Widely disseminated hydroxychlroquine study retracted by authors - <AUTHOR> https://mobile.twitter.com/TheLancet/status/1268613313702891523 <comment><USER2> So if I'm reading this right, the authors retracted the study because they weren't able to get more details about the anonymous data they used, as the org who provided the anonymous data refuses to share more details about it on account of patient confidentiality agreements

Edit: I think I found the statement from the org who has the sensitive data ... [https://surgisphere.com/2020/05/29/response-to-widespread- re...](https://surgisphere.com/2020/05/29/response-to-widespread-reaction-to- recent-lancet-article-on-hydroxychloroquine/)

It includes:

> We also take data privacy very seriously. Our registry is an aggregation of > customers who use our QuartzClinical data platform. Our strong privacy > standards are a major reason that hospitals trust Surgisphere and we have > been able to collect data from over 1,200 institutions across 46 countries. > While our data use agreements with these institutions prevents us from > sharing patient level data or customer names, we are able to complete > appropriate analyses and share aggregate findings to the wider scientific > community.

And...

> We believe that an independent academic audit that validates those three > functions as it relates to our papers in the New England Journal of Medicine > and The Lancet will bring further transparency to our work, further > highlight the quality of our work, and also continue to deserve the > confidence of our work by our colleagues.

>

> This process will follow strict boundaries as it relates to our data use > agreements, among other considerations. _We are pursuing such an independent > audit with all due haste while ensuring compliance with various legal and > regulatory concerns._ [my emphasis]

<comment><USER3> > The Surgisphere registry is an aggregation of the deidentified electronic > health records of customers of QuartzClinical, Surgisphere's machine > learning program and data analytics platform. Surgisphere directly > integrates with the EHRs of our hospital customers to provide them > actionable data insights to improve efficiency and effectiveness.

I would be concerned if I was a patient whose doctor used Surgisphere. It sounds like Surgisphere has full access to electronic health data, and it's not clear if patients clearly consented to this...otherwise they'd be able to release more detailed information.

They say it's "deidentified", but if you have a list of age, gender, medical conditions, location, and medications taken (etc) how hard would it be to "reidentify" someone?

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> What troubles me is that people politicized a potentially life-saving treatment. That's how dangerous our political climate has gotten. Orange man says HCQ good, but orange man bad therefore HCQ bad.

<comment><USER5> The issue was also that "orange man" was not basing his statements on any convincing evidence.

However people across the world associate the prestige and respects of the POTUS office as conferring authority on his statements. They think he has access to sources of info they may not (His HCQ boosterism seems to have been based on tweets and watching Fox News cable hosts though, no inside info).

<comment><USER6> I have always found it strange that some people think Trump just says these things of his own volition. As if the President of the United States wouldn't be advised by some very, if not the most intelligent people our country has to offer. I guess some would say the blind faith is dangerous but at the same time I look at it as being common sense that our President would not advise something that could potentially kill people.

<comment><USER5> The POTUS is certainly advised by some very smart people but he has a mind of his own.

Analysis of his tweets have shown they often match the programming of his favorite Fox News TV shows exactly. (A time stamped remark based on something he sees on fox, then an equal delay and a new Tweet based on programming a similar amount later in the show).

This dynamic tension between the advice of experts and Fox News that Trump receives played out very visible in the HCQ saga where Dr. Fauci in the live press conferences kept trying to walk back Trump's remarks in the same conferences. [https://www.statnews.com/2020/03/20/trump-coronavirus- drug-j...](https://www.statnews.com/2020/03/20/trump-coronavirus-drug-just-a- feeling/)

> WASHINGTON — President Trump on Friday admitted that his enthusiasm for an > antimalarial drug unproven as a coronavirus treatment was based largely on > gut instinct, after an open disagreement with the nation's top infectious > disease expert at a White House press briefing.

> When reporters asked Tony Fauci, the director of the National Institute of > Allergy and Infectious Diseases, whether the drug hydroxychloroquine was > effective at preventing coronavirus, he said simply: "The answer is no."

> But when Trump came back to the microphone, he told reporters that "we ought > to give it a try."

> "I think we disagree a little bit," Trump added. "I feel good about it. > That's all it is, just a feeling, you know, smart guy. I feel good about > it."

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Haven't there been several other studies showing it has largely been ineffective? There was a completely unrelated one yesterday about how it didn't seem to help prevent catching the virus.

[https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMe2020388](https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMe2020388)

<comment><USER8> Indeed, it doesn't help _post exposure_. UMN is doing two other trials, one for _pre exposure_ and one for _treatment_. IIRC, all of them do not use zinc or macrolides. (Some patients of the post exposure prophylaxis trial used zinc, but there's no statistical difference without, although the authors warn about confounding factors).

Some important limitations of the study, results notwithstanding:

\- There were basically no PCR-confirmed tests, due to lack of testing materials, and patients reported symptoms themselves

\- The whole thing (reporting) was done via email or telephone, no in person checks (even HCQ or placebo was shipped to the participants)

David Boulware (the study's PI) on Twitter, a couple of weeks ago, complained that he sought funding from the NIH for this trial, but he got none.

I thought it was all said and done for post exposure prophylaxis, but at least NEJM's editor is not of the same opinion, and mentions that even in this field of application there are still unknowns[1].

There are larger trials going on, like UK's RECOVERY, which will likely give firmer answers.

[1] [https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMe2020388](https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMe2020388)

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Thankfully, this was discovered by some tenacious independent researchers. Does anyone have the scoop on who sounded the alarm how they were able to bring the issue to light?

Edit: So apparently this study was just a preprint and not even peer reviewed yet. I don't see why it carried so much weight in the media and WHO decision if that's the case. I think it's probably a good thing that it was scrutinized before it even hit peer review. Found a pretty good writeup here:

[https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2020/05/25/this- contr...](https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2020/05/25/this- controversial-hydroxychloroquine-paper-whats-lancet-gonna-do-about-it/)

<comment><USER10> The media does not usually know how to report on scientific research. Unfortunately, the increase of pre-prints seems to have magnified this problem.

Taking a step back, scientific progress is poorly understood in general, even by many smart and inquisitive folks. In fact, I think no one really has a good concise, thorough description for how science unfolds. The reality of it is incredibly complex and messy (but nonetheless unbelievably effective).

Even something as seemingly basic as the "scientific method" as it is taught in schools and seen in popular discussion is pretty misleading. It is not a great model of how science is done.

Another concrete example of the confusion is the debates commonly seen about the definition of supposedly official scientific terms such as "law", "theory" and "hypothesis ".

Sean Carroll has a great episode on his Mindscape podcast that touches on this a bit and provides a decent if not fully satisfactory answer to the question of how science actually works. As a heads up, they spend a good chunk of time talking about the concept of truth and some related philosophy :) I found it interesting and useful, but I can guess not everyone will appreciate it.

[https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/podcast/2020/05/04/95-l...](https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/podcast/2020/05/04/95-liam- kofi-bright-on-knowledge-truth-and-science/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I wonder if the news that talked about the study so much when it was first published will spend as much time talking about the retraction.

<comment><USER12> FWIW, that _never_ occurs.

EDIT: Although it is currently being mentioned on the front pages of NYT, WaPo, and WSJ.

<comment><USER13> Aw hell, for the past several years, they're just fine with editing their posts and hoping their error falls down the digital "memory hole."

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

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Submitting this as a tweet in isolation is teeing up for a flamey exchange in the comments here.

</comment><comment><USER13> There's even more going on here. Take a look at the studies and note 1) the timing and 2) the lack of zinc. We've already had statistically significant results, where zinc is a significant factor with HCQ. Also the timing doesn't make sense. Wait 4 days after they show up so the virus can replicate, _then_ give them a viral replication inhibitor? Huh?

Check out Dr. Martensen's videos. He's called this stuff earlier than anyone I'm aware of:

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

Also, compare and contrast what the news media was saying at the time. Then, compare and contrast with this: (WHO report which also shows how safe HCQ is)

[https://www.who.int/malaria/mpac/mpac-mar2017-erg- cardiotoxi...](https://www.who.int/malaria/mpac/mpac-mar2017-erg- cardiotoxicity-report-session2.pdf)

<comment><USER15> I've never seen a published report on zinc and chloroquine, and this combination seems to only appear in YouTube videos. Do you have any links to clinical studies?

<comment><USER13> There's a study referenced here. The p-value for Zinc vs. No Zinc is 0.003.

