The world is not falling apart: The trend lines - <AUTHOR> http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/foreigners/2014/12/the_world_is_not_falling_apart_the_trend_lines_reveal_an_increasingly_peaceful.single.html <comment><USER2> Great! We're better overall than we were! No reason to rest on our laurels, though. How can we be better than we are now?

Here's some areas that aren't doing too well:

1\. Climate Change - We're in store for a lot of trouble over the next few decades[1]. How will we manage?

2\. Wealth Inequality - The gap is widening[2]. How do we reverse the trend?

3\. Gerrymandering/voter suppression - The ones in power are the ones who draw the district boundaries[3]. How do we stop the feedback loop?

[1]: [http://ipcc-wg2.gov/AR5/](http://ipcc-wg2.gov/AR5/)

[2]: [http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2014/12/12/racial- wealt...](http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2014/12/12/racial-wealth-gaps- great-recession/)

[3]: [http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2014/12/the- pern...](http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2014/12/the-pernicious- effects-of-gerrymandering/383418/)

<comment><USER3> Why should I care about the relative wealth of the rich instead of absolute wealth of the poor?

<comment><USER4> This is the key question for me too.

Nowadays a blue collar worker (at least here in EU) has better living conditions than the wealthiest and more powerful mere hundred years ago.

Nowadays nobody has to die because of bad teeth and everybody has access to cheap and effective education and through that to other means of production.

<comment><USER5> The poor generally have none of:

* dental insurance * effective inexpensive dental care * effective education * access to effective education * a pathway to 'other means of production' * better living conditions than the wealthiest of a mere 100 years ago (the second industrial revolution and the gilded age, where the rich were incredibly rich, and the poor were utterly wretched)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This point of an increasingly peaceful world has come up repeatedly over the years, but I think there is an inherent problem in the way it is viewed. The rise of the internet and social media has facilitated glimpses into the terrible acts which humans are capable of perpetrating against one another. That combined with a biased media who thrives on shock and outrage, it's no wonder we find this data difficult to digest. Most of the modern world influenced by this biased media reside in very sterile, largely safe environments. In effect, we've become ultra-sensitized to gore and violence, and as a result our impression and response to any sort of mayhem is skewed accordingly.

<comment><USER7> Perhaps this combination is positive. Horrible things have always happened. While they are happening less today, we have much greater visibility of the horrors that do happen. And they still horrify us – as they should. This gives us motivation to strive harder to eliminate them altogether. The jarring thing about looking at those charts is the labels on the y axis – murder, war, genocide, rape, child abuse. It's certainly good that they are trending down, but how much genocide is ok? How much rape is acceptable? Perhaps our natural fixation with the dark side of life is a good thing. True, there is much cause for optimism, but should we really be complacent when these numbers aren't zero?

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I wish this kind of data was frequently mentioned throughout the year in mainstream media. Continue to show the news the way they are but keep this kind of data around to jeep people "calibrated" I think would help people's perspective on the world more positive.

<comment><USER9> >I wish this kind of data was frequently mentioned throughout the year in mainstream media.

Except bad news is what people want to see and it's what makes money. If you try to shift your news reporting away from crime and gore it kills viewer/readership.

example: [http://www.bbc.com/news/blogs-news-from- elsewhere-30318261](http://www.bbc.com/news/blogs-news-from- elsewhere-30318261)

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> _Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Gen. Martin Dempsey informed the Senate Armed Service Committee (in 2013), "I will personally attest to the fact that [the world is] more dangerous than it has ever been."_ Now that's surprising from the head of the JCS, and from a former commander of an armored division in combat. He's a trade-school guy (West Point), so he knows his military history.

Things have been much, much worse for the US. Early in WWII, it didn't look good. When the USSR got ICBMs and H-bombs, it really didn't look good. Worldwide, nobody is having a really big war right now. The USSR lost 20 million people in WWII. Nothing that bad has happened since.

There are some big worries ahead, mainly regarding proliferation of nuclear weapons and troubles involving existing nuclear powers - Russia, China, Pakistan, and North Korea. Those are the things that can kill us.

Domestically, the biggest threat is the Mississippi River, with major floods both at New Orleans and further upstream.

<comment><USER11> >Now that's surprising from the head of the JCS, and from a former commander of an armored division in combat. He's a trade-school guy (West Point), so he knows his military history.

Of course he says that, the budget for the department of defense is in part dictated by how dangerous the public and congress perceive the world to be.

Military leaders have been saying this exact same thing for centuries.

<comment><USER12> _Of course he says that, the budget for the department of defense..._

Yet who does Congress consult when they're considering how much to spend? It's almost as if they _want_ to spend more money on the military...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I am increasingly worried about the state of the world each year.

However, I was discussing this with a friend recently and we were talking about how much of it was simple the result of more reports about the trouble in the world. I realized something: if there was, say, ten reports of really bad, violent crime in Denmark (where I am from -- population: 5 million people) per year, that would be very little. But even so, if I heard about each of them, it would be practically something really bad happening every month which would lead me to feel that things were going down the drain.

In other words, an unchanging constant violence rate would _seem_ like a deterioration. And furthermore, if the type of violence was different every time, I would start to feel that all the different types of violence were on the rise.

So maybe my fear is not completely justified. But I still don't feel completely convinced.

<comment><USER14> It's easy to get the impression that things are going to hell from the news because that's what gets viewers. If you want evidence for the opposite I recommend Pinker's very good book:

[http://www.amazon.com/Better-Angels-Our-Nature-Violence- eboo...](http://www.amazon.com/Better-Angels-Our-Nature-Violence- ebook/dp/B0052REUW0)

Or to save the cost and hassle of getting his book, watch Pinker talking about it:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o5X2-i_poNU&feature=youtu.be...](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o5X2-i_poNU&feature=youtu.be&t=3m40s)

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> "The World is Falling Apart!" gets _way_ more clicks than "The World is Not Falling Apart," though.

<comment><USER16> Exactly. It is journalism what is falling apart, not the world.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> The world can "fall apart" without people dying. For example, the ongoing currency wars.

You can also have violence without death. Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib are examples. Because these people are only tortured, and not murdered, is that considered "peaceful"?

And it also would depend on how far back you draw the data from. Is the Stalin famine of the 30s modern, or ancient? If we cast the data back to the 1600s, it's new. If we cast the data back to the 1920s, its old.

Some data sets in this article go back to the 60s, some go back to the 30s, some only back to the 90s. Maybe we need more data. Lets cast all the data sets back a few hundred years and look again.

Consider me unconvinced.

<comment><USER18> Steven Pinker has done a fairly deep study of the long run decline in violence: it is real, it is over centuries, and it is dramatic. But it is not guaranteed to last. I highly recommend his book as it provides a lot of data on the topic (and is quite a good read too).

"The decline in violence, he argues, is enormous in magnitude, visible on both long and short time scales, and found in many domains, including military conflict, homicide, genocide, torture, criminal justice, treatment of children, homosexuals, animals and racial and ethnic minorities."

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Better_Angels_of_Our_Nature](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Better_Angels_of_Our_Nature)

<comment><USER19> > Pinker uses the phrase as a metaphor for four human motivations that, he > writes, can "orient us away from violence and towards cooperation and > altruism,"[2] namely: empathy, self-control, the "moral sense," and reason.

All of which are contrary to religious fundamentalism... which worries me as a US citizen.

<comment><USER20> Why? Fundamentalists are noisy, but they aren't a majority. Catholics are the largest group, probably followed by the various types of non practitioners (I'm including atheists and people that "aren't sure" together there, I think it's fair to say that "not sure" is a ways away from fundamentalist). It's harder to sort out the protestants, but the more moderate "mainline" groups certainly have more influence than the fundamentalist groups, even if they don't quite outnumber them (but they are at least similar in number).

The type of news that fundamentalists end up making also isn't all that discouraging, they are usually losing court cases where they tried to inject their beliefs into public life.

<comment><USER19> I guess it depends on where you draw the line on fundamentalism. I live in the Bible Belt and I'd argue that, at least, the Southern Baptists should be seen as a Fundamentalist organization. That locks down the majority of the people in the SE-quadrant of the continental US.

