Don't you have dev and staging server, where you could develop, test, and pre-deploy everything without shutting down the website?

<comment><AUTHOR> Online data migrations are complicated and error prone. We deemed it not worth it.

All the code was tested before going live, but at some point you actually have to move and re-format all 8.5 million files.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Why worry about case-insensitive file systems if you are not using one currently?

<comment><AUTHOR> Because running out of the box on OS X makes testing _way_ easier. Currently we use DMGs, and performance is terrible.

<comment><USER22> I know a lot of folks develop on OS X, but this just seems like another argument to develop on Linux or a BSD.

But then, I haven't owned a non-Linux box in 16 years, so I may be an outlier...

<comment><USER23> It isn't an argument. DMGs are fine for development and testing and they can be made case-insensitive. Or you could just, you know, create a separate partition.

If the DMG speed is too slow for development and running tests(not testing with the full live dataset) you are doing something wrong.

<comment><AUTHOR> So we shouldn't test using a snapshot of live data? Seems prone to finding errors only on production.

<comment><USER23> When developing and testing new features/bugfixes? Unless the bug is directly tied to production data I have no idea why you would have to use production data for that. I'm not saying don't do it on a staging server, but you don't develop on the staging server.

Right now I have a vagrant box where the VM images is on a DMG and all data is NFS mounted from the same DMG onto the VM, which is kind of the worst scenario I can think of. The testing database is around 2GB and the source+data files etc is ~200MB, just because I actually do need to fix a bug related to a portion in the production data. What's slow is the CPU, and that is still doing fine. It's not the disc even though I'm abusing it this way. That's on a 2011 macbook, 16GB, 400GB SSD.

HN is a small piece of software which should be easy to write tests for, 2GB db and 200MB source/data-files should be more than you'd ever need to work on something like HN. If you want to stress-test, test fs speeds etc you cannot do that on Mac OS X anyways since you're not running Mac OS X in production.

Changing the specs of a piece of software in order to make development more easy seems totally backwards. You're developing for production, not the other way around.

And at last, why not simply add a case-sensitive partition to your Mac if speed is such a big problem?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> And the question for this answer: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7872121](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7872121)

</comment><comment><USER25> > and is why the site went down on June 18th.

Do you mean the site will go down on June 18th?

<comment><USER26> YC's time machine startup will be in stealth mode.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> I love how hn doesn't load 150 circus elements. I can reload pages all day long.

I was just thinking.....

      function byId(id) {
         return document.getElementById(id);
      }
        // hide arrows
        byId('up_'   + item).style.visibility = 'hidden';
        byId('down_' + item).style.visibility = 'hidden';

could be :

      function hide(id) {
         document.getElementById(id).style.visibility = 'hidden';
       }
         // hide arrows
         hide('up_'   + item);
         hide('down_' + item);

Then it is 150 in stead of 185 chars, 19% smaller or 23% bigger.

And the function name is better of course.

</comment><comment><USER28> Thanks, I got so much work done today!

</comment><comment><USER29> And, HN becomes responsive. ✧\ ٩( 'ω' )و //✧

<comment><USER30> Responsive as in "responsive design"? Hardly. The only thing that uses media queries is the vote arrow.

<comment><USER31> Before responsive design came around, the word "responsive" actually meant a server would respond quickly to actions.

<comment><USER32> Words change with time. When you say 'responsive' in a web setting it's nearly always in regards to responsive web design - not 'this page is responsive now, returning results quickly!'.

bshimmin shouldn't have been downvoted.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> Just curious: why are user names case sensitive?

<comment><AUTHOR> There are 114 accounts that share the same lowercase representation.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> Pardon if I'm ignorant here, but is there a blocker to open-sourcing HN? I'm sure the community would love to help.

<comment><USER35> Previous discussion: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5006037](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5006037)

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> It's definitely snappier and now looks responsive too! Thanks for the hard work kogir et al!

</comment><comment><USER37> I bet some before/after load charts would be pretty impressive!

</comment><comment><USER38> Can we classify this as "archeology"?

</comment><comment><USER39> That's exactly how i would have changed things to make the website faster!!! -4 jan 1991-</comment>


Early South Dakota Thrived by Being a Divorce Colony - <AUTHOR> https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/history-of-divorce <comment><USER2> There used to be many ways to escape and start over. There was no ID, or if there was it was easy to forge. Debts, crimes, families, all of the good and bad in your life could be wiped away in a new city with a new name. Sometimes even free land would be granted just for moving to the middle of nowhere.

It is now impossible to escape your past, and this has both good and bad parts. Obviously victims of crimes and lenders prefer it, but something has been lost when there is no place to get a fresh start.

<comment><USER3> You can move to african or other 3rd world countries still. If you have cash to start over,you can get about without using your old ID past the port of entry. It may not be the western life you're used to but you can buy a house,have a source of income (business or a job if you forge paperwork) and even a family.

<comment><USER4> won't you stick out like a sore thumb if you have a different race (one associated with being very wealthy) and an American accent / inability to speak the native language? I honestly don't think this is feasible for your typical white american. At worst maybe you manage to get a shitty no- questions-asked local job and apartment but you're bound to raise questions and in any actual low-cost area you are bound to be a perennially prime target for getting mugged

<comment><USER5> No you just end up being an English teacher which gets you paid upper middle class wages just because you are white.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Fascinating. People think America is a Christian conservative country but its much more complicated than that. It was the first Western country that made divorce legal decades before Europe and there wasn't a stigma on remarrying.

</comment><comment><USER7> The Dollop did a fun episode on this: [http://thedollop.libsyn.com/332-the- divorce-colony-live-at-s...](http://thedollop.libsyn.com/332-the-divorce- colony-live-at-sxsw-whoratio-sanz)

As a North Dakotan, it gave me lots of fun things to prod my Southern cousins with.

</comment><comment><USER8> Interesting. The original Cataract Hotel (before expansion) still stands, and houses apartment dwellers.