[https://youtu.be/IH2UoBUcW2I?t=1289](https://youtu.be/IH2UoBUcW2I?t=1289)

The study title, and authors are here: [https://youtu.be/IH2UoBUcW2I?t=1008](https://youtu.be/IH2UoBUcW2I?t=1008)</comment></comment></comment>


Dart M2 released - <AUTHOR> https://www.dartlang.org/articles/m2-whats-new/

<comment><USER2> Excited about this finally stabilizing enough to try a project with.

<comment><USER3> Yes and no. While the syntax of the language is becoming more stable, there are still some pretty big changes coming. Mainly to the core libraries that the Dart team publishes.

Mixins are still in the works (a way to do interfaces... sorta...). As well, interacting with data flows will be changing to use a stream based model. This means if you are doing any server-side Dart and you are reading a file or a socket, you will probably need to make changes to that code with M3 releases.

But ya, the language is definitely getting farther along. One of the more popular books about the language just his the printing presses this week as well [1].

I'm most excited about M2 as it brings SecureSockets (so I can do HTTPS connections) on the server. There are lots of other goodies in M2 (like smaller javascript from dart2js). I also like that they are publishing performance data for 2 tests, showing that the VM is already faster than V8.

[1] <http://www.manning.com/buckett/>

[2] <http://www.dartlang.org/performance/></comment></comment>


Ingredients for creating disruptive research teams - barry-cotter https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/dCjz5mgQdiv57wWGz/ingredients-for-creating-disruptive-research-teams <comment><AUTHOR> In my experience, attempts to build these organizations are unsuccessful primarily because they fail to understand the functional role of the visionary leader and/or they select team members based on them being very smart with little thought toward how the selection will impact social dynamics.

A "visionary leader" is not a charismatic person executing someone else's vision, but this is the model many organizations use. A visionary leader is always executing their own vision, the object is to find one with a vision that aligns with the organization and giving them a platform to execute their vision. It is difficult to navigate the intrinsic ambiguities of a vision effectively without it being your own. In the specific context of research organizations, leaders must be viewed as technical peers by the people they are leading or it will be difficult to build trust in the vision. An ideal leader is one that everyone suspects could do their job if required. You can't fake that technical gravitas with seniority, pedigree, and credentialing but I've seen many organizations try. I would argue that finding a suitable leader is the biggest hurdle to building an effective disruptive research organization.

One under-rated aspect of building a top-tier team in my opinion is selecting each member for unique, critical expertise that does not overlap with any other person on the team. This simple practice mitigates many adverse social dynamics that destroy team productivity when two excellent people have non- distinct expertise. It creates natural ownership, encourages self- organization, and makes it obvious to everyone on the team the value every other member brings to their work. With this comes the obligation to educate and mentor the rest of the team on your area of expertise and to explain/defend decisions to anyone that asks. Pride in being the expert in their area and wanting to be recognized for that usually compels it. No one is excluded from this obligation, not even leaders. This sounds like a single point of failure but in practice it causes a lot of critical knowledge to be efficiently socialized by the members of the team that are expert in that knowledge.

</comment><comment><USER2> You don't create breakthroughs through checklists.

Examples:

"This study says 80% of successful pitches have a 'purpose' slide so we need a purpose slide"

"If we build a control tower, the cargo planes will return"

</comment><comment><USER3> > Psychological safety, i.e., the feeling that voicing controversial ideas or > dissent will not cause abandonment or loss of status, seems to be an > important factor for making interactions between researchers particularly > fruitful. _It's not clear to me how exactly this can be achieved._

I know I've read various articles/blogs on this topic, including techniques to achieve it, but it seems I neglected to save any of them in my EverNote. Anyone happen to know of any good ones off the top of their head?

<comment><USER4> Here are a couple but just reading through them, I think they are lacking. I need to think more about why. I suspect it's about tactics vs. principles.

For example the one talks about pre and post mortems. I have seen those done badly first hand where they do NOT create psychological safety.

Anyways, check these out but do so with an inquisitive mind.

Everything You Ever Wanted to Know about Psychological Safety from NOBL Academy [https://app.getpocket.com/read/2567268015](https://app.getpocket.com/read/2567268015)

Tool: Foster psychological safety [https://rework.withgoogle.com/guides/understanding-team- effe...](https://rework.withgoogle.com/guides/understanding-team- effectiveness/steps/foster-psychological-safety/)

\</comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment>----- Before Google came along with Project Aristotle there was W. Edwards Deming, who advocated "driving out fear" in reference to creating psychological safety.

Here's a blog post with some ideas from Deming's work. You'll see things at the tactics level but also much at the system level, like stack ranking is a bad idea for psychological safety.

Much of Deming's work had manufacturing as its context but an enterprising mind can see how it relates to knowledge work and other endeavors. Read Creativity, Inc. by Ed Catmull to see how he used ideas from Deming to build their systems and culture.

[https://michelbaudin.com/2012/10/27/deming_8_of_14_drive_out...](https://michelbaudin.com/2012/10/27/deming_8_of_14_drive_out_fear/)

[https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/18077903-creativity- inc](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/18077903-creativity-inc)

</comment><comment><USER5> "...I picked based on my own non-systematic judgment..." is a pretty big caveat for deciding what makes something good. If his judgement is biased toward being impressed by quality X of a group, then sure enough the study will conclude that quality X is important.

However, any objective measure of research group effectiveness is probably worse. You sometimes see them ranked by number of papers published, or number of patents filed, which is definitely the wrong criterion. Whereas the author's judgement is probably mostly aligned with what you or I might value.

It's better to be subjectively right than objectively wrong.

</comment><comment><USER6> The article talks about how the evidence seems to point to the opposite direction of constraints stimulating innovation, but I wonder if this finding is a side effect of the small sample size issues the author discussed at the beginning. The amount of innovation coming out of startups is high, and they certainly operate under enormous constraints. Furthermore, there is a difference between no inconveniences (no teaching obligation) and no constraints - technical constraints in particular (Wozniak dealing with significant constraints in designing computers etc.) could be powerful stimulants of creativity.

<comment><USER7> Resource constraints act like foul lines, limiting where you are allowed to hit it out of the park, but also making you concentrate on where you can.

Distractive constraints are like fewer times at bat.

A natural abilty for overcoming either or both disadvantages can give rise to exponential performance once the restrictions are reduced or removed.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> The author mentions they dont know how a culture if psychological safety is created, and then mentions the outsized importance of the leader. I would hypothesize that the leader's character is what helps create that safety. If you are allowed to disagree with the boss and have robust debates, then surely you can disagree with your colleagues and deal with colleagues disagreeing with you as well.</comment>


Now this is an environment for development - <AUTHOR> http://www.thewonderfactory.com/aboutUs/our_space.php

<comment><USER2> I don't know. Could be due to the special lighting or the extra-high-gloss- cleaning for the photoshoot - but that slideshow left a very cold and unpersonal impression on me.

Like a modern hotel; definitely stylish, but not really a place I could imagine feeling at home (which is the feeling I need to be most creative).

<comment><USER3> I think they tried very hard to make the place look organic, but you if look carefully everything just seems contrived. I think it's sort of the uncanny valley of interior decoration, which I see quite often these days.

It probably serves more as a function to impress clients than to actually inspire creativity.

If I were them I would've let the employees decorate their own spaces. Could've saved a bunch of money that way. I would've also chose a house with garden over Manhattan, but then again I don't run a consulting company.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Holy overhead, batman! NYC rents are absurd as it is. Unless they got a great deal then they are chewing up major funds just on a place to sit.

<comment><USER5> They also have some of the most prestigious clients in each of their respected areas.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> All mac, no dual monitors, they honestly put some sort of flame decal on that table, and minimalism is not one of their design philosophies.

In summary, needs more Helvetica.

</comment><comment><USER7> Bleah. Also: why did I have to shrink the text size in order to read all the text in both text boxes on this page: <http://www.thewonderfactory.com/news/index.php>

</comment><comment><USER8> Looks like a lot of the Yaletown loft offices in Vancouver.

I prefer some walls and more monitors, myself. But, I get the impression the advertising-y, designer-y type folks are happier with that style of setup.

</comment><comment><USER9> Only one monitor per seat?

<comment><USER10> There is a monitor? I had to zoom in a lot to catch a glimpse of it.

<comment><USER9> Perhaps not in the first picture. They are clearly visible in the later parts of the slideshow.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Perhaps. Since I'm a non-artists mundane type, the work I would hypothetically be doing would be more important. All those pictures feel kinda tacked on, anyways.