Also depending on how you draw your lines, the Catholics aren't even remotely close to #1 status. About 24% of Americans are Catholic while about 51% are Protestants. I'll agree that it's a little iffy, but I'm willing to count the Protestants as a singular group.

Perhaps I'm just jaded because I live in the land of "lets turn the US into a Christian theocracy".

<comment><USER20> Yeah, the first step of the discussion is drawing some lines.

When I said the Catholics were the largest group, I was treating the protestants as separate groups. Mostly because if you are treating "fundamentalist" as an axis, the protestants don't really group together. They even tend to be somewhat polarized across that axis.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> THIS IS TERRIBLE.

How can news agencies make any money if they can't scare people into hysterics that keep them glued to the TV screen?

How can gun companies and home security firms sell product if people aren't afraid of everything around them?

THIS KIND OF RESEARCH HARMS THE ECONOMY AND MUST BE STOPPED.

Sincerely, Tom being cynical

</comment><comment> UVB-76 I think a lot of this has to do with perception.

The violence and suffering in the world, particularly overseas, feels more inescapable in the digital, high definition, always connected age.

This age has gifted us perception, but not perspective.

<comment><USER22> Saved that last line in Evernote to ponder later.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> It's simple, yes we might have less violence and your stats seem to make sense. However, the reason you are right is because we are being more controlled by, I don't know world bank, countries, laws. Today in Turkey they want to give the president the power to turn off the internet at will for 24 hours. There is news like this every day, ways to get more control and power over people. There are 1 million camels in Australia, the government thinks that that is to much and they pay people to shoot them. So, one milion camels is too much for a whole continent but there is nothing wrong with having 8 billion people on earth, destroying just about everything, that is ok? We have no choice in what is happening around us, most people I know would want their country to stop importing oil and find a greener alternative. This day an age that wouldn't be too hard. So why aren't we? That is not in your equation! We are destroying our oceans, atmosphere, finally the republicans are willing to talk about climate change, but all is still weight around money and cost. The monetary system is broken and it is global. One little change effects one way or the other the entire globe. If you ask me it all is hanging in a balance that is controlled by a few wealthy. And it is hanging on very thin strings these days.

</comment><comment> guard-of-terra By the way, homicide rates chart should account for age distribution. As population ages, the 18-40 age group dwindles. And, statistically, that is who dominates homicide deaths.

If you account for that, your chart may switch polarity.

Same for rapes.

As for "Democracy and Autocracy" \- this chart comes from people who still call Uzbekistan a "young democracy". Actually, many supposedly democratic countries actually aren't.

</comment><comment><USER24> A better title would have been "Progress isn't uniform, and measuring it is hard." Each war brings progress in trauma medicine, which contributes to making war (and driving) less deadly. That's good, right? Right?

Higher education requirements and increasing relative status as policing becomes a relatively more desirable job for people with lower (and capped) aptitude means policing gets better by many metrics. Nonetheless, militarization is a bad thing, solution rates are shockingly low, the Drug War is a distraction, and cop culture is rotten: [http://www.salon.com/2014/12/23/deader_than_a_roadkill_dog_d...](http://www.salon.com/2014/12/23/deader_than_a_roadkill_dog_disgusting_racist_song_about_michael_brown_performed_at_lapd_officers_charity_event/)

Some things are clear, however: Terrorism is a negligible threat. Nuclear weapons are still the #1 threat to civilization. But there is a lack of intentionality in both these areas.

</comment><comment><USER25> Steven Pinker has built a writing career out of telling people who are doing really well that everything is fine and that they should keep on enjoying.

<comment><USER26> He has built a writing career out of writing books about cognitive science and language, and then more recently diversified into history and writing style.

Exactly one of his books, so far as I can tell, has anything to do with telling anyone "that everything is fine". But it doesn't claim that _everything_ is fine (only that violence is on a long downward trajectory).

I'm guessing that your real objection is to _The Blank Slate_ , which you see as justifying entrenched discrimination. I'm not at all convinced that it does any such thing, but in any case it's a long way from "Pinker wrote one book that some wealthy right-wingers might find comforting" to "Pinker's writing career is built on comforting wealthy right-wingers".

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> It`s the end of the world as we know it. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AzqiPvGrkTo](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AzqiPvGrkTo)

</comment><comment><USER14> The world is not falling apart. Personally though things are wearing out. They should fix that!

</comment><comment><USER28> This article is pure link bait. Both ends of the extreme are far removed from the truth. There is hardly anything in this article that isn't sensationalist fluff.

</comment><comment><USER29> I've always heard that more people died in the 20th century than any other... Not sure if that is true or not. Never did the research.

<comment><USER30> More people were born in the 20th century than any other. Comparing the absolute number instead of ratio is misleading.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> This is a proof that there are lies, damn lies and statistics :).

World is in terrible shape, from climate, to new conflicts emerging, richest people detachment from reality are some that come to mind.

<comment><USER32> Solid evidence you've given there. I'm even sympathetic to being convinced that things aren't as good as the datasets I've looked at personally seem to show, but I've not had much that shows me otherwise. Instant world-wide wide- band communication and mass media's adoption of it has had an interesting effect on society's perception of how "terrible" the shape the world is.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> > England, Canada, and most other industrialized countries...

England isn't a country. Constantly referring to it as one, was a distraction from the contents for me.

<comment> 0x5f3759df-i Wrong:

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

<comment><USER34> "Wrong" is wrong. The linked article cites England as a country in the UK.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> Tell that to the 7000 Yezidian women in ISIS captivity marked with a price tag, paraded through Raqqa then gang-raped, tortured and starved. Forced to strangle themselves to death using scarves to get out.

Or the Female PKK/YPG soldiers defending their families being captured alive by Swedish Arabs and Somalians islamic rapists.

For them the world is falling apart.

I guess since we can't blame Israel for this it's not front-page news. But lets worry about about the lack of feminine characters in a Donald Duck video from the 70s or the apparent sexism in games.

<comment><USER36> talk about missing the point. You can acknowledge that violence is on the decline while also wanting it to continue to decline. The danger in ignoring the decline is that resources will be disproportionately redirected to solving problems that aren't of any real concern (terrorism, war on drugs, etc) instead of the problems that are actually in need of solving.

<comment><USER35> I never acknowledged anything you mentioned, so I am not sure what you've been reading or smoking.

Please, tell me what resources have we spent on saving these 7000 women (probably more) used as sex-slaves by these islamists?

I guess they are not a real concern because they're not as bad as "sexism" in video games or the "racism" in using native American outfits for Halloween.

<comment><USER37> Short of supporting a full scale invasion and colonization of the countries in question how do you propose to change the situations that allowed this to happen?</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Improved wikis with more markup options - <AUTHOR> http://blog.bitbucket.org/2013/01/09/improved-wikis-with-more-markup-options/

<comment><USER2> I'm still a fan of bitbucket. While I like Github if I wanted to open source some software, I like bitbucket for hosting my private repos. I can use this for backup for any project I'm working on and not worry about it. This could be for backing up config files (/etc/) on my linux box, or some project I'm wipping up that I don't really want to share with the world.

While Github is nice for its social and discovery aspect, if I just want code hosting, Bitbucket are a great solution.

Also, for those large companies that want to run their software internally, Bitbucket's solution is quite a bit cheaper than Github. I haven't had to setup either (or use either), but the pricing for Bitbucket makes it very appealing.

[1] <http://www.atlassian.com/software/stash/pricing>

[2] <https://enterprise.github.com/pricing>

<comment><USER3> There's also HgLab ( <http://hglabhq.com> )

<comment><USER2> Stash is Git, hglab is Mercurial I would say Gitorious[1] would be a closer comparison to Stash.

[1] <https://gitorious.org/>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Thanks to the BitBucket devs for integrating markdown in the wiki. Much appreciated!

</comment><comment><USER5> That's really nice. I would really like something like this in their Confluence product. Currently, I have to use their special "Confluence Wiki Markup" language, but when saving it is immediately transformed into rich text, meaning I can never edit the wiki markup again. I'm forced to include the wiki markup file as an attachment to the wiki so I can edit it later.