"There is a bit of salve to soothe the loss of the Cataract Hotel. The original 1871 building is still being used for apartments on Duluth Avenue, just six blocks from its original location."

[https://www.argusleader.com/story/life/2014/06/01/looking- ba...](https://www.argusleader.com/story/life/2014/06/01/looking-back- cataract-hotel-gone-soon/9735931/)

</comment><comment> Nevada-Smith Meh. Reno, Nevada held the title of Divorce Capital of the World for six decades. [http://renodivorcehistory.org/](http://renodivorcehistory.org/)</comment>


EU citizens in UK could face 'deliberate hostility' policy after Brexit - <AUTHOR> https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2017/jan/16/eu-citizens-in-uk-could-face-deliberate-hostility-policy-after-brexit <comment><AUTHOR> Are you EU citizens in the UK experiencing troubles, business-wise? I'm finding it increasingly difficult to start preliminary discussions already, so giving up and moving on.</comment>


Ask HN: Any tech-oriented CV review services? - <AUTHOR> Hi,
I want to use a resume-review service but I'm afraid that most agencies and freelancers I found online are too generic. Anyone had a good experience with an online CV review services?
thanks <comment><USER2> Agreed - send it to me (email in profile) and will happily give it a review for nothing but the lolz, but if you want a wider review Insuggest putting the on GitHub as markdown (or rest) and asking for pull requests / comments

In fact I would do that for the above.

</comment><comment><USER3> I'm not sure if you got your answer, but I am a founder of Resume Raiders (www.resumeraiders.com) and I have almost 20 years of recruiting experience in the software industry. Feel free to reach out at daveATresumeraidersDOTcom

</comment><comment><USER4> I'm an engineer with experience at SV tech giants + SV startups. You can shoot your resume to me I'll get back to you in a day or two: kai at randomdotnext.com

</comment><comment><USER5> What kind of review are you looking for?

Posting it on HN is going to be a pretty good review in itself (though possibly a bit harsh).

<comment><AUTHOR> Everything really, from grammar/spelling errors up to improved descriptions.

HN could be pretty harsh indeed, but it's a good idea. I wonder if/how it could be done retaining some privacy - I'm afraid it could somehow get back on me in the future as I see future job opportunities via HN.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I'm happy to review, you can send it to janbernhart AT optiver.com

</comment><comment><USER7> I can review your CV if you want. I have 15+ years in tech, and experience as a hiring manager. aleksey (at) verticalsysadmin.com

</comment><comment><USER8> I believe the subreddit cscareerquestions provides a venue for this, if that helps.</comment>


Show HN: Tueetion – SaaS based class management app - <AUTHOR> https://tueetion.com <comment><USER2> Just as a small FYI. After looking at the site it isn't really clear to me what the platform does or who would want to use it specifically. Would highly recommend addressing both of those problems on the homepage preferably when you get a chance.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the comment. Haven't thought it that way before. I'll update it a little bit to make it more obvious.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: How do I become a great programmer without a CS degree? - <AUTHOR>

I've been programming professionally for about a year, but I feel like I'm going to hit a wall in my personal development if I don't take some steps to fill in the gaps that I'm missing without a CS degree.<p>Having no formal math or CS background, what steps can I take to walk, talk, and program like someone with a strong CS education? <comment><USER2> FWIW, this question was just asked a few days ago, and there was a lot of good advice and links to previous threads with the same question. try searching HN (at the bottom of the screen) for some suggestions. Cheers.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks, this is the link for anyone else that stumbles upon this topic: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7612783](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7612783)

<comment><USER3> Thanks for the link!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> You can find various tutorials through internet by practice watching those tutorials you can be a good programmer. But for this method you need to be dedicated ও forbearing.</comment>


Tesla: "I'm a defeated man. I wanted to illuminate the whole earth." - <AUTHOR> http://sciencevibe.com/2017/04/05/teslas-sad-last-interview-im-a-defeated-man-i-wanted-to-illuminate-the-whole-earth/ <comment><USER2> This interview seems very, very unlikely to me.

<comment><USER3> Agreed. That this "interview" supposedly takes place in 1899 and mentions Einstein (first published paper 1901) and the Theory of Relativity (1905) either implies a date typo in the first sentence or a complete fabrication.

<comment><USER4> Here someone thinks it is a translation of part of a play:

[http://brassgoggles.co.uk/forum/index.php/topic,45539.0.html](http://brassgoggles.co.uk/forum/index.php/topic,45539.0.html)</comment></comment></comment>


How to fix America - <AUTHOR> http://thelotteryparty.com/monkeywrenching-democracy/

<comment><USER2> Ban all PACs? So, in other words, repeal the First Ammendment. No thanks.

<comment><AUTHOR> I'd rather favor total transparency. All political funding straight from very modest federal grants. Push ideas, not adverts and million dollar buses.</comment></comment>


One Month on the World's Longest Train Ride for $1,000 - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/gone/one-month-on-the-worlds-longest-train-ride-for-1-000-a681fdaf0b6b#.1f3b2qpet <comment><USER2> Unfortunately Derek Low has a colorful history of plagiarism. He often steals other people's photo without credit.

I had a lengthy back-n-forth with numerous authors and photographers about this very post. You'll see that a few of the photos in the beginning of the post now have "Source: _______" beneath them, this was a last ditch effort so that he could keep the post up.

See the HN discussion last time a Derek Low post was submitted: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10258972](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10258972)

<comment><USER3> Wow, I just assumed all the pictures were his (w/o reading credits) since it's basically a photo essay. Off with his head!

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> This guy also took the $23,000 Suites Class on Singapore Airlines from Singapore to NYC.

[http://dereklow.co/what-its-like-to-fly- the-23000-singapore-...](http://dereklow.co/what-its-like-to-fly- the-23000-singapore-airlines-suites-class/)

edit: i learned that most of this is plagiarized. it's baffling that he would take such a trip and yet still plagiarize a bunch of the content.