</comment><comment><USER12> All the money spent and they couldn't afford dual _large_ monitors and at the very least _cubes_ (not to mention private offices) for their developers?

<comment><USER13> Yeah, the lack of some massive displays struck me as odd too. Our offices are plain and boring but the walls of screens lit them up.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> i wonder if people would ever get ANY work done. such plush surroundings would only make my eyes wonder.

and even if people WERE dedicated enough to get work done, wouldn't it imply that they'd just ignore all this fancy stuff?

</comment><comment><USER15> Glorified cubicles.

Notice that the majority of the shots are of communal areas or conference rooms. There's a few shots of a "collaborative workspace" and another shot of part of an "open workspace". This is just a dressed up cubicle farm like all the others pervasive throughout the IT industry.

This is such an annoying trend because there's plenty of sound research that developers with individual offices are more productive (due to fewer interruptions, or at least a greater ability to control interruptions).

Say what you will about Joel Spolsky, the guy at least knows how to treat developers right by giving them real offices instead of yet-another-glorified- cubicle-farm: <http://picasaweb.google.com/spolsky/FogCreekSNewOffice#>

<comment><USER16> Actually, you have much better endorsements than Spolsky. 2 classics in software engineering also stress that individual offices are much better: Rapid Development, by Steve McConnell and Peopleware by Tom DeMarco.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Their walls may be prettier, but my monitor is bigger, and so is my second.

<comment><USER17> My monitors are bigger and so is my TV, but that doesn't matter.

You can get even more done by delegating work to be done on other people's monitors than your own :)</comment></comment>


One group controls 51 percent of Bitcoin mining, threatening security sanctity - <AUTHOR> http://www.pcworld.com/article/2364000/bitcoin-price-dips-as-backers-fear-mining-monopoly.html

<comment><USER2> This is more interesting: [http://hackingdistributed.com/2014/06/16/how-a- mining-monopo...](http://hackingdistributed.com/2014/06/16/how-a-mining- monopoly-can-attack-bitcoin)</comment>


Ask HN: Buy multiple vertical domains or focus on one main domain? - <AUTHOR>

I just discovered that a large pool of .com domains for multiple markets where I could offer a product, is still available and not taken. These domains are similar to this:<p>[Vertical]Mytopkeyword.com BusinessMytopkeyword.com MediaMytopkeyword.com ScienceMytopkeyword.com TravelMytopkeyword.com SportsMytopkeyword.com RetailMytopkeyword.com MarketingMytopkeyword.com AutomotiveMytopkeyword.com ManagementMytopkeyword.com<p>Almost any domain and market with my top keyword is still available. I could basically grab them all in one minute. Should I go ahead and buy like 20-30 domains to cover all these areas direcly, or would it be for SEO a better move to use all these market keyword all together on a single domain instead (as a subdomain) like for example:<p>[Vertical].Mybrand.com or Retail.Mybrand.com or
Travel.Mybrand.com ? <comment><USER2> 1\. Domain names are cheap. Grab them.

2\. You understand subdomains. Most people don't. Don't confuse your customers.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for pointing out argument number two.</comment></comment>


Meet Goosebump: Spotify's Next Partner - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@jeremy_leary/goosebump-the-startup-thats-transforming-the-live-music-industry-81d30ba67665 <comment><USER2> Looks interesting. Hopefully it's more useful than Spotify's current concert recommendation system that tends to let me know about shows after they've already sold out.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Please leave feedback!</comment>


U.S. Plans $500,000 Cap on Executive Pay in Bailouts - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/04/business/04pay.html?_r=1&ref=politics <comment><USER2> I certainly don't argue that the current CEOs of every firm receiving a bailout are doing a great job.

...but I love the message here: "Attention, world class CEOs who could earn 1,2, or 4 million dollars by working in the tech sector, or energy, or X or Y, or Z: you'd be a fool to come and try to salvage these firms. Instead, we'll find and recruit only the kind of management which is willing to take a fraction of what you're worth".

<comment><USER3> If you're in it for the money, then you shouldn't be in the game to begin with.

My portfolio was down 10% last year. But I'm not panicking. I invest for fun. Other people I know who invest because they wanted to build their wealth lost assloads more than I did. They never really did like investing, and they don't want to hear me when I talk about economic projections.

Sure, compensation is a good thing. And we should lift the restriction when this bailout crap is over. But I really think that the geek community-- with all its libertarians --places waaay too much emphasis on short term monetary compensation.

Here's a better idea. In tech, we get stocks right? That vest over time? Lets give these exec stocks, that don't vest until 10 years AFTER they're out.</comment></comment>


On Committing Suicide - <AUTHOR> https://austingwalters.com/on-committing-suicide/ <comment><USER2> perfect. I don't even know whether or not we agree on politics, but spot on and well said.

I love the comment you got "reeks of centrism". Yes quite so, thank you. It kind of stinks to high heaven of rationalism, with a pungent whif of logic.

I think there are a lot more of us out there that feel a bit like this.</comment>


Facebook's new terrestrial connectivity systems – Terragraph and Project ARIES - <AUTHOR> https://code.facebook.com/posts/1072680049445290/introducing-facebook-s-new-terrestrial-connectivity-systems-terragraph-and-project-aries/ <comment><USER2> One thing they might not notice working in California.

Down east we have trees. Not shrubs that pass for trees, but 40-50 ft high trees that add 40-50 feet to the height of your sticks.

(Yes, some researchers have gotten millimeter waves to reach base stations that are under a canopy, but that is different from the tower which will have to shoot through quite the slant angle unless it is solidly over the treetops.)</comment>


How many hours do you work a day (developers)? - <AUTHOR> After 3 in-place jobs, I've been working at home for three months now. One thing I have noticed is that I can deliver a comparable ("samey") amount of progress in less hours of pure work.
At my office-located jobs, I waited to complete 7-8 hours of work (excluding chit-chat, etc) in order to feel satisfied. Now I can do with 4:30 on average. For me being interruption-free is a huge boost.
Personally I do believe in measuring effort in work-hours. Assuming you feel optimal (which I constantly make sure of), the more time you spend the more you get done. Also, 90% of webdev does not require that much creative hard-thinking imo.
My question simply is - do you find 4:30 of work a day acceptable (for you)? And marketable (for employers to accept it)?
Anyway, feel free to post how many hours you work, and what you think about it. <comment><USER2> I think 4:30 will be hard to market, as most people are stuck in the stone age. As you said, productivity is not a matter of hours, it's a mix of many things. But that's not what the majority believes. Many people still believe we work like ice-cream sellers, who need to be around, not matter what. My guess is most people want to pay only for the hours you work so it will be hard to explain why you want to be paid for 8 hours when you just work 4 hours (even with same productivity).

Personally I work every day. When I am tired and not productive, I work less. When I feel good, I work much. The minimum is usually 6 hours. Maximum is usually 12 -14 hours. At weekends, it happens it's just 2 hours a day.

I don't count in work time. I count in "fun". If I have fun, I automatically work more. If I am not having fun, I need to double-check if I am the right thing. If it's not, I go away. If it is temporary or something that needs to be done, I make sure I have some good relaxing part afterwards.

</comment><comment><USER3> 3 - 5 hours at my day job, 5 - 9 hours running my startup(s)/consultancy.

I leave some videos running before I sleep so I could hear/learn something new before I sleep.

I also work through weekends.

I think it is too much, but as a Syrian, I don't have the birth advantage of having a first-world country passport, I have to keep both the job (allows me to have the visa), and I make a lot of money which I can spend on family and building my own dreams.

<comment><USER2> This can happen even with first-world birth advantage like me in Germany. However, I don't have that many bullets around me. I wish you only the best for you, your family, and dreams.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Over the past two months, I've had the opportunity to work from home. I've spent the last six years working in an office environment, with the standard "open" workspace.

Within the few months of working from home, I've noticed a radical change in my day. No longer am I interrupted randomly, while in deep thought. I don't veer off to the break room for coffee, and get caught up in conversations. I don't take excessive lunch breaks to stand in lines at a restaurant. Speaking of, it helps the waistline! I have easy access to my full kitchen at home. I digress.....

Anyway, my team is located in central time, so I reap the benefit of distraction free coding between 2PM and 7PM pacific time.

I typically wake up, sit down at my desk at 9AM, and begin my daily routine of checking email, checking out what's new via HN, catching any meetings with folks in the central timezone, etc. Once lunch comes, I take a break, and begin planning what I want to accomplish in my 2-7 distraction free time block.