<comment><USER6> Yes! This is an annoying new feature... I wonder why they did this!

<comment><USER7> Wiki markup didn't suit the non-technical crowd.

If you're a fan of wiki markup in Confluence and have upgraded to >= 4, you might want to use this plugin.

[https://bobswift.atlassian.net/wiki/display/CWP/Wiki+Plugin+...](https://bobswift.atlassian.net/wiki/display/CWP/Wiki+Plugin+for+Confluence)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I really like BitBucket but I don't love markdown, afaik it lacks key features and power. It's also bit annoying to add trailing spaces etc, even if I code in Python and am used to meaningful whitespace.

<comment><USER9> I don't know about BitBucket's particular flavor of Markdown, but for a full- featured Markdown, see [Pandoc](<http://johnmacfarlane.net/pandoc/>). It supports the elements you're probably missing, ex. definition lists, tables, LaTeX math, footnotes. To add a line-break, it supports using a backslash instead of trailing spaces.

Also, Pandoc gets deeply-nested lists right.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Really enjoying using Bitbucket. If it wasn't for them, I'd have never understood the power of Git since I'm not from a development background.

I also really like their issue tracking features.

</comment><comment><USER11> I love Bitbucket - it's a great no-frills, straight-to-the-point Git hosting solution.

My only problem with them is that they _still_ don't support elliptic curve encryption for ssh keys, despite the fact that this has been the OpenSSH default for quite some time now. Worse, they seem not to be interested in supporting them: [https://bitbucket.org/site/master/issue/4222/no-support- for-...](https://bitbucket.org/site/master/issue/4222/no-support-for-ecdsa- keys)

</comment><comment><USER12> Awesome! Is that editor open source?

</comment><comment><USER13> very cool. but remember folks, wiki is where docs go to die.

<comment><USER14> Ha, so true!

So, where to put docs when you want the team to read them, _and_ act upon them?

In fact, how to write documentation that's useful like this at all? The more teams I work with, the more I see need for documentation and yet the less faith I have that any will help.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> I _wanted_ to like bitbucket for the private free repos that they offer.

But I ran into an domain verification issue when I tried to update/push a repository as listed in their docs.

So I did a bit of dig and found this:

~ » dig bitbucket.org

<snipped>

;; ANSWER SECTION:

bitbucket.org. 36584 IN A 220.127.116.11

bitbucket.org. 36584 IN A 188.8.131.52

OK. So two IPs there. I visit those IPs and they show what seems like some usernames that have zero activity and seem suspicious (to my paranoid brain atleast).

Last I remember, which was about a couple of months ago, 182 was fetching the proper bitbucket.org pages. But even that seems to show up some username created in Dec 2012(!)

<comment><USER16> This doesn't make any sense. You had an issue verifying your own domain... I don't understand what that has to do with bitbucket's DNS. ... so then you loaded the site directly from the IP? And then you were surprised that it gave you a random virtual host?

<comment><USER15> > You had an issue verifying your own domain.

No. There was an issue verifying bitbucket.org. A git push could never be done because of some cert issue. That is when I dug a little further to look at the IPs directly.

FWIW, the cert issue seems to be resolved now. I just checked with two VMs.</comment></comment></comment>


The Pixar Story - <AUTHOR> http://www.economist.com/research/articlesBySubject/displayStory.cfm?story_id=11402613&subjectID=348909&fsrc=nwl

<comment><USER2> Charlie Rose with Steve Jobs and John Lasseter in 1996 <http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=4952557933657865919>

For some context: this is shortly after Toy Story, and before Jobs returned to Apple.

</comment><comment><USER3> I recommend watching "The Pixar Story" when it comes on STARZ. A great documentary.

</comment><comment><USER4> Two Words:

Steve Jobs.

<comment><USER5> Not really. If you read those unauthorized biographies of Steve Jobs, you will know besides Steve's financial backing, most of his management ideas were not adopted by Pixar and Steve Jobs yielded because he knew he's not good in that area. Steve's permanent obsession was making great computers when he bought Pixar from George Lucas. Most operation inside Pixars has been always run by Ed Catmull and John Lasseter and they basically do the way they want to get things done.

But nobody can denied Steve Jobs unconditional financial support during Pixar and Next's low point. And Steve Jobs reap his reward during the IPO of Pixar and buyout of Next.

<comment><USER6> Pixar success is all about the confluence of it's three major players.

1) Ed Catmull - He was the founder with the original vision and great technical skills. He also brings a humility to Pixar, hired only the smartest and best people, and knew that the art should drive the technology, not the other way around. I believe his biggest contribution was knowing he couldn't build Pixar by himself.

2) John Lasseter. Creative visionary. Pushed the tech people hard to think outside their comfort zones and find solutions to complicated problems. Without him, Pixar would be a dead software/hardware company.

3) Steve Jobs. Brought the cash. Let John and Ed do their thing. Managed the business relationships almost perfectly, negotiating the original deals w/ Disney, keeping Pixar insulated through some awful Eisner years, and, in my eyes, created the studio in the mold of a Silicon Valley company. He was also indispensable. He always gave just the right amount of push-back. Hopefully, Bob Iger can manage this as well as Steve did.

<comment><USER5> Well said. I guess maybe Steve Jobs learned the lesson from Pixar and brought it back to Apple. Has anyone thought that Jonathan Ive is playing the role to Apple just like John Lasseter to Pixar recently?</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Opponents urge CSU to reject 4th year of high school math for admission - <AUTHOR> https://edsource.org/2019/opponents-urge-csu-to-reject-4th-year-of-high-school-math-or-related-courses-for-admission/615546 <comment><AUTHOR> This would start in 2026. But a small percentage (5%) of high schools (often in low-income areas) don't offer 4 years of math.

CSU = California State University</comment>


Should UTF-16 be considered harmful? - <AUTHOR> http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1049947/should-utf-16-be-considered-harmful

<comment><USER2> UTF16 gives you the worst of both worlds: it wastes a lot of memory for ASCII- like languages (mostly ASCII plus some special characters), you have to deal with byte ordering and you still don't get the advantages of directly addressing a specific character without parsing the whole string up to the character you want.

But.

If you widen the character even more, you'd probably still want it to be somewhat word-aligned so you'd use 32bit per character which would have enough storage to store all of Unicode plus some. The cost though is obvious: you waste memory.

Depending on the language, you even waste a lot of memory: think ASCII or ASCII-like (the middle european languages). In UHF-8 those need - depending on language - barely more than one byte up to two bytes per character. Representing these languages with 4 bytes per character makes you use nearly 4 times the memory reasonably needed.

This changes the farther east you move. Representing Chinese (no ASCII, many character points high up in the set) in utf-8, you begin wasting a lot of memory due to the ASCII compatibility. As encoding a Unicode code point in utf-8 uses around one byte more than if you would just store the code point as an integer.

So on international software running on potentially limited memory while targeting the eastern languages, you will again be better off using utf-16 as it requires less storage for characters really high up in the Unicode plane.

Also, if you know that you are just extended ASCII, you can optimize and access characters directly without parsing the whole string, giving you another speed advantage.

I don't know what's the best way to go. 32 bits is wasteful, utf-16 is sometimes wasteful, has endianness issues and still needs parsing (but is less wasteful than 32bits in most realistic cases) and utf-8 is really wasteful for high code points and always requires parsing but doesn't have the endianness issues.

I guess as always these are just tools and you have to pick what works in your situation. Developers have to adapt to what was picked.

<comment><USER3> > Representing Chinese (no ASCII, many character points high up in the set) in > utf-8, you begin wasting a lot of memory due to the ASCII compatibility.

That's not "a lot", that's only 33% more in the _best case_ of purely CJK text.

OTOH any non-CJK characters are 50% smaller. It starts to even out if you add few foreign names or URLs to the text.

And for HTML, UTF-16 is just crazy. Makes HTML markup twice as expensive.

CJK websites don't use UTF-16, they use Shift-JIS or GBK, which are technically more like UTF-8.