<comment><USER5> No he didn't. Derek Low is a notorious plagiarist; these stories were discredited back when they first appeared on HN and Reddit last year.

[http://andystravelblog.boardingarea.com/2014/10/02/singapore...](http://andystravelblog.boardingarea.com/2014/10/02/singapore- suites-plagiarism-reddit-thank-you/)

<comment><USER4> Oh wow, thanks. Is that not him in the photos? Or is he only just plagiarizing the text?

<comment><USER5> Looking into it further (it's been a while, never expected to see him back on the front page), it seems he did take the trip but plagiarized most of the images (except the ones of him and his boarding pass) and much of the text/captions.

<comment><USER6> I .... don't know what to say. It's not as if the text he plagiarized was top- class writing! It's just observations and feelings; it would have been far easier to just write down what he was thinking! What is wrong with these people.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> A friend recently took this - Here's an email he sent me with the details (sorry for the formatting)

All in, it was just under £10k

Trains London to St Petersburg

London to Brussels - £100 Eurostar Brussels to Cologne - 58 Euro - Bahn.de (about £45) Koln to Prague - 138 Euro - Bahn.de (about £109) Prague to Krakow (three trains) - 488PLN - Polrail.com (about £92) Krakow to Warsaw - 140PLN - Polrail.com (about £26) Warsaw to Minsk - 698PLN - Polrail.com (about £132) Minsk to St Petersburg - £284.72 - realrussia.com

Accommodation Krakow - £68.22 lastminute.com Accommodation Warsaw - £38.76 lastminute.com

Other nights from London to St Petersburg were on trains

Tour - £5995 -all trains from St Petersburg to Hong Kong -all accommodation from St Petersburg to Xi'an -more than half the meals (apart from when on the train) -transfers to and from all stations -all guides and tours -all visas

Accommodation Hong Kong - £304.96 - Not sure where booked

Spending money - £1640

Flight HK to Melbourne - $HK9076 (about £746) Travel Insurance - $AUD324 (about £172)

Total: £9753

Polrail.com and realrussia.com are agencies and so added about 25-30% on top of the ticket prices, but the Polish and Russian rail websites aren't in English so didn't have much choice there. The Polish accommodation was pretty swanky and right next to the stations, there were much cheaper options, but splashed out a bit. Travel insurance was required for our visas; we had trouble finding anyone to insure us because we weren't finishing where we departed from. Spending money was under what we budgeted. The tour was obviously the big expense, doing it ourselves would have been a lot harder, but would have saved a lot of money, but then we'd have to have gone and lined up to get visas whereas they did that for us. Also having someone standing on the platform with a sign with our name on and then being driven to our hotel was pretty cool :)

<comment><USER8> Russian railways website is available in english: [http://pass.rzd.ru/main- pass/public/en](http://pass.rzd.ru/main-pass/public/en)

You can check prices and book tickets online without fees.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Minor correction: I would say that the new Yiwu-Madrid railway line is the longest in the world with ~10,000 Km vs the Trans-Siberian's 9,000 Km. [https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Yiwu%E2%80%93Madrid_railway_line](https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Yiwu%E2%80%93Madrid_railway_line)

<comment> guard-of-terra But it's not passenger rail for good parts of its length, is it?

My minor correction to the article: Wikipedia says that China uses Standard Gauge, this means Russia and Mongolia use wider and not narrower Russian Gauge.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Is there internet available on any of the trains? Anyone worked remote from a train like this before?

<comment><USER11> >Is there internet available on any of the trains? Anyone worked remote from a train like this before?

no these trains don't.

But some amtrak's in america do have wifi.

<comment><USER12> Correction: Some claim to have Wifi. It rarely works.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I definitely was thinking of doing this in the near future. I watched a documentary on a guy that took a train ride like this and the scenery was just amazing

<comment><USER11> Me too. But I am too scared to go at it alone, I am worried about my stuff getting stolen ect.

<comment> guard-of-terra Why would anybody need your stuff? There's no shortages of used trousers. Even if you carry an used laptop it's not a grand desirable item.

You can use plastic to avoid ever having large sums of cash on you.

<comment><USER14> > Why would anybody need your stuff? [...] Even if you carry an used laptop > it's not a grand desirable item.

That used laptop might be worth a year of disposable income in some parts of the world. And temptations are had to resist when others understand that you can replace it after a single week of working.

> You can use plastic to avoid ever having large sums of cash on you.

No, in most parts of the world you cannot rely on plastic. Heck, even in Uruguay ("the Switzerland of South America") I had to take a bus for 1 hour to get to the next ATM; nobody in my beach side town would accept credit cards. The trick in such parts of the world is to distribute your money evenly into various pockets and bags and to have one dedicated pocket where you keep what you need for the day in small denominations so you don't have to flash an average, monthly, local salary when trying to pay for a roadside snack.

<comment> guard-of-terra I've never heard of stealing and reselling laptops in Russia, perhaps because used laptop market is very saturated. People have more than they can possibly sell. This might change in a few years of harsh economic downturn but there's no signs yet.

Ten years ago cellphone stealing was a thing, then market saturated and it became thing of past.

I've been to Uruguay and we had no problem using ATMs at Tres Cruces. Of course you need to carry _some_ cash, but $100 equivalent is more than enough. Argentina, totally different story as you might imagine.

<comment><USER15> Can you elaborate in the Argentinian part? I traveled a bit in some rough part and although I was quite worried I never had problem

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Funny to see this guy complain about platzkart train car. I've been doing 24h+ trips like this regularly before travelling by air became more convenient and affordable.

Also the last photo of the bridge is by Prokudin-Gorskii from early 20th century. It doesn't even look like this anymore.

</comment><comment><USER17> Any account for travelling the transsiberian on first class? How much it cost?

I'd love to live this, but only the good parts (meet other people, from other places, diverse landscapes) and skip the bad ones (bad sleep, scarce food, etc)

<comment> guard-of-terra Jun 22, Vladivostok - Moscow costs 60k roubles or around $900 first class (СВ), just looked.