So, while I do work a full 8 hours, only about 4-5 hours of that time is spent head down in code.

Point is, I certainly agree working 4:30 is probably sufficient, however, for me, I do utilize the other hours of the day to "socialize" and plan "big picture" with my colleagues via video conference. I feel that if I lost the extra time in the mornings, these meetings would overflow in to my distraction free time.

</comment><comment><USER5> It depends how you frame the time in question. Is this 4 hours and 30 minutes of heads down, in the zone, productive work? Or is it a mixture of emails, conference calls, and coding?

In my experience managing and being part of various teams and projects for over a decade, I have found that a senior level developer that gets 4 hours of productive work done each day (over a week average, often not in one spurt, depending on the individual) is worth his/her weight in gold.

I always try to encourage 40 hours a week of being online, available, dealing with meetings and whiteboard sessions, but 1/2 of that devoted to heads down work like coding or designing. Often many people that are extremely valuable end up getting less than 20 hours a week of real focused work done in my experience.

<comment><AUTHOR> Great input, I feel relieved to read that my 4:30 (of pure coding work) is good, according a profile like yours.

Personally I'm kinda afraid that some developers out there might be pulling actual 8 hours of overhead-free progress, unlike me. Doing that daily would certainly drain me.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Yes, 4:30 is plenty. I am a remote salary employee at a consultancy firm and work less than that.

I've worked at three other web firms and always had to pad my "billable hours." A boss gives me a project with "x" amount of hours and I'm not going to say "well, I can do this in half the time," because they'll just give me more work with no additional pay.

If I were truly motivated I would start my own firm. But I don't like dealing with clients or writing functional specs; I only like to code.

</comment><comment><USER7> In our office we work around 8 hours per day. We use Agile (Scrum) but we count only 6 hours per day. We recognize that we spend around 2 hours in overhead tasks (informal meetings, tasks not listed in the sprint and some not-job related work.

<comment><USER8> You still get paid for 8 right? You count only 6 for estimates. Just clarifying that I understood correctly. :)

<comment><USER7> Exactly. You understood it correctly :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> There's no such thing as an acceptable amount of hours. Is the goal reached or not?

Often in programming, you have this weird situation where spending more time makes the work harder. It is actually possible to dig a hole that makes you further away from the goal, while for the whole time you think you're getting closer. So I try not to get too tired, and I manage deadline expectations. Often you find the right solution to a whole day's problem in a few minutes of clarity the next morning.

Working from home, there are certain productivity benefits. There's no commute. The environment is familiar. I can take a break whenever I like, to do whatever I want, like take the kid out on a 2 hour lunch break. I can make more kids during work hours. Run errands. Often I find I can spread out the normal working hours over a longer period and feel better.

There's no meetings, other than online chats on Skype or Slack. There is a bit of a danger of chatting too much, but it's not as bad as when you're sitting in the office.

The thing that makes the most difference is whether I like what I'm doing. If I'm enjoying a project, time just flies by. It's like snapping your fingers, and breakfast turns to lunch, which turns to dinner, which turns to bedtime.

<comment><USER10> There is actually an acceptable number of hours, it's somewhere near the number of hours you can work without burning out. For me that is about 5-7 hours a day. Two things I remember, one was an old guy talking about working in a windshield factory, where they made windshields for cars. They had a line. While he was working their they sped it up by 25% and management was happy happy joy joy. The workers were getting run ragged though and after a few weeks the defect rate started creeping up. After a few months the defect rate was so high that they were producing less finished product than when the line speed was slower. Took another year for the plant manager to get fired and bring in a guy who turned the line speed back down.

The other is the first place I worked their were two younger coders and they were being flogged to work 9-10 hours days, basically being given unreasonable deadlines. After a few years they burned out and the company fired them. Twenty years later both of them are still damaged. I did some of the same, hurt my wrist, which is still a little messed up. After that I decided I didn't care I was going to work as much as I though possible and that's that. You only have so many hours a day. Instead of using yourself up, concentrate really hard on not wasting your time.

Me, I've never been fired for not working enough hours.

<comment><USER9> What I was thinking was acceptable on the low side. If you get things done, but it seems fast, that should be okay.

Of course working too much is bad for everyone, I sympathise with your examples.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I think that watching your "working" time decrease and being concerned about it is one sign that you're crossing into a new threshold of experience in your career. Most people in this position conflate "working" with "producing", but as many learn, these two are very different.

"Working", "producing", code grunt-ing, whatever you call it, seems to be what most young folks spend all their time doing in their first few professional years (it's what I did too). This is a good thing, it builds a lot of exposure and raw experience. You may be immersed in (or cranking out) code, fixing bugs, or working _directly on_ your project/product for almost your entire work day, every day.

But at some point, many re-remember that they must learn and grow to advance in their field, and with that comes reading, exploring, trying/failing, as well as non-technical work, like planning/architecting, etc.

Once you start finding that you are pulled out of the code more and more, it's just a sign that "working" and "producing" are getting further from each other for you. And that's not a bad thing.

</comment><comment><USER12> I run a little consultancy, and I'm about where you're at. I need to target around 4 billable hours per day for actual client work. This means I turn the clock on, start working, and when I'm finished or ready to call it quits on that particular project or task the clock is stopped.

I then spend about 2 to 3 hours on administrative, misc project management, emails, research, self-improvement/learning, and personal and business projects. Somewhere in there is some fruitful and non-fruitful time wasting.

On good days, I can crank out 6 hours billable, when really pushing it on deadline that can go to 8 or 10, but that wipes me out for a while afterwards.

</comment><comment><USER13> I work 5 days per week, 8 hours per day. I have given working time reduction some thought and I have worked 4 days per week, 8 hours per day in the past. I would like to try working 5 days, 6 hours. That's two hours less per week than 4x8, but without the 20% productivity drop. With a good lunch break I think a 6 hour work day will cost no productivity loss. That's my theory anyway, haven't had the chance to try it out yet.

</comment><comment><USER14> I think you can easily get the same amount of work done definitely with 4:30 compared to 8 going to a job, but having remote lets you do more with 8 and you should because you are putting up with less crap. The worst thing you can do is be lazy in that situation giving Marissa Mayer more fuel to her bs mantra. You should fly above your coworkers who are coming in every day. Lead by example and this will be the norm.

</comment><comment><USER15> about 8hours a day.

2hrs independent technical reading.

2hrs independent design/development.

4hrs code-review/training others/discussions.

<comment><USER16> I believe this should be the typical day of every developer.

<comment><USER15> Hmmm... no wonder i feel immensely satisfied at work nowadays. ;-)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> To answer your question, If I can get 4-6 hours of solid dev time in I'm a happy camper.

"Also, 90% of webdev does not require that much creative hard-thinking imo."

Really? Is this true for people? I'm a web developer, and right now i'm sorting through 30K lines of obfuscated javascript code looking for a bug. A few hours of that and my brain gets pretty tired!

<comment><AUTHOR> As a backend (Rails, in particular) dev, most tasks are really streamlined - I've done them 1000 times before pretty much the same way I would do now. There is room for unpredictability, debugging hours, etc but those are rare.

I can see how frontend or higher-profile backend dev can be more unwieldy/demanding, though.

I made the 90% remark because it is a somewhat common opinion that programmers are completely above the hours thing. Were programming a totally creative activity, I would agree, but it is not.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> I work from home about 8 hours of billable work per day.

Whenever I step back into any office, I am astounded at the lack of productivity in comparison to my own. I feel I can easily accomplish 2x to 3x the work in the same 8-hour day at home compared to an engineer of equal skills and experience.

<comment><USER19> Same here, 8 billable hours (four days a week), 6-8 productive hours, depending on how stressful the day is.

<comment><USER20> "Oh hey... someone else working 4 day weeks, just like Stavro... oh..."

<comment><USER19> That's pretty conclusive proof that I'm the only person here working four days a week!

<comment><USER21> To back you up, I bill less that 4 days a week, and also know more than a couple of people doing the same.

<comment><USER19> Thanks, but that was a bit of an inside joke between coworkers :)

As a data point, I am currently full-time employed, it just happens that I prefer full-time being four days a week. I recently made the switch from five to four, and I'm enjoying it immensely.

<comment><USER22> I really want to do this just so I can get some time to work on my own projects. How did you sell this to your employers (or are they one of a very few shops which do the 4 day week thing like Treehouse)

<comment><USER23> I've seen people do this.