<comment><USER4> How exactly does UTF-16 make HTML twice as expensive?

I guarantee you that there are very few apps that will double their memory usage if you start using UTF-16 text. Even if you start looking at bandwidth once you compress the text there is very little difference. (You are compressing your HTML right?)

The case for UTF-8 saving memory makes a lot of sense if you're writing embedded software, however in most stacks the amount of memory wasted by UTF-16 is trivial compared to the amount of memory wasted by the GC, bloated libraries, interpreted code, etc.

If you're using .NET or the JVM char is 16 bits wide anyway. The UTF-8 vs. UTF-16 debate is a perfect example of mircobenchmarking where theoretically there is a great case for saving a resource but in aggregate makes very little difference.

<comment><USER3> > How exactly does UTF-16 make HTML twice as expensive?

        < 0 h 0 t 0 m 0 l 0 > 0

> If you're using .NET or the JVM char is 16 bits wide anyway.

Hopefully you don't need to be worried what .Net/JVM have to do for legacy reasons and you can use UTF-8 for all input and output.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> UTF-16 has all of the disadvantages of UTF-8 and none of the advantages, and originally comes from the UCS-2 era where they thought, "64k characters are enough for everyone!" Unfortunately, all of Windows uses it, so we as an industry are stuck with it.

<comment><USER6> You mean that it is not ASCII compatible?

Also, Mac OS X, Java, .Net, Qt, ICU... there are a lot of support for UTF-16, for other reasons than backwards compatibility. Processing UTF-16 is easier in many situations.

<comment><USER7> Processing UTF-16 would only be easier if you have a valid byte-order mark and/or know the endianness in advance and you can guarantee that no surrogate pairs exist. Otherwise the same pitfalls exist as when processing UTF-8, plus the endianness issue and the possibility of UTF-16 programmers not knowing about surrogate pairs.

<comment><USER5> What you're describing is UCS-2, not UTF-16. That's why the latter is frustrating to deal with

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Harmful, not really. Sometimes UTF-16 is the most compact representation for a given string, and its semantics are not that confusing. UTF-8 is a better "default choice", but the algorithms for both are very hard to get right. Given an idealized Unicode string object, it's still hard to do things like count the number of glyphs required to display the text in font foo, or convert all characters to "lowercase", or sort a list of names in "alphebetical" order. But the problem is not Unicode or UTF-16 or UTF-8, the problem is defining what a correct computer program is, and ultimately, that's the job for the programmer, not the string encoding algorithm.

Think of UTF-8 and UTF-16 as being like in-memory compression for Unicode strings. You can't take a gzip file, count the number of bytes, and multiply by some factor to get the true length of the string. But, this complexity is often worth the space savings, so that's why these encodings exist.

The problem that people have is twofold: one, the average programmer doesn't realize that characters and character encodings are two different things. The second is, they don't realize that a Unicode string is a data structure that does one thing and only one thing: maintain a sequence of Unicode codepoints in memory.

A Unicode string is not "text" in some language; it's some characters for a computer. To choose the right font or sort things correctly, you need additional information sent out-of-band. There is no way to do it right given only the Unicode string itself. People are reluctant to send out-of-bad data and so other people assume Unicode is hard. It's not. The problem is that Unicode is not text.

</comment><comment><USER6> Unicode should be considered harmful, possibly even text. Never think you understand text, it is a very complex medium, and every time this topic is brought up, you learn something about some odd quality of some language that you might never have heard of. Yes, UTF-16 is variable length, yes, it does make many European scripts larger. Size is always a trade-off and there won't be one standard for encoding.

Text is hard, do not approach it with a C library you built in an afternoon, leave it to the professionals. I just wish I knew any...

<comment><USER9> > Size is always a trade-off and there won't be one standard for encoding.

I don't see why, in modern multi-core CPUs/GPUs where 99% of time is spent idle, we can't just have "raw" text (UCS4) to manipulate in memory, and _compressed_ text (using any standard stream compression algorithm) on disk/in the DB/over the wire.

Anything that's not UCS4 is already variable-length-encoded, so you lose the ability to random-seek it anyway; and (safely performing) any complex text manipulation, e.g. upper-casing, requires temporarily converting the text to UCS4 anyway. At that point, you may as well go all the way, and serialize it as efficiently as possible, if you're just going to spit it out somewhere else. I guess the only difference is that string-append operations would require un-compressing compressed strings and then re-compressing the result—but you could defer that as long as necessary using rope[1].

[1] <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rope_(computer_science)>

<comment><USER10> The oft-stated advantage of UTF-32/UCS4 is that you can do random access. But random character access is almost entirely useless for real text processing tasks. (You can still do random byte access for UTF-8 text, and if your regexp engine spits out byte offsets, you're fine.)

Even when you're doing something "simple" like upcasing/downcasing, the advantages of UTF-32 are not great. You are still converting variable length sequences to other variable length sequences -- e.g., eszett upcases to SS.

Now the final piece to this is that for some language implementations, compilation times are dominated by lexical analysis. Sometimes, significant _speed_ gains can be had by dealing with UTF-8 directly rather than UTF-32 because memory and disk representation are identical, and memory bandwidth affects parsing performance. This doesn't matter for most people, but it matters to the Clang developers, for example. Additional system speed gains are had from reducing memory pressure.

Sure, we have plenty of memory and processor power these days. But simpler code isn't always worth 3-4x memory usage.

Text is not simple.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> UTF-16 is not harmful, just the "I use UTF-16, so I don't have to worry about Unicode issues anymore" stance is harmful.

Processing text is _hard_. For example if you write an editor, you must be aware of things like right-to-left text sequences, full-width characters and graphemes composed of multiple codepoints.

If you implement a case insensitive search, you must be aware of title case, and the nasty German ß which case-folds to _two_ upper-case characters (SS). (Ok, you'll probably just use regexes, it's the author of the regex engine who has to worry about it. And it is ugly, because it means that character classes can match two characters, which you have to consider in all length-based optimizations).

In first approximation it doesn't matter if you implement your stuff in UTF-8 or in one of the UTF-16 encodings, you have to deal with the same issues (include variable byte length for a single codepoint).

</comment><comment><USER12> I see a different problem: the scope of Unicode has crept outside the scope of its designers' expertise. Next you know, we'll have a code point for the symbol "arctanh". (Moreover, sin through arccosh will be contiguous, erf will be placed where you'd expect arctanh, and arctanh will sit between blackboard bold B and D, because C is listed a trillion code points earlier as "Variant Complex Number Sign", between "Engineering Right Angle Bracket" and "Computer Programming Left Parenthesis".)

Encoding the technical and mathematical symbols in two bytes is necessarily kludgy. There are International Standard kludges that everyone is supposed to use, but not everyone does. My solution would be for Unicode to stick to human languages.

</comment><comment><USER13> You shouldn't care about UTF-8/UTF-16/UCS-4 except for performance, and that totally depends on what you are doing with what data-sets.

As someone who speaks multiple languages and has written a fair amount of language-processing code, the simple truth is that if you are not using a vetted unicode framework for writing your application--and if you're asking if UTF-16 should be considered harmful, you're probably not--you are almost certainly introducing massive numbers of bugs that your own cultural biases are blinding you to.

Do not underestimate the difficulty of writing correct multi-lingual-aware programs. These frameworks exist for a reason, and are often written by professionally trained linguists.

<comment><USER14> Interfacing with third-party libraries is an obvious case where you do need to worry about encodings for reasons that are not performance.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Is there any reason to use a character encoding _other than_ UTF-8 (for new content)? There is a (lot of) legacy content in non-Unicode encodings. Also, UCS-4 _might_ be a useful optimization for processing text.

<comment><USER13> Size, perhaps? Remember, most of the world does not speak English. I bet you baidu uses UTF-16 for its indexes.

<comment><USER16> Is size _actually_ a concern in the modern world? With transmission and storage size is practically a nonissue and we have proper rather cheap compression anyway. And in memory? We have _gigabytes_ of ram, who cares? Of the potential situations where it may become an issue that I can think of, pretty much none of them are on end user hardware.