Second class (Купе) on less-posh train costs 17k roubles or around $300. I expected it to cost more frankly, given how second class Moscow-SpB sets you back $50 for just one night.

But obviously you would want to change trains / get off at some places in between, which needs more complex calculations.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> I wonder if it's possible to get some special ticket that lets you make the trip in separate legs at your leisure? Alternatively — I'm assuming it's possible to buy tickets at any of the stations where the train makes a stop — how large would be the financial overhead, compared to buying a ticket for the whole thing up front?

It would be awesome to take stops in interesting places for as long as you want during the journey.

<comment><USER14> Yes/no - it's complicated, I just did some research into that trip[1]. TL;DR: No, there are no hop-on-and-off tickets, yes, you can buy tickets at any of the stations but you might be out of luck because it's fully booked, leaving you stranded for a few days.

[1] [https://en.wikivoyage.org/wiki/Trans- Siberian_Railway#Ticket...](https://en.wikivoyage.org/wiki/Trans- Siberian_Railway#Tickets)

<comment><USER18> Whoa, didn't expect that much travelling information on Wikipedia, it almost reads like a travel guide. Thanks a lot for the link.

<comment><USER14> It actually _is_ a travel guide (called itinerary on wikivoyage) ;)

<comment> guard-of-terra Unfortunately, much of information looks out of date or imprecise. I'm contemplating doing edits.

"Tickets to international destinations (international means Mongolia and China, but not ex-USSR countries) are a completely different story. You can buy them only at dedicated cash desks (международные кассы) at major train stations. You can't buy such tickets online, even if you see the number of free seats and other details on the website. Prices do not depend on the season. They are calculated in Swiss Francs."

WUT? Maybe it was indeed so at some point of time but now it's news from Mars.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I'll add a link to this epic story over many of the same rails: The forbidden railway: Vienna - Pyongyang 윈 - 모스크바 - 두만강 - 평양

[http://vienna-pyongyang.blogspot.com/?m=1](http://vienna- pyongyang.blogspot.com/?m=1)

</comment><comment><USER20> This is cool. I want to take the orient express from eastern europe into China. One of my bucket list items.

<comment> iso-8859-1 How are you going to steal something as large as a train? And how will you bring it all the way to China without getting seen? Dispatchers along the route would have to help you.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Snowpiercer only costs $1,000? Okay sure, but is that the decadent-drug-your- way-to-oblivion class, or eat-bugs-and-maybe-your-arms class?

<comment><USER22> Haha, right on. We need a shot of Chris Evans in one of the coaches to sell me.</comment></comment>


Russian arrested for trying to recruit an insider and hack a Nevada company - <AUTHOR> https://www.zdnet.com/article/russian-arrested-for-trying-to-recruit-an-insider-and-hack-a-nevada-company/ <comment><USER2> I understand they mask the employee name. But what company have they tried to hack?</comment>


Don't rewrite Your Application - <AUTHOR> http://www.javacodegeeks.com/2011/09/dont-rewrite-your-application.html

<comment><USER2> I'll agree that they are often a very bad idea. But there are advantaages:

1) Writing the same code a second time often results in cleaner, more efficient code that is easier to maintain. If you don't believe this, write a small app. Then start from scratch and write the same app again, from scratch, without looking at the other. For further proof, do it again.

2) Some code is just not maintainable. If you can't test it, you can't change it without fear of breaking something. I usually do my best to write tests for the old code, but sometimes that's just not possible.

3) Feature creep. That old code was designed to solve an old problem, and then modified many times to solve newer problems. There are a ton of features and quirks that aren't useful any more, but nobody removed them. If you tell a PHB "I'm going to remove a feature" they will freak out. If you tell them, "That feature didn't make it into the rewrite because it's not used enough" they will thank you for saving the company money. (Bosses that get it are different, but this tactic is still more palatable.)

<comment><USER3> 1) This is true for YOU not necessarily for the next person, hopefully when you are rewriting the code you maintain some level of decency and leave a comment trail. If you optimize and clean the code there is a high chance that you end up with complex functionality packed into one liners.

2,3) If you do not have a test suite how can you reproduce the original code 1 for 1? Similar for new features. I totally agree that code (at least functionally) should always come with a test suite. If there isn't a test suite and you are planning to rewrite the code, the priority should be in writing a test suite or a black-box tester. At the minimum you should have a list of supported features that you are going to check off.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Ahh, refactoring vs rewriting. All fairly sensible stuff, but while the spirit of the author saying:

"If you can't implement new features in a clean way I claim: You aren't really able to implement the whole application in a clean way from scratch either"

is noble, there are surely circumstances where the existing system is so broken/incompatible that this claim might not hold up. However, you would hope competent developers are aware that outright binning a working system is a Bad Thing.

<comment><USER5> I once worked on a "barely working" application - the original project (which I wasn't involved with) had clearly been a train wreck and it had delivered a tiny proportion of what had originally been promised.

It presented the user with a couple of fairly straightforward screens, did some integration with a couple of other systems but had over 6,000 (not a typo) classes and a dependency on just about every acronym in J2EE. This had apparently taken a dev team of 30 or so over a year.

It was totally replaced by a much smaller application written in a couple of months by a team of three that provided a sound basis for delivering much _more_ functionality than was originally expected.

So sometimes, rarely, chucking away something that _barely_ works is very much the right thing to do.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> This article reminds me of "Things You Should Never Do Part I" by Joel, and it certainly echo's the same kind of sentiment towards rewriting your application.

Link to the original article: <http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000069.html>

</comment><comment><USER7> ... and more often than I'd care to admit, it is easier and BETTER to quit and find another job rather than "re-write" or "re-factor" somebody's legacy mess. Seriously. Life is too short.

</comment><comment><USER8> I think the chances are quite good that they were indeed both stupid and evil.