"I want to work 4 days per week".

"OK, no problem, we will reduce your salary / bonus etc by 20%".

Time passes.

"Ok, I am doing the same job for 80% of the salary and I never make my bonus".

":)".

<comment><USER19> I bill daily, in 8-hour blocks. All those hours belong to my employer, and I do as much work as needed. Any more work than that needs to allocate more 8-hour blocks.

I know that being a salaried employee is different, but if you're letting people work you into 10-hour days, don't.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> I used to work at one of the big corporations, and most people there probably worked ~10h a day, but was only paid for their 8h/day contract and given no overtime. I'm building my own company now, and honestly it consumes most of each day each week. The difference is, at my old job I'd spend ~8 of those 10 hours doing work that was mind-numbing and/or stressful, and only ~2 working on something I really enjoy. Even though I've probably done ~12-14h each day so far this month, I usually spend <1h of each day doing work I don't really want to do (invoicing, reducing the backlog of important-but-interesting issues on the queue, etc.), so I actually enjoy most of my day.

</comment><comment> bjr- Based on git logs and some extended time tracking experiments, I tend to get ~4 hours of real work done on an average day.

I feel most relaxed when that's split between 2 hours in the morning and 2 hours in the afternoon. Great days are 6 hours (i'll be in "the zone" from ~4:30 to ~6:30).

Another 3-6 hours can be spent reading (code or books) and exploring (fiddling around in a repl).

I am at the office for 8-10 hours per day, but the office is really only a center where most work hours occur. Often a good Saturday spent across libraries, cafes and parks can yield 6 hours of getting shit done.

</comment><comment><USER25> I tend to like to allow myself lots of time for "information consumption" balanced with productive output time. So I am in "work" mode maybe 8-9 hours per day. But during that, I allow myself to go off on sustained tangents and don't beat myself up over that -- I trust the tangential learning to be valuable later. (This has proved true for me.)

If I didn't value that tangential learning time, I would probably be happy with 4.5 hours of solid "productive" work :)

</comment><comment><USER26> I work around 8 hours a day of which around 5 is billable. I work on my own projects and my clients'.

I don't bill for the time I spend researching in bed in the middle of the night to prepare for the next day. I'll wake up at say 3:00am with an idea/solution and I _have_ to research it right then. I email the links to myself. I don't recommend this approach - it's probably not healthy.

</comment><comment><USER27> i think part of the challenge is how to count hours spent in the office but not coding. Some amount of discussion is necessary to get a group on the same page, and some time socializing about things that aren't work lubricates those discussions by letting people feel comfortable and familiar with their coworkers.

That being said I worked remote (from home) for ~5 months and felt like a got a ton of work done, most days coding for 5-6 hours, 1/2 - 1 for communication, and 1 hr for technical reading / self-training.

Currently i'm working at a shop that thinks i should arrive at the office at 9 and leave at 6. to me, that adds up to 45 hours a week (per above, imo lunch with coworkers is an important part of teamwork and counts as working): that's too many hours each week at a place that also strictly counts PTO days! and those two factors combined certainly discourage me from ever putting in more than the odd hour or two of self-study on the weekends & evenings.

</comment><comment><USER19> I think 4:30 is a bit too low. I think five to six hours of actual work are about average, but after eight hours of productive work I felt completely drained, and couldn't wait to just veg out in front of the TV (which I otherwise almost never do).

</comment><comment><USER28> It depends on what kind of work I'm doing. If it's painful, nitpicky stuff then it's hard to get 6 hours of focus in. If it's interesting stuff then time flies and more than 6 hours.

</comment><comment><USER29> It depends on the tickets I'm assigned, and that can be feast or famine. I don't possess any decision making power in the tasks I am assigned, and to be honest I'd rather not have it.

Sometimes the tasks I'm assigned are merely to reconnoiter the feasibility of taking action, and not to actually develop or commit code changes.

In other cases I'll be asked to change something that required 30 seconds of effort. Maybe flipping the value of a configuration flag from true to false, et c.

On average, I'll deal with tickets that involve several hours of stepping through nested loops in a debugger and inspecting log output, or wading through long-running SQL queries, and then committing changes that improve upon an existing body of work.

More rare are the intermediate tickets, that might take days and weeks of effort, and roll up into a larger project spanning many weeks or months across multiple developers. Tickets that keep me continuously tasked for multiple days at a time experience differing degrees of productivity, depending on hundreds of variables, and some of those variables are the work environment.

If something's _really_ important and difficult, and the colleagues I'm delivering it to possess an understanding that it requires my undivided attention, then I'm provided with exactly that. I'll ask for a quiet office to camp out in, with a door I can lock, if I need it.

No matter what, I'm in the office, regardless of whether I'm idle, during a dead zone of activity while we wait for other people to provide requests or complete planning through interminable daily hours-long meetings, or whether I'm swamped in a firestorm of emergencies that divide my attention across several immediate worries.

At the end of the day, I'm paid for my time, and sometimes that pay is what will retain me through period of waiting for my turn at the trigger. If you don't pay me for that time, then I'm a temp, and not a regular, full-time employee. That's how it works.

I'm not a founder, or a partner, so I don't receive bonuses or a share of profits based on the success of calculated risks. In exchange for that, I accept the status of a regular persistent relationship. Eight hours a day, 50% of my waking time on this plain of existence, on call as a resident expert.

I stopped worrying about a perfect, even flow of continuous, normalized engagement a long time ago. Almost every field out there has varying degrees of hurry-up-and-wait temperament, and that comes with the nature of human interaction.

It's not productive to mince parsimonious hours and minutes, in my opinion, when it doesn't reflect the realities of human interaction.

</comment><comment><USER30> Get paid a salary, but feels like I put in around 6 hours working (minus eating, bathroom, talking, etc).

</comment><comment><USER31> I work 9am-6pm with a 1h launch break. Apart from that, I code some side projects mostly between 9pm-12pm

</comment><comment><USER32> Before taking a 3 week vacation: 6 hours per day After taking a 3 week vacation: 1 hour per day

</comment><comment><USER33> per day;

8 hours working full-time

4 hours on dev/devops for kihi.io

2 hours learning something new (go, rust, etc.)

rest walking the dog or sleeping

seems normal

</comment><comment><USER34> full time job: 9 hrs a day

side project: 20 hrs a week</comment>


Fusion Drive: Apple jumps on the SSD cache bandwagon - <AUTHOR> http://www.extremetech.com/computing/138535-fusion-drive-apple-jumps-on-the-ridiculously-overpriced-ssd-cache-bandwagon

<comment><USER2> "Update: After poking at this more, it's possible that Apple is using a simplified tier structure in which entire files are moved to the SSD and backed up the HDD, rather than a more sophisticated caching mechanism."

Sensational blog post. Extremetech couldn't be troubled to follow through with due diligence, it apparently doesn't have any journalistic integrity, or editorial review. They literally falsely accuse a company (right in the blog title) of releasing an overpriced commonly available product. Then, at the end of the article excuse their horrible research, by starting with the sentance "it's possible that Apple". Shouldn't Extremetech know what Apple is doing since you just finished writing a scathing blog post about it??

In fact, they are not caching at all. Extremetech completely blew it on this article, either revealing their lack of professionalism, bias, and/or, both.

<comment><USER3> Apple's charging $250 for a $99 SSD plus some software. It's overpriced.

<comment><USER4> Welcome to Apple's SSD pricing. Want to upgrade from 128GB SSD on a laptop to 256? $300 for that please. How about from 128GB to 512GB? $800. All the way to an astounding $1,300 for a 768GB drive. It's insanity, but since you can't open up the laptops to add one of your own it's insanity that you have to pay for.

<comment><USER5> I really hope you don't have to pay $1,300 to get a 768GB drive in your system. I ran into a situation a couple years ago when the 320GB drive in my MBP was running out of space. I didn't want to buy a whole new system, so I ordered a 640GB drive online, took it to a local certified Apple repair shop, and let them put the drive in. The cost of the work? $100.

This was before the unibody models, but I'm sure the process will be the same for the new systems. Oh, and the best part of going to an Apple repair shop was that my warranty remained intact. I never had any issues getting the Apple Store to work on my laptop after the hard drive was replaced.

If Apple prevents people from doing this with the new hardware, then this will be a disappointment. I haven't kept up with the specifics of their new laptops --I know that the RAM is soldered in, but I hope the hard drive will be replaceable.