<comment><USER13> I reiterate my example of baidu.

Just because size isn't a problem for your application, doesn't mean there aren't others out there dealing with petabytes of text.

<comment><USER16> _"Of the potential situations where it may become an issue that I can think of, pretty much none of them are on end user hardware."_

Do what you need to on your companies machines, but keep it out of ecosystems it has no reason to be in.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> If whatever framework or libraries you're using don't hide this from you nearly completely, you might be doing it wrong. Just use the default Unicode format of the OS and framework or standard libraries you're using and never think of it again.

Much like dates and times, correct handling of Unicode is best left to the poor souls stuck dealing with them full time, all the time.

<comment><USER18> _> Much like dates and times, correct handling of Unicode is best left to the poor souls stuck dealing with them full time, all the time._

Reminds me that date parsing is fucked up in iOs and you actually need to know your shit to get it right when dealing with users around the globe. But I don't see people dealing with this full time.

<comment><USER19> In all apps i've worked on, passing dates around as 'seconds since 1970' has made date parsing on ios effortless - you may want to try that.

<comment><USER20>
      > passing dates around as 'seconds since 1970' has
      > made date parsing on ios effortless

I'm confused. How does the way that you store dates internally have anything to do with date parsing? If you are accepting dates from users, then you still have to normalize then to unix timestamps.

That also doesn't cover things like:

* Take this date and convert it into a week represented by the last Sunday of the week (i.e. 20110410 represents 20110403-20110409).

* Basically anything involving days of the week.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I agree with much of what the top-voted answer says, with the exception of the criticism of wchar_t. wchar_t is _not_ equal to utf-16: it is supposed to be a type large enough to store any single codepoint. Environments where wchar_t is utf-16 simply have a broken wchar_t - when wchar_t is ucs4 then it fulfills its original purpose.

</comment><comment><USER22> I dislike UTF16 for a very simple reason: it's another type of encoding to deal with. If I could force the entire world to dump UTF16 and use UTF8, I would. Hell, I'd force everyone to dump UTF8 and use UTF16 if I could too. It's just such a pain in the ass to have to deal with having so many ways of encoding text on the web.</comment>


Where to hate daylight saving time and where to love it - <AUTHOR> http://andywoodruff.com/blog/where-to-hate-daylight-saving-time-and-where-to-love-it/ <comment><USER2> I would have liked to see maps of the whole world. I live in Helsinki, 60 degrees North, and the sunrise today is 08:40 and the sunset is 15:33. It's still going to get _a lot_ darker before the solstice.

Quite frankly, at this point it doesn't really matter if it is offset one hour in either direction. But the abrupt change of DST really takes a toll. The timing is also unfortunate, because on the last days of summer time there's still a bit of sunlight after regular work hours, but the change to winter time practically removes the last lit hours from the day if you work somewhat regular office hours.

I would like to see the daylight savings time abolished and going to permanent summer time here.

<comment><USER3> > I would like to see the daylight savings time abolished and going to > permanent summer time here.

Daylight savings time _is_ summer time. Sounds like you would like to run on daylight savings time year-round (as would I).

<comment><USER4> > Sounds like you would like to run on daylight savings time year-round (as > would I).

Most Europeans (and probably americans?) would definitely benefit from shifting their timezones by 1h and keeping it there. Hell, Central European Time could probably shift by 2h, the timezone goes from Spain to Poland, Warsaw currently gets sundown at 1530! (Lille which is roughly the same latitude gets sundown at a more respectable 1647)

<comment><USER5> The fun is, that in Warsaw the delta between CET and solar time is much less, than in Lille.

See: [http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2572317/Are-Y...](http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2572317/Are- YOU-living-sync-Amazing-map-reveals-manmade-timezones-countries-false-sense- sun-rises.html)

(Yes, dailymail, but at least they have a nice maps).

<comment><USER4> > The fun is, that in Warsaw the delta between CET and solar time is much > less, than in Lille.

Which is exactly the issue. We don't actually want solar noon at noon because nobody sleeps from say 8PM to 4PM, or 9PM to 3AM.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> In 1974 the US basically had DST the entire year to save energy. Being on year round DST would save us the most energy, because most people use energy at night for artificial lighting.

The main argument against it is that "kids have to go to school in the dark." Well you know what? Look at these maps. How many kids _already_ have to go to school in the dark? Why does it matter? Even the kids would rather have more light _after_ school so they can play.

And if you ask a farmer about it, they'll tell you "the animals don't read clocks". To them it doesn't really matter, they get up with the sun regardless of what the clock says.

<comment><USER7> Tangentially related, there are also studies showing that schools that force kids to get up at 6:30 also produce lower performing students because kids stay up late everywhere and then never get enough sleep.

If you want to keep the public school work week, it would make significantly more sense being 9-5 or even 10-6 Monday to Thursday rather than 8-3 Monday to Friday.

We aren't going home to work the farm, and we aren't setting insanely early sleep schedules to get up with the sun to till the fields. These ancient time systems cause legitimate harm for the sake of posterity.

<comment><USER8> Note that those studies apply to High Schools. Young kids are notoriously early risers.

Here in Ottawa, Canada, they've stumbled on a good solution. To save money on busing, they've staggered the school start times to allow bus sharing. In my area, that means the buses drop elementary kids off for an 8 o'clock start and then pick up high school kids for a 9 o'clock start.

As far as your suggestion of running four 8 hour school days instead of five 6 hour days, I certainly hope you're talking about high school. 6 hours is already too long for my 6 year old, I can't imagine 8 hours.

<comment><USER9> Whereas ours did the opposite... Pick up the high school students for an ~820 start, run back out and grab the younger kids for a 900 start.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Those light map images are based on the premise that 5pm is a reasonable time for sunset, which is something I disagree with.

I like DST because I like light evenings. I can put up with dark mornings, but don't take away my light evenings.

<comment><USER11> >Those light map images are based on the premise that 5pm is a reasonable time for sunset, which is something I disagree with.

When daylight savings rolls around each year, I always make the same comment: _god it feels civilized to be going home when it 's still light outside_!

<comment><USER12> At least you live in a place where DST makes a difference. It doesn't help a bit in northern Europe, I'm pretty sure we only do it to keep time parity with central Europe.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I disagree with the premise of this article. I don't care if the sun is out when I have to wake up or not. I dislike doing something incredibly dramatic like changing what time it is and having to force myself into a different rythm because some people might or might not be happy that now there might or might not be more sun in the evening.

<comment><USER14> > _I don 't care if the sun is out when I have to wake up or not._

This isn't about what you - or for that matter millions of people - do or don't want to do. After all, if we only did what we wanted to do, none of us would pay tax.

This is about reducing energy consumption by attempting to have people sleep when the sun is down, and be awake when the sun is up.

<comment><USER15> Even if energy can be saved... why not make the companies set different office hours at different times of the year, rather than make people reset their watches? If companies' office hours are not to be messed with, why are the people's lives?

I really cannot understand the logic behind this. People should be free to choose if they want to sleep more when the sun is down, right? And with Capitalism, you should tune the price of energy consumption to make people save more, instead of making strange laws.

<comment><USER14> > _If companies ' office hours are not to be messed with, why are the people's > lives?_

Daylight savings isn't messing with anyone's life, it's changing the arbitrary read-out on a human-invented device, nothing more.

> _People should be free to choose if they want to sleep more when the sun is > down, right?_

Of course, anyone can sleep as much or as little as they please. There might be school and employment consequences to that, but you can still do it.

You can also drive a car as fast as you please - but there might also be consequences to that.

<comment><USER16> > Daylight savings isn't messing with anyone's life, it's changing the > arbitrary read-out on a human-invented device, nothing more.

If you work or have kids in school, you need to adjust your sleep pattern to match the readout on that human-invented device. Look at small children and retirees: DST does not affect them because they wake up whenever they want to. Seems to me that the root problem is that businesses and schools demand people arrive at work the same time regardless of sunlight conditions. It's stupid that billions of people change their measuring devices twice a year instead of just having businesses pick "summer hours" and "winter hours".