</comment><comment><USER9> Sometimes you DO have to rewrite your application, particularly if you build it on proprietary software which has support agreements and EOLs which get hit. For example, look at all the crocks of shit hanging around on COM/VB6. They need to be completely replaced.</comment>


Ian's Shoelace Site - <AUTHOR> http://www.fieggen.com/shoelace/index.htm <comment><USER2> So strange to see this here.. I spent a couple days reading the site a few years ago. It was during a time where I was looking for alternative ways to live my life and if I could have subtle improvements on everyday things.

I learned a few knots and even now when I buy a new pair of shoes I consult the site to see what lacing style would suit the shoe and my foot. (since different styles put different tension on the wearers foot).

I have to say, I'm happy it exists, it enriched my life in such a subtle way, this is the kind of content that the internet was made for in my opinion.

<comment><USER3> So... what other alternative ways to live your life did you discover? Love that idea!

<comment><USER4> I'm working towards owning no shoes with laces. Between my Dubarry boat/deck shoes and a pair of laceless Converse, my other shoes are eschewed!

<comment><USER5> Have to recommend Blundstone boots. I was concerned that the elastic would wear out but it's been years and looks like it will outlast the tread. They are durable, grip well, waterproof easily, and dressy enough for semi-formal occasions. Warm enough for winter and cool enough for summer too!

<comment><USER6> Bought my first pair 4 weeks ago. I recently relocated from Sydney (somewhat ironic) to NY. I found a recommendation on reddit and couldn't be happier.

Orthogonal to shoes and such, I find that I end up searching for recommendations for products on reddit as opposed to a store or review engine. I prefer to know what enthusiasts think rather than a bunch of randoms who have voted based on a star system.

Are there are sites that just list products and have only a single recommendation for each category? "This is _the_ boot to buy if you are looking for cold weather boots. It's a good combination of warm, waterproof and stylish." That's basically what I was after and exactly what reddit delivered after some searching through relevant subreddits.

<comment><USER7> [http://thewirecutter.com/](http://thewirecutter.com/) comes close

<comment><USER8> And its sister site, thesweethome.com, for housewares and other non-electronic stuff.

Both of these sites are so popular that their recommendations are usually the top seller in their respective Amazon categories.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> This man changed how I tie my shoes. This sounds small, but frankly, it was one of the largest changes I have ever made to my life.

Why? Because I learned to tie my shoes at the age of 5 or 6. It's something that was ingrained into my bones. A physical memory, an act that was undeniably of the flesh, not of the mind.

Changing muscle memory is really tough, especially when it's 30 year old muscle memory. But the double Ian knot was so compelling and easy, I actually made the effort over the course of about a year to make it my standard knot. It was really hard at first. I felt like a 3-year-old trying to learn how to finger paint for the first time. It got easier over time, but it really was one of the most difficult things I've had to change about myself, ever. It was like changing from brushing your teeth with your dominant hand to your less dominant hand.

And yet, it was worth it. The double Ian knot is incredible. Something so simple and yet made such a change in my life...

<comment><USER10> Me too - I've used Ian's Secure Shoelace Knot for the last ten years or so, and never since have my shoelaces ever come undone, nor have they ever been difficult to untie. It's a small thing, but it will benefit me in a minor way for the rest of my life.

<comment><USER11> Totally agreed, I learned Ian's secure knot 10 or so years ago, and not only do my shoes never come undone, but I've also taught a whole pile of people it as well!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Ah! This page was on the front page of somethingawful a good ten years ago. At the time I had shoes with particularly slippery laces, so I started using Ian's Secure Knot, and never looked back: [http://www.fieggen.com/shoelace/secureknot.htm](http://www.fieggen.com/shoelace/secureknot.htm)

<comment><USER13> Oh interesting! I've used the Ian knot for about 10 years now and hadn't even considered looking for anything else.

Quite a lot of sailing has given me a good appreciation of knots. It's amazing how (when you're doing a lot of rope work) you can get a real instinctive sense of the pressures on a knot and how to create the best knot for the situation. In ocean racing there are places you have unusual needs (like tethering the running backstays to the cars while you adjust the angles).

Believe it or (k)not, there a branch of mathematical topology dedicated to knot theory.

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

[http://www.fieggen.com/shoelace/ianknot.htm](http://www.fieggen.com/shoelace/ianknot.htm)

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> I'll vouch for the "Ian Knot". Throughout my life I had to double-tie the classic shoelace knot or else it would come loose a some point during the day. Then I tried the Ian Knot. It is significantly faster and easier. And, now I have some laced shoes that I just slip on because they stay tied for weeks instead of hours.

[http://www.fieggen.com/shoelace/ianknot.htm](http://www.fieggen.com/shoelace/ianknot.htm)

<comment><USER15> I tried the Ian Knot, found it fiddly to tie. I use a standard knot by force of habit or when I can't stand having unties, or the laces are long, I use a Surgeons Knot.

The Surgeons Knot is just a standard shoelace tie with 2 slight modifications - when you overlap the 2 sides of the lace you tuck the lace under twice. This, like a Timber Hitch, creates much more contact area and thus much more friction.

I have (not from that site) switched the way I tie a standard knot as I was doing grannies instead of reef-knots. This seems to have prevented unwanted unties.

<comment><USER16> vouch for the surgeons knot. watched the ted video for correctly tying shoe laces. surgeon knot was only one more loop. i have shoes with rounded laces that comes undone easily, this fixed the problem.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I'm always fascinated with how deep some niche-topics are. I mean, it's just a shoelace and very few people think about it at all. So cool!

Fun fact: searching for 'shoelace' on google puts this site on third place for me, right after shoelace.com and the wikipedia entry.

edit: Ian Figgen is the inventor of the Ian knot that somebody else has posted here. He has to be _really_ into shoelacing!

<comment><USER18> Ian's site is a blast from the distant past when a majority of the websites on the net were about super niche topics curated by some enthusiast.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> One thing that's worth noting about the classic bow shoelace knot is that no- one seems to know how to do them. The right way to do it is with the bow knot reflected relative to the base knot below it, like a reef knot, rather than oriented the same way, like a granny knot. I never knew this until a few years ago and since I've started doing it, I've stopped needing to double-knot my laces - they're secure enough for me with a single knot done properly. I always try to explain this to people when I get a chance, and no-one else seems to know about it, either.