<comment><USER6> AFAIK on the latest Apple models with SSDs, the SSDs are a proprietary form factor but not soldered on.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Edit: Alright, they updated the blogpost saying this.

But it's not an SSD 'cache' right? It's two separate disks/units merged by the OS. Not like Intel, OCZ, etc which is an HDD with some SSD chips "before the bus", Right?

<http://s2.gizmologia.com/files/2011/06/2011-05-31-ocz.jpg>

Or I am missing out?

<comment><USER8> _It's two separate disks/units merged by the OS._

That's my understanding, and in fact I expect that would make it work better in some ways.

But if that's so - if it's two commodity pieces of hardware managed by some driver-level software - then it would make sense for it to be _cheaper_ than the custom-hardware solutions from other sources. Or at least, we might expect the per-unit cost to Apple to be lower than the custom hardware systems.

So that just makes the alleged overpricing worse.

<comment><USER9> It would only be cheaper if the components were the same. My Seagate hybrid drive has somwthing like 4-8GB of flash. Doesn't the Apple hybrid have 128GB?

<comment><USER8> Yes, 128GB for $250. But excellent 128GB SSDs can be had _at retail_ for as little as ~$90 on sale. What does that 128GB drive - purchased in huge quantities directly from the manufacturer - cost Apple?

Your Seagate hybrid isn't the only system of it's kind, it's not the comparison I had in mind.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> In practical terms last week if you wanted a Flash+HDD solution from apple it cost about $500 to add a 256GB flash drive and 1GB hard disk (I can't remember exactly, and anyway I'm more familiar with UK prices). Now you can get a fusion drive for $250.

They're not directly comparable technically, but I'm in the market for a 27" iMac. The cost of the optimum available spec for me just went down and the convenience went up, so I'm a happy camper.

</comment><comment><USER11> It sounds more like tiered storage than cache to me, or perhaps it's both. But why let that get in the way of a sensational headline.

</comment><comment><USER12> It sounds like a huge improvement over my current workflow of having my OS and Apps on the SSD and then having symlinks to my old larger hard drive for all my photos and videos.

Has this sort of thing really existed on Windows for years or are people just seeing the words "flash" and "cache" and oversimplifying it?

<comment><USER13> Intel's Z68 SRT has existed some time with windows-only drivers, but it's not clear how Apple's fusion drive compares in functionality, portability or performance with an equivalently specced SRT-drive (ie, a 128GB SSD used as the cache drive in a windows box).

A detailed review + teardown will able to answer these questions.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Well you cant call it caching. By definition, that means data is written to both drives at the same time. In the case of Fusion Drive data is always read from and written to the SSD. It is basically a software which moves files around.

<comment><USER15> _Well you cant call it caching. By definition, that means data is written to both drives at the same time._

Writing data to both the cache and the main store is not a fundamental property of caches. Consider, for example, the caches on the microprocessor of an x86 chip. The only time both the cache and main memory will contain the same data is if the trait is set to 'WT', which is very rare.

It's true that (coherent) caches behave in such a way that you can't tell that the data isn't duplicated at each level, but that's achieved by writing back the data when, for example, an external device requests some particular cached data.

If the cache is persistent, and external devices can access the cache as easily as the main store, there's no particular reason to write data back, other than evictions [1], i.e., you should expect the cache to basically be "a software which moves files around"

[1] This isn't strictly true -- depending on the access patterns and the characteristics of the cache and the bus, you might want to opportunistically write data back to avoid having to write back on an eviction. Disclaimer: I've only worked on microprocessor caches and not disk caches, so I'm not intimately familiar with performance traces for disk caches. However, based on simple back-of-the envelope reasoning, it seems to make sense to make disk caches the type of cache you consider not to be a cache at all.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Which chipset does the new imac use?

Intel has SSD caching support built into the Z68 chipset now, it sounds eerily similar, they could simply be using that. Both reads and writes are cached.

[http://www.anandtech.com/show/4329/intel-z68-chipset- smart-r...](http://www.anandtech.com/show/4329/intel-z68-chipset-smart- response-technology-ssd-caching-review/2)

<comment><USER3> There's actually nothing built into the chipset; Intel RST is a Windows driver (it just refuses to run on any chipset that it doesn't like). RST behaves fairly differently from descriptions of Fusion Drive.

<comment><USER16> Alright, I was under the impression it was a partial hardware implementation. I knew that it was artificially restricted to the Z68 chipset only, but still thought it was sort of a winmodem type solution.

IE: there's still some special hardware there but the real smarts was in the driver.

I stand corrected. Regardless, this is only a stopgap solution while SSD prices fall. I expect to see it MIA in 2-3 generations.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I just want to know, can I override its behavior so as to favor applications or directories I want better throughput with.

<comment><USER3> Nope; no ricing allowed.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I'd love it if they would introduce support for it outside of the BTO option. I'd like to rip out my optical drive and put in an SSD, but the pain of having to transition everything over has so far kept me from doing so.

</comment><comment><USER18> This idea originated from technology that has existed in advanced storage arrays for awhile, and in fact ZFS is optimized to take advantage of it.

Apple has consumerized it now.</comment>


McKinsey: The five types of successful acquisitions - <AUTHOR> http://terrydata.wordpress.com/2010/07/09/mckinsey-the-five-types-of-successful-acquisitions/ <comment><USER2> This community seems to frown on consultants and the Big Four a lot. How do we feel about McKinsey research and white papers like this?

</comment><comment><USER3> F McKinsey and their consulting lot.

The company I was at prior hired our CEO from McKinsey and what a joke that turned out to be. All yakity yak and no action.

He kept talking about scaling up, and hiring people so that we could scale the business. We ended up with more C levels than actual staff. We just wanted to ship features and stick to a working game plan, but he ended up fucking that all up with all his excel spreadsheets and power point presentations. One minute we are this, the next we were this other thing.

He nearly analyzed the company into the ground. Thank god he got fired, unfortunately it was after I quit (because of him).

</comment><comment><USER4> I'm sorry but this is consulting BS. Any acquisition could be framed under one or even several of these types.

I remember reading the giddy business articles on HP+Compaq being a "transformational" merger and we all know where that went.</comment>


Show HN: We'll be live streaming ourselves building a product in a weekend - <AUTHOR> http://productweekend.live/ <comment><USER2> This is an announcement of a live stream. That's not eligible for Show HN. Please read the rules: [https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html).

</comment><comment><USER3> I really love the idea, will drop by to check out how you execute it. Good luck building your product!

</comment><comment><USER4> I look forward to watching this.</comment>


Ask HN: Is Realtime Interplanetary Communication Feasable? - <AUTHOR>

Do you think it'll ever be possible to have the sort of "real-time" communication we have today, across planets? <comment><USER2> With our current understanding of physics, it doesn't seem possible but the key word is _current_. Scientists recently measured particles going faster than the speed of light. Granted it was not much faster and is still not verified, but if that's possible, it'd stand to reason that there could be other advancements that could do it. If you asked anyone a hundred years ago if they thought they could have real-time communication with someone half way around they world, they would think you were crazy.

<comment><USER3> Wasn't this formally disproven, that particles (neutrinos) can go faster than light? A technical issue I think was at play, or some miscalculations that did not take the effects of relativity into account properly.

<comment><USER4> Indeed, all the experiments located under Gran Sasso are reporting measured speeds compatible with light speed (in the vacuum). Here's the CERN press release: [http://press.web.cern.ch/press/pressreleases/releases2011/pr...](http://press.web.cern.ch/press/pressreleases/releases2011/pr19.11e.html) There are also named two possible causes of the original, unexpected result.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Since it's proven we can never exceed the speed of light, and it takes ~14 minutes for light to travel to Mars...

No.

<comment><USER6> The speed-of-light limitation is a local limitation. There have been experiments showing that it's possible to send information faster than the speed of light, and bypassing the speed of light by e.g. moving or changing your frame of reference is theoretically possible (e.g. wormholes, folding space, etc.)

<comment><USER7> I don't recall any experiments showing FTL transmissions - it's always turned out to either be an illusion.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> In our lifetime - No! Beyond that- I am not sure of the limitation of light.

Consider this- There is a lake which is 50 meters wide but 500 km long. You want to cross the lake. You are at the middle of one side of the lake. Now to cross you need to travel aproximately 500km if you follow the bank.

Now if your maximum speed is 6 km per hour yo need more than 80 hours.