<comment><USER17> Amen. DST feels a lot like trying to combat obesity by changing the kilogram, so that everyone weighs the same. It doesn't affect people's actual weights, just like how DST doesn't affect the amount of daylight we receive.

<comment><USER18> It does, for you personally, if you sleep through that daylight or are stuck inside for most of it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> My complaint with DST isn't so much about when we have to get up, but about what it does to commuting with respect to sun position.

For anyone who lives to the west of their job - and that seems to be a lot of people - and has relatively normal office hours, you're going to go through a time period in the spring and fall where the sun is in drivers' eyes as they're commuting. In the morning, just after the sun rises, it will be blinding drivers going east, and in the evening, before sunset, it'll blind drivers going west. Given the geography, there's not much to be done about that. If we just wait a couple weeks (for any given person), the times will progress enough so that they'll no longer be affected.

But when you throw DST into the equation, it resets progression of sunrise and sunset times. After we've made it through those couple weeks where the sun is in your eyes, suddenly the time change hits, pushing the time back into your commuting drive again.

Thus, the number of days I need to spend in dangerous driving conditions, with myself and other drivers partially blinded by the rising or setting son, is more-or-less doubled by DST. It seems to me to be a significant safety issue.

<comment><USER20> I highly recommend wearing sunglasses while driving. This does not eliminate the sun issue, but it helps not just deal with the sun but also those few seconds of temporary blindness when you get reflections.

That said, the most useful thing I found was to change my commute around glare issues.

<comment><USER21> I don't like sunglasses, so I had windshield tint installed instead: [http://i.imgur.com/Npc7z1D.jpg](http://i.imgur.com/Npc7z1D.jpg) (not my car, just a sample)

<comment><USER20> Careful, that's illegal in several states.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> As someone who lives in India (no DST) but interacts frequently with people in the USA. I _hate_ it. Maybe it was rational before mass globalization, but now that many of us interact regularly across time zones and national borders it complicates time, which should be sacrosanct.

<comment><USER23> Bear in mind that the USA is at higher latitude, so day-length variations are far more pronounced as you approach the solstices.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Opinions about DST vary, perhaps reflecting how a person's "internal clock" functions. Biological differences play a role, some people are natural early risers, others tend to stay up late. I'm in the latter category so I strongly favor DST, but I can see how others might hate it.

It's exacerbated living north of the 45th parallel. Officially we get about 16 hours of daylight/nighttime at the solstices. However, it's actually much worse than the raw data suggests.

Living in the shadow of hills to the west, among tall trees, in a rainy climate with frequent heavily overcast skies, after DST goes off, by 3:00PM the sky is already dark. No wonder a lot of people around here look forward to March and return of DST.

The morning effect is minimal, winter sunrise comes quite late. At year's end it's after 7:50AM, so it's dark on the way to work no matter what the weather and DST would not make the morning commute any dimmer.

OTOH >16 hours of summer daylight is amazing and delightful. The place just comes alive. While we can't legislate the seasons, keeping DST longer than we do would at least be a small token of compensation.

</comment><comment><USER25> 5pm is a horrible time for sunset. When are you going to play catch with your kids?!

<comment><USER8> When do I play catch with my kids? In the summer time. In the winter, I go skating with my kids after dark, which works well under the flood lights.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> Living in one of the places that doesn't do DST, it's always struck me as bonkers to go through that twice a year.

</comment><comment><USER27> Ugh, waking up at 6:30 AM. I've done it once, never again. I refuse to work for a company where I have to wake up at 6:30 AM to get to office.

</comment><comment><USER28> Since its hackernews I think its fair to comment that I hate it because it makes the already difficult time programming even more difficult. Now I don't just have to save timezone somewhere but also the offset (to be full proof) of the time. How about the UI? Does anyone know of a timepicker UI pattern (I haven't seen any) that allows you to input the duplicate hour during DST > ST switch?

I don't have to suffer through this change but it seems like something that will affect people's rhythm a lot and make them mess up things twice a year. What would be the health and other cost of that would be?

Hmm just thought about it and looked it up. It seems that people use ~10% their energy budget in lighting. So I don't see even in terms of energy usage that being worth it? Specially since using better lights would have a much more savings.

[1] [https://nplainsnorthernnotes.files.wordpress.com/2011/03/gra...](https://nplainsnorthernnotes.files.wordpress.com/2011/03/graphic-2011-04-home- energy-use-legacy.jpg)

<comment><USER29> > _fool_ proof?

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> There is nothing to love about DST. It just messes up sleep cycle and daily routine. When you will have small children you will understand.

<comment><USER10> The flip side is having an extra hour of daylight in the evening to be able to go outside and play catch/whatever with your children.

<comment><USER17> There's no "extra" hour of daylight. The sun doesn't care how we set our clocks.

<comment><USER10> If I get home at 7 and it's dark then it doesn't really lend itself to going outside.

In daylight savings I still get home at 7 but now there is an hour of daylight left.

So even though there is still the same amount of daylight in the day, due to the rescheduling of the work day with respect to daylight, there is an extra hour of daylight _in the evening_

<comment><USER17> Wouldn't it be easier to redefine office hours so that people can go home at 6, instead of redefining everyone's concept of time?

<comment><USER10> Nowadays I work for myself, so yes it is easier to redefine _my_ office hours. Changing the office/school hours of all my friends/family/children however is not feasible.

It really is an all-or-nothing sort of proposition. Can you imagine for example if half the businesses in an area ran on 9-5 and the other half ran on 8-4? You would get far more chaos than the minimal disruption caused by DST.

Now you might argue that society shouldn't be run based on the whims of people who want daylight in the evening, and you'd have a fair point. The counter to that is that likewise it shouldn't be run based on the whims of people who don't.

Luckily I live in a democracy and if, based on the will of the people, the state government where I lived decided to rescind DST then so be it and while I wouldn't like it, I would accept it.

However, I would wager that the majority of people where I live _prefer_ daylight savings and so having it is the will of the people.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> I live near Melbourne and if there wasn't DST, in mid-summer the sun would rise at 4:30am. Pass.

<comment><USER32> Even with British Summer Time the sun rises at 4:30 in the summer here in Scotland (and we're not that far North) - what's the problem with it?

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> The biggest flaw with this visualization is that it doesn't allow you to expand DST to the entire year, or increase it to double/triple/quadruple DST. I assume that it would simply be too heartbreakingly beautiful to witness it, and it was withheld for our own good.

</comment><comment><USER34> In the US

<comment><USER35> aaa there we go, someone else disappointed to read the article and scroll down to see the interactive map is a map the US only...

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> Russia had continuous day light savings time from 2011 to 2014 ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_in_Russia#Daylight_saving...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_in_Russia#Daylight_saving_time)).

"However, many Russians in the north complained about darker mornings in winter." So they went back and permanently adopted winter hours ([http://www.bbc.com/news/world- europe-29773559](http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-29773559)).

</comment><comment><USER37> Permanent DST - aren't we just arguing to move the prime meridian 30 degrees to the west and pushing everyone's time zone out?

Or would it just be easier to get everyone to agree to go to work an hour earlier?

Where I live we have no DST. As I live at the eastern edge of the time zone, the sun comes up at 4:30 am and is all done by 7pm on the summer solstice. It's a stupid time zone. But efforts to get DST implemented have been very difficult and strongly resisted from people living further west.

</comment><comment><USER38> > but I'll grant that waking up before the sun is miserable

Uhm, where I live this is inevitable most winter months. I don't see any problems with it and seldom hear anyone complain.

</comment><comment><USER39> Bah, if we want to start work, say, an hour after sunrise we can just do that now. We can trivially make an alarm clock that calculates sum position at a particular location. There is no technical reason that we need to argue over changing local time some even number of hours when we can do it exactly.

</comment><comment><USER40> I hate DST for a whole other reason: politicians "changing time" seems like a ridiculous idea to me. I think office/school hours should sometime opt for a summer/winter schedule instead.

But then I would also not mind to have the whole world on the UTC clock instead of timezones :)

</comment><comment><USER41> The interactive graph part isn't loading for me due to some HTTPS error

<comment><USER42> You probably have HTTPS Everywhere installed.