I see there's a page about this on the site: [http://www.fieggen.com/shoelace/grannyknot.htm](http://www.fieggen.com/shoelace/grannyknot.htm)

<comment><USER20> I was taught how to tie my shoelaces by my granny, and sure enough, I was doing granny knots, and I was frustrated with some shoes, because the shoelaces would just come undone, and you'd have to double-tie the knot or something.

Until, at the ripe old age of 32, when a friend tipped me about Ian's shoelace site, and I finally learned how to tie my shoelaces properly.

It's a great example of not knowing what you don't know, because shoelaces, right?

<comment><USER15> Same here, noted how someone tried their leaves as it looked peculiar. Realised I was effectively tying grannies, changed the direction of my second loop; far more secure.

To me it's fascinating as it's something taught at a very early age, something used nearly every day, yet something a lot people seem to do "wrong" (inefficiently) by habit or ignorance.

But now my kids know and can suffer less unties, so that's good.

Similar thing for me, the "use a food packet as a bowl" trick (eg for crisps/potatoe chips).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> this site comes up often and it usually sparks conversations about shoelaces, but i want to see the algorithms(o) and database schema

the consistency in the images, and the seemingly exhaustive quantity, implies they were algorithmically generated

i would love if each image had a build array that documented how to draw the laces using a minimalist(i) notation representing connections and nodes

this paired with simple client side code could have the images created dynamically with less work for the server and less data being sent across wire.. a random photo(ii) from the 'dis' method(iii) was 2.7K

instead it seems the server either stores or creates html with the images hard coded and serves up the images associated with the method, though the image file names are encouraging of a meticulously normalised underlying abstraction

i think an appreciation, either conscious or unconscious, for this underlying abstraction is part of the attraction to this project

(o) [http://www.fieggen.com/shoelace/2trillionmethods.htm](http://www.fieggen.com/shoelace/2trillionmethods.htm)

(i) [http://www.fieggen.com/software/info.htm](http://www.fieggen.com/software/info.htm)

(ii) [http://www.fieggen.com/la/ya-d+.png](http://www.fieggen.com/la/ya-d+.png)

(iii) [http://www.fieggen.com/shoelace/displayshoelacing.htm](http://www.fieggen.com/shoelace/displayshoelacing.htm)

<comment><USER22> Like you, I'd _love_ to pass a simple minimalist string to a Javascript code to render images client-side. My more recent "Create-a-Lace" does just that, dynamically generating all the .svg images using client-side Javascript. However, I've yet to see browsers correctly render shadows, without which the diagrams lose depth. When that hurdle is overcome, I may well extend this concept to all lacing methods.

In the meantime, I do indeed need to resort to some 600+ individual .png images in order to render each of the 50+ lacing methods with their many variations and multiple numbers of eyelet pairs.

<comment><USER21> this is great, yeah i investigated the create a lace after i wrote the comment, generalising that effort would seem to save you some server resources!

honestly, i think you should consider working on some indirect educational material

it seems your shoelace site encourages appreciation for mathematical abstractions in both those that study them and those unaware

you've created one of those rare works wherein anyone who encounters it speaks highly of it

great work on the site!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> I have an adblock (ublock); I almost never clicked an ad willingly in my life.

But on that website I clicked almost all the banners.

This website is awesome. Designers, "content creators" and advertisers should learn from him.

<comment><USER24> I agree, and it's also amazing to me to see how well he's maintained the site in the ten years since I first saw it, including a tongue-in-cheek, clickbait- style granny knot celebs page[1], that produced a laugh-out-loud moment for me.

[1] [http://www.fieggen.com/shoelace/grannyknottingcelebs.htm](http://www.fieggen.com/shoelace/grannyknottingcelebs.htm)

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> This is how I do 'Ian's knot': [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gbaHxsilsKI](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gbaHxsilsKI)

</comment><comment><USER26> I love sites like this, that prove content wins out over everything else.

</comment><comment><USER27> I found this site a few months ago and it has been so great. I wear boat shoes everyday and if you've ever worn boat shoes, you know they don't like to stay tied. Ian's Secure Shoelace Knot keeps my shoes tied for weeks at a time (at a minimum).

</comment><comment><USER28> I love sites like this (and this one in particular). I remember stumbling on it many years ago, maybe a decade or more. No idea how I found it, but the secure knot is useful knowledge that's stuck with me all those years, and has come in handy many times. I don't really care anything about shoelaces, but I'm happy someone else does and built an enduring monument to that enthusiasm.

</comment><comment><USER29> Last year, I learned Ian's Secure Knot[1]. It took under an hour of study and practice once, and my life was slightly improved every day from then on. Never had my laces come untied since then. Great ROI.

[1] [http://www.fieggen.com/shoelace/secureknot.htm](http://www.fieggen.com/shoelace/secureknot.htm)

<comment><USER30> Same. Taught my kids to use this knot too. I never have to re-tie their shoes. I think this knot is easier to teach and tie than the classic knot.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> I like the Turquoise Turtle Shoelace Knot.[1]

It's almost exactly like the "standard" shoelace knot I've used most of my life, but with just an extra tuck, and it virtually never unintentionally gets untied. It's fast, easy to put on and easy to take off. Highly recommended.

I also like Perry's Perpetual Knot.[2][3][4][5][6]

The idea behind it is that you only ever tie it once, and then only ever have to loosen and tighten it rather than re-tie it.

On one pair of shoes, I had Perry's Perpetual Knot adjusted so that I never even had to loosen or tighten it either. From then on I'd just slip my shoes on and off without needing to adjust it or re-tie it.