Now you get a great idea to create a bridge on the lake- Time to cross is reduced to a minute or so. Now what you are doing is instead of walking one dimension following the bank you just bridged the two places using second dimension.

I do not know if it is possible to create a bridge among two places using another dimension or not- but it is alwaws a possibility and you can do it by travelling less than speed of light.

<comment><USER6> The 'generally accepted' theory on how to accomplish this well is some implementation of quantum entanglement.

A wormhole is another possibility, but connecting both ends of an Einstein- Rosen bridge to the same universe would render it too unstable to be used for any sort of communication, as it would collapse before light or radio signals could make it through. One could theoretically get around this by creating two wormholes to a separate universe, with the endpoints here separated by distance and the endpoints in the other universe very close (so that signals/matter/etc. travels to the other universe and back). In effect, this would work similarly to 'hyperspace' in some sci-fi (e.g. Babylon 5's jump gates).

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I think they've been able to demonstrate quantum entanglement getting past the latency problem; the light beam has to be continuous (you have to know you want this communication for as long as it takes for the photons to make the journey) but by sending one entangled photon and monkeying with its trapped twin at the source, it's theoretically possible to get near-instant communication over any distance.

Still, as important as latency is here on planet Earth to the financial trading witch doctors in New York, Tokyo, and London, seems odd no one's been able to monetize this idea as yet.

</comment><comment><USER10> AI, machine learning and a digital version of the universe.

<comment><USER7> I guarantee that if we develop AI good enough to simulate any given's person's actual responses, the first most popular use-case will be people trying to figure out how to successfully talk their significant others into a threesome.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Yes, but only if it's bad news. (since nothing travels as fast as bad news)

<comment><USER6> This is actually one of my favourite throwaway jokes from the Hitch Hiker's Guide: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_races_and_species_in_Th...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_races_and_species_in_The_Hitchhikers_Guide_to_the_Galaxy#Hingefreel)</comment></comment>


Unable to login into Delicious and 404s on profile pages - <AUTHOR>

Is it just me or is delicious unable to be used for everyone.
I am seeing pages like https://delicious.com/tom ( A random user) throw 404s (soft 200 status). Is there a known outage ?
No information or response from @Delicious or @Delicious Help <comment><USER2> Give kippt.com a try. It's a way better service. (disclaimer: the founders are my friends.)

<comment><AUTHOR> kippt is more like read-later service, not a bookmarking service like Delicious

<comment><USER3> ..better a read-later than a read not-at-all service.

Seriously, Delicious has been on a slow slide downhill since before Yahoo abandoned it. One would have expected the new owners to try to reinvigorate it, but they seem more intrigued by the possibility of dressing it up in hopes of doing another Instagram, instead of actually improving the service. The Bookmarking action [when it works, currently for me ~70% of the time] takes 4-10 seconds regardless of the quality of connection. It's frustrating.

Google, or someone here, please take up the mantle. We need a fast, reliable service with a data-driven UI on which everyone can get aboard.</comment></comment></comment>


On Securing Web Session Ids - <AUTHOR> http://hueniverse.com/2015/07/08/on-securing-web-session-ids/ <comment><USER2> I think this might be overcomplicating things. Why not just a secret to create the valid sessionID in the first place? Why have it as a separate process if you already have the ability to mix in a secret?</comment>


Police Unions Defend Bad Cops. Why Won't They Defend Broward County Deputy? - <AUTHOR> http://reason.com/blog/2018/03/01/police-unions-defend-bad-cops-who-do-awf <comment><USER2> Anti-union web site complains like that non-dues-paying union members don't get the same union protections as dues-paying union members.</comment>


Pandas Visualization for Data Scientists with D-Tale - <AUTHOR> My company, Man Numeric, has really been pushing for open-source projects and we were able to open source this client for visualizing pandas data structures.  The motivation for building such a tool was born out of a conversion from SAS to Python and we needed a replacement for SAS's Insight function. It integrates really nicely into a jupyter notebook or python terminal.
Under the hood its a small Flask service with a React front-end (particularly react-virtualized & chart.js) which can be instantiated by passing it a Pandas data structure.  It can handle datasets of any size (as long as the data fits in your RAM) by only loading & drawing what data is viewable in the dimensions of your browser. I have a demo running on PythonAnywhere:
http://andrewschonfeld.pythonanywhere.com/dtale/iframe/2
Let me know what you think?
I also have another heavier piece of data available for playing with:
http://andrewschonfeld.pythonanywhere.com/dtale/iframe/1
GitHub: https://github.com/man-group/dtale
Thanks <comment><USER2> Got an error on the first example:

Traceback (most recent call last): File "/home/AndrewSchonfeld/.virtualenvs/dtale/lib/python3.6/site- packages/dtale/views.py", line 710, in get_data data = DATA[data_id] KeyError: '2Let'

<comment><AUTHOR> Looks like your link copied a little but if the word on the following line of my post. It should be: [http://andrewschonfeld.pythonanywhere.com/dtale/iframe/2](http://andrewschonfeld.pythonanywhere.com/dtale/iframe/2)

<comment><USER2> Thanks!</comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: A minimalist event-driven (epoll) framework - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/hal9000xp/euclid <comment><USER2> Probably best not to upload your private key to Github!

[https://github.com/hal9000xp/euclid/blob/master/core/server....](https://github.com/hal9000xp/euclid/blob/master/core/server.key)

<comment><USER3> It's more helpful to private message people these things, sometimes the author doesn't even know their project has been posted to HN.

Last week I wanted to comment about a bug on HN, then I realized it's more constructive to open up an issue on their Github repo.

<comment><USER2> I compared the author's Github username and the submitter's HN username and assumed that they were the same person. Though a private message is probably still a good idea.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah, I'm working on this project alone. Feel free to ask me for features.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I haven't really dug into it (though what I have seen looks pretty nice), but when I think "light-weight event-driven framework" I don't think "includes a fixed point math library".

At first glance it seems like there may be some semi-tangential stuff included here that might do best factored out into a separate project.

<comment><AUTHOR> I agree with you. Before I published Euclid I thought about cutting "fixed point math library" from Euclid. But after a while I realized that it's a tiny bunch of macroses. And I decided: why not to give a little gift to algo traders.

I promise to factor out fixed point math into a separate project in case when it evolves.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Your crc32 files appear to have a GPL license on them. You cannot legally relicense / derive works from them under your own license.

<comment><USER6> The author has done nothing wrong. You can legally combine GPL-licensed code with code licensed under a GPL-compatible license. The author's code is licensed under the ISC license, which is compatible with the GPL.

(Of course, anyone distributing this project will need to comply with the terms of the GPL since it contains GPL-licensed code.)

See [http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl- faq.html#WhatDoesCompatMean](http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl- faq.html#WhatDoesCompatMean) and [http://www.gnu.org/licenses/license- list.html#ISC](http://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html#ISC)

<comment><USER5> I agree that you're allowed to combine such works.

I was trying to point out that the project's top-level LICENSE file, which makes no mention of the GPL license that the combined work must be under: [https://github.com/hal9000xp/euclid/blob/master/LICENSE](https://github.com/hal9000xp/euclid/blob/master/LICENSE)

(From your link "[GPL licenses] also permit distribution of such combinations provided the combination is released under the same GNU GPL version")

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Is there a reason why you didn't use another event-driven framework like picoev[1], ivykis[2], or the more popular ones like libuv[3], libevent[4], libev[5]?

[1] [https://github.com/kazuho/picoev](https://github.com/kazuho/picoev)

[2] [http://libivykis.sourceforge.net/man3/ivykis.3.html](http://libivykis.sourceforge.net/man3/ivykis.3.html)

[3] [https://github.com/joyent/libuv](https://github.com/joyent/libuv)

[4] [http://libevent.org/](http://libevent.org/)

[5] [http://software.schmorp.de/pkg/libev.html](http://software.schmorp.de/pkg/libev.html)

<comment><AUTHOR> Actually, Euclid is not just minimalist event-driven framework based on epoll. I just could not find a better short description. Euclid is an attempt of minimalist out-of-box solution based on event-driven architecture.

Here is a reason, why I did not choose another frameworks:

[1] It's hardly a framework, it's just a loop;

[2] A good event-driven framework. But it's not a complete solution. For example, there is no SSL support, no HTTP 1.1 support, no config parser, no modularity;

[3] Really good event-driven framework. But it's a big code-base. And again it's not a complete solution (see previous);

[4] I like libevent. I read repeatedly libevent source. Euclid inherited a few things from libevent (nothing special, but for example, how it works with OpenSSL API). Bot it's a big code-base. And there is a lot of logic intended for handling many connections. But my trading bot will not work with a lot of connections. I don't need that logic at all;

[5] It's a loop. I agree it's a good loop. But I need much more (in relatively small code-base!);

In other words, I needed small, cute and fast solution that satisfy my needs (trading bot).