</comment></comment><comment><USER43> The entire idea of daylight savings time is idiotic. In a thousand years we will be looked back on and they will sneer at our lack of intelligence for adopting such a silly ritual.

</comment><comment><USER44> Always hate it, why? It kills people.</comment>


Asheknazi Jewish Intelligence - <AUTHOR> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ashkenazi_Jewish_intelligence

<comment><AUTHOR> " While only about 3% of the U.S. population is of full Ashkenazi Jewish descent,[2] 27% of United States Nobel prize winners in the 20th century,[2][3] 25% of Fields Medal winners,[4] 25% of ACM Turing Award winners,[2] 6 out of the 19 world chess champions, and a quarter of Westinghouse Science Talent Search winners have either full or partial Ashkenazi Jewish ancestry. However, such statistics do not rule out factors other than intelligence, such as institutional biases and social networks. Undue weight is also given to the Ashkenazi statistics because people of partial Ashkenazi ancestry (half or less) are included, but only compared to the portion of the US population of full Ashkenazi descent."

Something is definitely going on here.</comment>


Software developer's guide to release a side project: Part 1 (iOS app) - <AUTHOR> http://db42.in/2015/01/02/from-starter-to-finisher/

<comment><USER2> IMO: If you are finishing up a side project iOS / Android app, don't bother with a website. Just get it out of the door! Traffic doesn't drive itself to the website. If you drive traffic somewhere, you may as well drive it directly to the App Store.

There is no reason a quickly cobbled together website that has the same screenshots your App Store listing has will convert any better than the App Store.

Plus, the iTunes web page is pretty good at SEO and will probably turn up before your own page for relevant keywords.

In fact, the time you save by not building a Landing Page, you can invest into:

a) Writing a great description of your app. Also includes relevant keywords for your niche, you may want to use a keyword-research tool. [https://searchman.com/](https://searchman.com/) seems to be the best free tool atm(?).

b) Make sure your screenshots not only show meaningful data, but also clearly communicate why/what your app is useful for, e.g. how a problem is solved. Explainer texts can make it A LOT easier to communicate that. Shameless plug of a side project of myself: [http://www.screenscott.com](http://www.screenscott.com)

c) When the app is live, make sure it gets downloaded and reviewed. Tip: Ask friends / family to download the app and give you feedback. If you get criticism -> Great, you'll know what to do next. If you get positive feedback -> Great, they've already written the review! Now you just need to ask them to post it in the App Store :-)

</comment><comment><USER3> It's amazing how much non-programming work is required to get an application release-ready. Add to that list domain acquisition, email configuration, staging environments, legal documentation, status pages, error tracking, user and subscription management and feedback mechanisms.

Our startup is tackling this domain, and we'd love to hear more of these "petty issues" web and mobile apps need to resolve before shipping - we've found that, while seemingly minor, they present a huge hindrance to the launch of developer side projects.

<comment><USER4> The mastermind group I'm has collectively learned that "shipping is a skill", just like programming or UI design. As you've discovered, there's an awful lot of steps between building some software and actually getting it into people's hands.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Side projects for me are weekend projects. I toss them onto my personal site and watch it for a few months to see if it gets used and if I get any feedback. If it does, I'll polish it some more and try to do something with it.

But I'm not going to go make up branding, set up a new domain, and build a bunch of marketing when I don't even know if the project works for people or not.

So in my mind, Part 1 of releasing a side project is: Have a personal site with enough traffic to act as a testing ground for your ideas.

<comment><USER6> If your side project lingers on your personal site where nobody sees it, how would you ever know if people need what you're making? This is the typical "if I build it they'll come" pitfall.

You're basically talking about validating your idea before you spend any more time on it but if you truly care about validation, it's actually the opposite: you'll need to spend _more_ time to validate your idea.

<comment><USER5> Your assumptions about my motivation are incorrect -- I need what I am making. That is why I make things. If other people also like it, then I turn it into something more. Sometimes.

It has built up into a little site with a few thousands users each month. Which I know is small potatoes to a lot of people, and doesn't hold a candle to my actual job. But it is plenty for me.</comment></comment></comment>


Moby: An open-source project to advance containerization - <AUTHOR> https://blog.docker.com/2017/04/introducing-the-moby-project/ <comment><USER2> I have a real issue with Docker Marketing Speak bullshit. "Democratizing containers"? When were they not democratic? What were they before? Tyrannical? or - _gasp_ \- communist? And now they are going to _ADVANCE THE SOFTWARE CONTAINERIZATION MOVEMENT_ what does that even mean. Hacker News commenters tend to be pretty smart, and at the time I am posting this, most comments are along the lines of "eh? say what now?" When their core consumers don't understand the message, you can bet your hat that they are not the real target of the message. Or the people at Docker are not good at marketing, which I find harder to believe.

<comment><USER3> You're right: as an individual user of Docker, you're not the customer. You're the product being sold to the customer, which is enterprises that see adoption by users as a proof point Docker (the company) boasts about.

<comment><USER4> Red Hat, Google, Amazon and Microsoft will probably make more money from Docker than Docker.

Disclosure: I work on Cloud Foundry on behalf of Pivotal.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> A marketing-speak filtered out version of this announcement: You will be able to assemble your own docker engine by stripping out components you don't need (that have until now been shipped in a single docker binary) and keeping the ones you do. This is like assembling PCs, for docker.

I think this was mainly intended as an answer to the criticism docker has been receiving (by kubernetes maintainers and others) ever since they decided to ship swarm with docker. I think this move is great as it goes a step further and allows you to swap out build systems, volume mgmnt too. Even though I did not mind docker shipping with swarm, others in the community were, and this shows docker listened, which is great.

EDIT: grammar fix

<comment><USER6> Aren't they doing it kinda backwards? Shouldn't you start with the pieces and then let people assemble them how they want?

It's fine to offer off-the-shelf supported configurations but why start with everything and the kitchen sink and then try to backtrack?

<comment><USER7> Because nobody would use docker if installing it required a custom complex build process. This way docker can keep docker CE for its standard use case but also satisfy power users with specific requirements by allowing customization.

<comment><USER8> I use docker because I can go from

"Hey cool project, I want to try it!"

To already setup in under a minute depending if I'm at home or not.

Also the VMs start really fast, so it's good for getting exotic compiler toolchains on Windows running quickly. Everything has a dockerfile.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> This is a transcript of a keynote I just gave at Dockercon. But the keynote had in-depth demos and the blog post doesn't. It will make more sense with the demos.

I will try to summarize: when we build Docker for Mac, Docker for Windows, Docker for AWS etc, we assemble a lot of individual components into a complete platform. Then we pack that platform into a bootable artifact for the target environment. That's a lot of work, and it gets harder as the number of targets multiply. We developed a framework to make this more efficient. That framework has become the de-facto upstream of the Docker platform - it sits between the individual upstream projects and the finished product. So we're open-sourcing it as Moby, moving all of our open-source process under it, and inviting the community to come play. Think of it as the "Fedora of Docker".

Here's more technical details from the readme: [https://github.com/moby/moby/blob/moby/README.md](https://github.com/moby/moby/blob/moby/README.md)

TLDR: \- If you're a Docker user, nothing changes: Docker remains the same \- If you're a Docker open-source contributor, you're now a Moby contributor. Everything is basically the same, except more modular and more open, and you are less tied to Docker. \- If you're building non-Docker container platforms, it's easier to share components and ideas with the Docker community, without being forced into anything you don't like.

The Moby tooling itself is pretty neat: you define all the components in your system (including the OS and hypervisor, if required), then pack them into the artifact of your choice. For example you can assemble LinuxKit+ContainerD+Redis into a tiny "RedisOS", and then boot it straight from bare metal; or virtualize it with HyperKit and run it on a Mac; or virtualize it with HyperV and run it on Windows. Moby does all of this for you automatically (this is one of the keynote demos).

We also showed a "Kubernetes in a box" assembly, to show that you don't have to stick to Docker-built components.