[1] - [http://www.fieggen.com/shoelace/turquoiseturtleknot.htm](http://www.fieggen.com/shoelace/turquoiseturtleknot.htm)

[2] - [http://web.archive.org/web/20051203081429/http://web.ukonlin...](http://web.archive.org/web/20051203081429/http://web.ukonline.co.uk/glennbarcham/Shoe/knot1.htm#per)

[3] - [https://s24.postimg.org/ng1fp6lj9/perrys_perpetual_knot.png](https://s24.postimg.org/ng1fp6lj9/perrys_perpetual_knot.png)

[4] - [https://i.imgsafe.org/bee20e4850.png](https://i.imgsafe.org/bee20e4850.png)

[5] - [http://i.imgur.com/mzyXuet.png](http://i.imgur.com/mzyXuet.png)

[6] - I'm uploading the instruction image to a bunch of image hosting sites, so hopefully the instructions will be available "perpetually", since archive.org doesn't even seem to have saved them.

</comment><comment><USER32> I do the standard shoelace knot the other way round from his page ( [http://www.fieggen.com/shoelace/standardknot.htm](http://www.fieggen.com/shoelace/standardknot.htm)). I bet I've saved at least 1 minute over the past 35 years from doing this.

1\. start with left over right starting knot

2\. hold loop in left hand, thumb and index finger

3\. feed other lace round the front, holding it with right thumb+index finger, then round the back, then through the hole, so it lands on the pad of your left thumb

4\. use left thumb and right index finger to push/pull loop through hole, then grab it with left middle finger as it comes through (your thumb can remain in place)

5\. use right thumb and 2nd/3rd phalange of right index finger to hold other loop (you'll probably be in roughly this position already by now)

6\. well done, you've caught the rabbit :) (In this story, it does _not_ escape.) Now pull its ears.

(If you'd rather have the loop in your right hand, no problem, but start with a right-over-left knot in step 1 I suppose.)

This is a superior approach, I think, because of how the lace meets your stationary thumb at the end of step 3 rather than your stationary finger, allowing a smoother step 4. I'm struggling to explain this coherently but basically you need multiple digits on the _other_ side in order to quickly move your grip on the loop from one side of the main knot to the other. But if it's your thumb on the other side, you've only got the one digit...

(Maybe I just got it wrong while trying it out, though? This is after all literally the habit of a lifetime. The above is just based on my trying to figure out why the other way round felt inefficient, even after taking into account the basic difficulty of actually doing it in the first place.)

<comment><USER22> Well described! The fingers are indeed in superior positions for grabbing the bunny ears.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> I really think websites should be like this. Informative and easy to use without bloating javascript behind.

</comment><comment><USER34> He is featured prominently in David Rees' Going Deep episode about how to tie your shoelaces. That whole program is a gem, and people like this should be celebrated.

</comment><comment><USER35> Nicholson Baker's _The Mezzanine_ is a meditation on innovations of the post- industrial world, the inanities of corporate culture, and a humorous look at a somewhat neurotic obsessive who identifies points of personal hygiene as major milestones in his personal development.

A quote from my well-worn copy:

      | I tried to call up some sample memories of shoe-tying to
      | determine whether one shoe tended to come untied more often
      | than another. What I found was that I did not retain a single
      | specific engram of tying a shoe, or a pair of shoes, that dated
      | from any later than when I was four or five years old, the age at
      | which I had first learned the skill. Over twenty years of empiri-
      | cal data were lost forever, a complete blank. But I suppose this
      | is often true of moments of life that are remembered as major
      | advances: the discovery is the crucial thing, not its repeated
      | later applications. As it happened, the first three major advances
      | in my life--and I will list all the advances here--
      |
      | 1. shoe-tying
      | 2. pulling up on Xs
      | 3. steadying hand against sneaker when tying
      | 4. brushing tongue as well as teeth
      | 5. putting on deodorant after I was fully dressed
      | 6. discovering that sweeping was fun
      | 7. ordering a rubber stamp with my address on it to make bill-
      |    paying more efficient
      | 8. deciding that brain cells ought to die
      |
      | --have to do with shoe-tying, but I don't think that this fact is
      | very unusual.

The novel begins as the narrator, Howie, returns to work after purchasing new shoelaces to replace the ones which broke as he was tying his shoes.

The novel is fantastic if you enjoy meditative digressions regarding everyday inventions. I recommend it highly.

EDIT: add recommendation, fix OCR mistakes, punctuation.

</comment><comment><USER36> Never seen someone so passionate about shoelaces. It's great that a site like this exists. Wonder what other niche sites I'm missing out on.

</comment><comment><USER37> [http://www.fieggen.com/shoelace/cialacing.htm](http://www.fieggen.com/shoelace/cialacing.htm)

This is fascinating: Coldwar era CIA agents lacing their shoes as "a form of covert signalling, using straight segments interspersed with one or more visible crossovers at different positions."

</comment><comment><USER38> I've been using the Mega Ian Knot ([http://www.fieggen.com/shoelace/megaianknot.htm](http://www.fieggen.com/shoelace/megaianknot.htm)) for the past 6 months or so.

It's the most secure of the knots and is visually appealing, but is somewhat tricky to tie. I've got a fair amount of experience with knots, but it took me about an hour of practice to be able to tie it reliably and (relatively) quickly.

I'm not necessarily recommending this to other people; in the effectiveness- difficulty tradeoff, it carries a fairly substantial difficulty penalty that probably isn't really worth it. But there's something about using the __ultimate __shoelace knot that appeals to me, so I thought I 'd mention it.

<comment><USER39> That's how I tie plastic bags. I think I learned it some twelve years ago from a friend.

Its really secure and, from my point of view, really easy and simple to do. However, Im trying to tech it to my wife and for some reason it seems really hard for people not used to it to grasp and be able to make it in a competent way.

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> One of the realest sites ever made. Cheers Ian for your fantastic example of how the internet should work.

</comment><comment><USER22> Thanks, everyone, for stopping by and visiting my shoelace website. Fun to see that it is still highly respected, and from folks such as yourselves, that's pretty cool!