YC HN inspired me a lot, a minimalist, cute and exactly what I want.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Very well written C code, a joy to read it (ok, for as much C can be a joy to read).

Thanks for sharing.

</comment><comment><USER9> Hey bro, I'm also building an event-driven trading framework except I went with ZeroMQ (for socket level pub-sub, rpc and push-pull) and Google Protobuf (for messaging serialization and shared service scaffolding across C, JVM and Python).

Granted, yours is one layer closer to the socket, so I hope that we are not trading the same securities so that your FIX messages will arrive faster than mine, ;)

</comment><comment><USER10> Care to explain why you need the PTRID contraption?

<comment><AUTHOR> Of course! I will try to explain a problem:

1\. suppose there are two layers L0 and L1;

2\. also there are an object O1 of type T which is used by L0, but pointer A1 to O1 is stored in context C at L1;

3\. suppose an object O1 was freed, but after a while an object O2 was created at the __same__ address A1;

4\. suppose a context C still has a pointer to A1 as a pointer to an object ____O1____;

5\. but A1 doesn't have __O1__ anymore, O1 was freed, right now, A1 contains an object O2;

6\. suppose after a while, L1 call API from L0 and pass A1 as a pointer to an object O1. OOPS! We have a bug at this point and we don't even know about it!

You may tell that it's unusual situation when O2 created exactly at the same address where O1 was stored. But I can answer that L1 may store objects on the array, say `T Os[100];` . In this case that situation is very possible.

So I solved this problem by introducing PTRID. In short, ptr_id_t contains address and unique id which is incremented globally.

So using PTRID at stage (6) I can catch a bug! See the code.

Note that, PTRID is intended to using for intra-layer calls. Don't use PTRID everywhere because it's a bit costly. Use it for intra-layer calls (i.e. between L0 and L1).

I like the following analogy:

1\. memory address space is one-dimensional space.

2\. but objects created and freed over the time!

3\. so it's not really good to use one-dimensional pointer in two dimensional space!

4\. that's why PTRID can be imagined as two-dimensional pointer, i.e. a pair (A, T). Where A is address, and T is time (i.e. global ID in my code).

<comment><USER10> Right, thanks. It's a form of pointer virtualization basically.

To me personally this falls into the same domain as the "if (0 == x)" notation - it protects against a very specific type of rake that its proponents just happened to have stepped on at some point eariler on. I've been programming in C for over 20 years now and I have never had the issue you are describing. I understand it's possible, but then there's plenty more ways to shoot oneself with C pointers.

<comment><AUTHOR> I worked (and I'm still working) on several big projects which wrote by different people, and by different companies, and at different time. I repeatedly noticed the same pattern where there is a limited linear array of contexts. For example, linear array of user contexts.

In this case, it's easy to create a new object in that array just after previous object was destroyed at the same slot (we called an index number in the user context array - slot).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> ¿Only works on linux?

<comment><USER12> It's Linux only because epoll, which it is based on, is a Linux system call.

<comment><USER13> That comes from his refusal to use other libraries. He'd get the same performance using a library that abstracts thinly over epoll, /dev/kpoll etc.

<comment><USER12> I'm not sure I'd call this a refusal, they've only just released it and it was born from a personal project where they didn't need to create a generalized portable solution. This project may be useful to others as is which is probably why they released it.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Atlassian acquired doctape to push "files" to the next level - <AUTHOR> http://www.doctape.com

<comment><USER2> Why is the ourincrediblejourney tumblr blocked here? It's relevant to every company that pretends it's a great thing that they're deleting all their users' data. This page says: "We'd like to thank all of our users and early adopters for their trust". Why, so you can betray it?

<comment><USER2> See byoung2, your post is [dead] just for mentioning the URL.

<comment><USER3> Sure enough, when I log out, my comment is gone! I didn't know HN was doing this.</comment></comment></comment>


Riak at Braintree - <AUTHOR> http://basho.com/blog/technical/2012/08/14/riak-at-braintree/

<comment><USER2> If anyone from basho is here anyway to find the video/slides of a talk that openx(<http://blog.openx.org/07/openx-hosts-riak-meet-up/>) did? thanks

<comment><AUTHOR> That video should be available within a few weeks, so stay tuned.

Also, Anthony Molinaro from OpenX will be speaking at RICON, the distributed systems developer conference we're hosting i October. Tickets are still available :)

<http://basho.com/community/ricon2012/>

<comment><USER2> Also do you have an equivalent page to this (<http://www.10gen.com/presentations>) . Basically a page that lists every presentation and videos that speak about riak.

<comment><AUTHOR> we're in the process of a complete overhaul of our website--not to sound like a broken record, but...stay tuned :)

<comment><USER2> This seems to be it something like it <http://basho.com/company/production- users/> Scroll down and many companies have slides.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Braintree sucks, perfect match!

<comment><USER4> Care to elaborate on your obviously educated opinion of Riak?

<comment><USER5> Seriously, in my experience Riak is absolutely nothing but AWESOME. If you actually understand CAP and know what you want out of a system, Riak is a great for what it does. Probably best in class.

<comment><USER3> Yes, they do have some strengths like predictable performance and easy administration but they still have to improve on things like: \- weak data model \- difficult query API \- poor single node performance \- small community/weak adoption

<comment><USER6>
      > - poor single node performance

I am in the process of evaluating riak for an project, and have run across this too. I am not sure if it is specific to the eleveldb backend (I just used the default values so far), or just a bad config on my part. Even when I relaxed consistency down to r=1,w=1 and used the protobuf interface, riak was still performing rather slowly (compared to some other things I am testing) in single node performance.

<comment><USER7> SERIOUSLY! Riak is _NOT MEANT_ for single-node clusters!!! It gets faster THE MORE NODES YOU ADD.

The minimum recommended number of nodes is 3; the "ideal" minimum number of nodes is 5.

<comment><USER6> yes, with n_val=3 (default) 3 nodes is the minimum. I was merely testing (actually had 3 riak instances on a single box as a "cluster") but with r,w=1 and n_val=1 it was about the same (slow), which was disconcerting. cpu was very high in one instance (others were nearly idle, and IO was low. I did not try dw=0 though (if that would even work). Might be worth a try.

I am going to try bitcask too, to see if eleveldb was the culprit and could be tuned.

<comment><USER7> Your test isn't valid if it was all on one box - the disk I/O is going to be really nasty with that. Your test would be better on three _different_ machines.

<comment><USER6> The disk io was pretty low. It is serial get/update/delete (as I mentioned earlier). I even tried moving the data dirs to ramdisk (was plenty of ram), but it didn't help much at all. i/o was certainly not the problem.

It very well could be a configuration issue. I am still trying a few things to see if I can get an improvement.

<comment><USER8> If you haven't done so already, I would highly-recommend taking a look at Basho Bench, our open source benchmarking tool for Riak.

<http://wiki.basho.com/Benchmarking.html> <https://github.com/basho/basho_bench>

<comment><USER6> thanks. Will do!</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Startup stock options % - <AUTHOR>

Clueless question: I'm transitioning over from Big Co to a startup (series c, so pretty established and not early stage), and they're offering some stock options. I asked the recruiter what % of outstanding shares my options would represent, and he says they legally can't disclose that info. Does that make any sense? Shouldn't they actually be legally bound to let me know how much my compensation is worth? For all I know there could be a trillion shares and my compensation is worth peanuts, right? <comment><USER2> The recruiter might not be able to tell you because the company told him/her not to, so in that sense the recruiter legally can't disclose it. It makes no sense at all for the _company_ to say that though, and if the company refuses to tell you the % that your shares represent, it's a bad sign.

<comment><AUTHOR> I actually meant the company recruiter, so I guess it technically is the company. They did mention the word "legally" though, so I dunno if I can contest that. What are the odds that they actually can't disclose it?

Otherwise salary and benefits are okay (a bit below what I earn now, but I expected that anyway) and it seems like a really established startup with a lot of potential, so this just strikes me a little weird. I'm not sure I'd forfeit the offer just because of this, but I just really don't want them to be shady about this, or anything :\</comment></comment>