<comment><USER10> Here's a different reason (jbergstroem also alludes to [1]) why Docker (the company) would rename Docker (the open source project) to a name that cannot be confused with Docker (the product): Trademark (Enforcement).

How do you (a for profit company built on open source) enable your community, to build and sell (their own) products, as well as enforce your trademark? If anyone (everyone?) can build and distribute and call their build `docker`, it becomes really hard to protect your investment (as a company and their fiduciary responsibility to their stock holders) from dilution of TheBrand(tm).

This is not cynicism and I don't fault Docker (the company) at all, it's just the reality of doing business. It's why Canonical requires a contractual relationship for infrastructure clouds to distribute Ubuntu images, it's why you have things like Firefox and IceWeasel, so on and so forth.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14140543](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14140543)

<comment><USER11> It's also an easy way to acquire more paying users. "Docker" has the name recognition now, if someone wants to adopt it after hearing about it they're likely to choose the paid product.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I too am confuzzled by this. I'm at a Docker shop where we currently run on DC/OS and Marathon. I think the most confusing thing about Docker right now are all the different scheduling and networking frameworks (DC/OS which adds a web ui to mesos and marathon, Kubernetes, Nomad, CoreOS/Fleet, etc).

None of these systems scale up from a single 1 node system to a full distributed cluster. Here was my attempt of trying to get DC/OS to run in a minimal cluster on Digital Ocean:

[http://penguindreams.org/blog/installing-mesosphere-dcos- on-...](http://penguindreams.org/blog/installing-mesosphere-dcos-on-small- digital-ocean-droplets/)

We use DC/OS at work and the web UI frequently transfers over 1MB of json a second and the failed containers tab can max out CPU at 100% O_o

Marathon, Kubernetes, Nomad and Swarm all have their own orchestration json files in totally different formats. It gets more confusing with you take about pluggable network layers (WeaveNet, Flannel).

I'd _like_ to think Docker is trying to bring some standardisation to clusters, networking and scheduling ... but I'm not sure if that's the case.

<comment><USER13> Took me some time to figure it out, but Kubernetes actually does, with kubeadm.

If you're on a Debian/Ubuntu-based OS, you basically `apt-get install kubeadm kubelet kubectl`, then `kubeadm init` (and you have 1-node cluster)

Then you `kubeadm join --token $token $master_node_ip` and you have the second node. Repeat as necessary, throw in some proper automation when you have enough (3+) nodes.

There is a disclaimer that it's beta, though.

Still, Docker feels much simpler, and I really believe "simpler" means "better". Maybe that's just my prejudice, but Kubernetes has awfully enterprisey aftertaste and feels to be full of magic. If Docker or Swarm goes haywire - and every software has bugs - I can check almost every component, piece by piece, down to what kernel is told to do - thankfully, they're still not too far from the actual OS primitives. If affected node number is tolerably small, I can even "downgrade" to Compose and manual scheduling and networking kludges, with relative ease. I'm unsure what I would do if some day Kubernetes would insists on malfunctioning.

<comment><USER12> I've played with Kubernetes and I wish I had finished my post on it. I got frustrated when looking at logs from a node wasn't supported by nodes joined with kubeadm (that was a few months back .. I really hope they fixed that by now).

I agree with you, Kubernetes seems insanely complicated. I haven't used it in production though. I'm in a Marathon shop, and it is really slick once you have a working DC/OS cluster .. but setting up that cluster requires a full time team. It's not trivial and far from simple.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> If I understand this right it sounds like Moby will be a grab bag of components you can use to create your own container platform. This means the Docker that we know of before today is an implementation of Moby plus some other things (GUIs, SDKs, etc) that they hope to strip out.

Like others, I found the press release incomprehensible so the pull request linked to in the docker/docker README is where I'm drawing this understanding from: [https://github.com/moby/moby/pull/32691](https://github.com/moby/moby/pull/32691)

As far as why I think Docker might be doing this:

It seems like a continuation of a similar strategy that they did with containers in the first place back when they were known as dotCloud. Rather than continue to compete with Heroku as a PaaS they found it better to open source their container technology and start a container movement (for lack of a better word).

Now that the container movement has happened there are a lot of competing tools at the container runtime (Docker, rkt, systemd-nspawn, lxc, etc.) and management (Swarm, Kubernetes, Mesos, Nomad, various ones that delegate to AWS ECS, etc.) levels. Rather than compete with all of those they are pushing themselves up a layer of abstraction to make it easy for companies to create their own container management tools specific to their needs.

</comment><comment><USER15> As I understand it (though I could be wrong) - this repository (in relation to the old one) is intended to be a parent.

Rather than having just the Docker engine, it will coordinate docker, swarmkit, infrakit, linuxkit in a single project.

These will be swappable, so for example you could a) swap swarmkit for Kubernetes, b) swap linuxkit for Debian, c) swap infrakit with Terraform.

Like "Docker for Mac/Windows/AWS/Azure/GCE", etc. already exist - Moby will likely house all these variations and allow the creation of custom "Docker/Other for X/Y/Z".

</comment><comment><USER7> wtf? So the docker project is now "moby"? And I have no idea what the major changes are? How is this going to affect my usage of docker? The readme is incredibly confusing and lists no concrete features, especially none that justify reorganizing the entire docker project so drastically. It took me 5 minutes just to realize that github.com/docker/docker now redirects to github.com/moby/moby.

Is this really necessary? Seems like it's just going to create tons of confusion.

<comment><USER16> It might be temporary as they split the UI (the cli tool docker) and the new moby library.

Seems like a move made in a rush. It would have been better to spin out the dependencies of docker into moby instead of moving the project back and forth.

Agreed that it is very confusing at this stage.

<comment><USER17> > Seems like a move made in a rush.

You've just summarized everything Docker Inc. does.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Thinking marketing split? Docker is the product you pay for and Moby is "may break, use at own risk".

<comment><USER19> Except for this blurb from Audience section on the Moby Project site:

      Moby is NOT recommended for:

      Application developers looking for an easy way to run their applications in containers. We recommend Docker CE instead.

      Enterprise IT and development teams looking for a ready-to-use, commercially supported container platform. We recommend Docker EE instead.

      Anyone curious about containers and looking for an easy way to learn. We recommend the docker.com website instead.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Can someone do a eli5 ? I don't understand what the product is.

<comment><USER21> This is github.com/docker/docker with a note added on top of the README.

For now you have to watch the DockerCon keynote to understand; it's intended as a "common assembly line for container systems".

<comment><USER15> The new README[0] is in a pull request[1].

[0]: [https://github.com/moby/moby/blob/moby/README.md](https://github.com/moby/moby/blob/moby/README.md)

[1]: [https://github.com/moby/moby/pull/32691](https://github.com/moby/moby/pull/32691)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> I cannot help but think that Docker the company is in deep trouble reading such product announcements. It's incomprehensible.

That said, what do I know. The folks at docker are brilliant marketers (with a great product). The marketing is the main reason docker is so wildly popular.

</comment><comment><USER23> So, their breaking up the monolith? Hold on to your hat!

</comment><comment><USER24> I was pretty sure something was broken when I was browsing Docker docs and suddenly I ended up in a moby/moby repo.

</comment><comment><USER25> I don't really understand this, but I think the special feature from Dockercon will help explain.

</comment><comment><USER26> Didn't Docker already have a project called Moby? Is this the same thing?

<comment><USER15> It seems so - the `docker/moby` repository[0] now redirects to `linuxkit/linuxkit`, but the `moby` cli from `linuxkit/linuxkit`[1] is being moved to the `moby/moby` repository[2].

[0]: [https://github.com/docker/moby](https://github.com/docker/moby)

[1]: [https://github.com/linuxkit/linuxkit/tree/master/src/cmd/mob...](https://github.com/linuxkit/linuxkit/tree/master/src/cmd/moby)

[2]: [https://github.com/moby/moby/pull/32693](https://github.com/moby/moby/pull/32693)

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I can't stop reading this as Mooby -- the golden calf. [http://kevin- smith.wikia.com/wiki/Mooby_the_Golden_Calf](http://kevin- smith.wikia.com/wiki/Mooby_the_Golden_Calf)</comment>