<comment><USER41> It has been said elsewhere, but I want you to notice this: YOU MAKE THE INTERWEBS

Because of you, and people like you I'm proud to have grown up not in any one country, city, block or street; but on the Internet.

<comment><USER22> Thanks for your kind words. It is mind-blowing to share knowledge with people from all around the world. Hopefully my humble website remains visible amidst the ever-growing hubbub of business that the internet has since become.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> I used this site to learn about the Army Lacing [1] for a pair of boots that would normally take ten minutes to take off when I get home.

It seems silly, but learning an improved lacing method has not only saved me a lot of time in a given day, but its prevented unnecessary stress. The method gives a fantastic, tight fit that's incredibly easy to loosen.

[1] [http://www.fieggen.com/shoelace/armylacing.htm](http://www.fieggen.com/shoelace/armylacing.htm)

</comment><comment><USER43> This is a fun page: [http://www.fieggen.com/shoelace/linking.htm](http://www.fieggen.com/shoelace/linking.htm)

</comment><comment><USER44> There is also a book on the mathematics of lacing your shoes:

The Shoelace Book: A Mathematical Guide to the Best (And Worst) Ways to Lace Your Shoes

[https://www.amazon.com/Shoelace-Book-Mathematical-Guide- Wors...](https://www.amazon.com/Shoelace-Book-Mathematical-Guide- Worst/dp/0821839330)

</comment><comment><USER45> I've found this site something like 10 years ago and changed how I tie my shoes. I do a double loop thing and I never have to stop to tie them back because they came loose. Whenever I see a soccer player stop to tie his laces I laugh and say that that should be the first thing the coaches teach and this site would be a great resource for that.

</comment><comment> nommm-nommm I came across this site at least 5 years ago and I learned from it I've been tying my shoes incorrectly my entire life. I always wondered why my shoe laces needed retying multiple times a day, even with double knotting. I had to relearn how to tie my shoes and it's been a significant improvement in my life, as odd as that sounds.

</comment><comment><USER46> I lace my shoes mostly only once: right after buying them. Then I just put foot in/out of it like that. Convenient :)

</comment><comment><USER47> !! I have found it again! Thank you! Because of a "share some cool website every day" program in jr high, I used this website and had the zipper lacing on my shoes for a long time. And to this day I only ever use the double Ian knot any more - but I could never find this site again. Here it is! :)

</comment><comment><USER48> Fun tech crossover, the word "aglet". In addition to the shoelace word, it was also the name of a Java mobile agents framework from IBM ~1997. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aglets](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aglets)

<comment><USER49> I once explained to a co-worker that we needed to buy a packet of "ethernet aglets." They knew exactly what I was talking about, and to this day I still don't know what the actual name for the things is.

<comment><USER22> My guess, based on the similarity to aglets, would be coax terminators?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER50> I've recently stopped lacing my shoes after discovering Lace Anchors:

[http://www.laceanchors.com](http://www.laceanchors.com)

I personally don't use them (too expensive) and use a knot instead.

I haven't noticed a difference in fit or comfort for casual shoes.

</comment><comment><USER51> This fills me with anxiety - "Oh my god, are there superior knots and lacing patterns out there that I've been missing out on?!?! Where will I find the time to learn them?!?! Will I do like I often do, give up and revert to ORDINARY KNOTS?!¿!"

</comment><comment><USER52> Dammit, I need a crib sheet that puts the tying steps all on one page -- it's a real pain stopping in between steps to scroll down, then trying to get my fingers back into the correct position.

</comment><comment><USER53> Shoutout to the checkerboard laces I sported in middle school thanks to this site.

</comment><comment><USER54> This guy is awesome. Back in undergrad, I started an online boutique for hard to find shoes and he let me reproduce some of his content on my site. At the time, I thought it would help with SEO.

</comment><comment><USER55> Wow, glad to find this! I'd somehow come across the Ian Knot about 20 years ago (is that possible?!) and have been tying my shoes (and anything requiring the same knot) that way since.

<comment><USER56> There was a fairly widely shared video EXE floating around for a bit more than twenty years, quite certain it was one of the first videos I watched on my Windows PC and I still remember it to this day.

<comment><USER22> That would have been my "IAN-KNOT.COM" executable animation, which was first built in Jul-1993 and then optimised in Feb-1994, and which was uploaded to various BBSs (as we did in the years before The Internet.) I should put that program on my website for old times' sake!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER57> Apparently the way I've always tied my laces (the only way I've ever known) is the Ian knot. I had no idea that's different than what most people do. Good to know!

</comment><comment><USER58> He's really missed out on the chance to sell a ton of laces.

</comment><comment><USER59> I learned to tie my shoelaces as a grown man from this website.

</comment><comment><USER60> I remember in grade 7, 2002ish before reddit was invented and the internet was discoverable, I somehow found this site and spent several days poring through it.

</comment><comment><USER61> I never knew there were so many ways to tie shoelaces! In fairness though, it's not something I've ever thought about either.

</comment><comment><USER62> I kinda have a soft spot for sites like this that look like they were made in the 90's. Respect for the old web.

</comment><comment><USER63> Oh yeah, I learned how to tie my shoelaces properly on this site. Probably saw it five or ten years ago.

</comment><comment><USER64> I was disturbingly excited to discover why my laces have been coming undone for 44 years.

</comment><comment><USER65> My god. How could I have been doing something so simple wrong for 40+ years.

</comment><comment><USER66> I abandoned shoes with laces about 10 years ago. Only got such with zippers (boots) or elastic straps left (sneakers). Probably saved me a few days of life since then ;)

</comment><comment><USER67> What methods do people prefer for boots?

</comment><comment><USER68> i read this as 'Iran's shoelace site' whoops</comment>


Lightcat.io – Release Notes - <AUTHOR> https://www.lightcat.io/release-notes-june-23-2020/ <comment><USER2> Google sign-in as the only sign-in option makes me say no thanks!</comment>