Skipping breakfast might help you lose weight - <AUTHOR> http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonkblog/wp/2015/08/10/the-science-of-skipping-breakfast-how-government-nutritionists-may-have-gotten-it-wrong/ <comment><USER2> The more interesting question I think is not whether skipping breakfast might help lose weight, it is whether the weight loss is due to lower overall caloric intake, the timing of digestion reducing bioavailability, the timing of when sugar became available to the body impacting targeted fat burn or somehow enhancing the body's ability to burn fat cells, or maybe the types of "breakfast" foods skipped, or just general impact on dietary choices,... or maybe it was...

Obviously I think the study is asking too high-level a question, and barely skimming the surface of how things work. Feels like the same sort of thinking that produced the alternative finding.

<comment><USER3> Honestly, I think it is a mix of glycemic index being affected by the longer fast and eating less. As I stated in my response below, my experience has been that the fewer meals I eat, the less I overeat.

I know that last statement isn't anything groundbreaking, but if you can get through the initial hunger created by changing your eating schedule, it can be hugely beneficial to limiting your caloric intake.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> At the end of the day it will always be calories in vs. calories out.

My personal experience is that I try to only eat 1 meal per day. Intermittent fasting is nothing new, and when I combine it with a low carb diet, it is extremely effective for me. I went from ~300 down to 225 in a matter of 4-5 months.

As long as I am busy, I hardly notice any hunger during the day now that I am used to the schedule and the 1 meal makes it much harder to over eat. 2000 calories is extremely hard to take in all at once, so it basically puts you at quite a deficit just due to the logistics of eating that quantity of food in a small window of time.

<comment><USER4> What do you eat and when do you eat it?

<comment><USER3> So most of my meals are very bachelor-like. Cook some sort of protein(chicken/steak/fish) or eggs/meat/cheese in a pan on the stove and then an entire steamable bag of frozen veggies of some sort. If I want to get really fancy I will do either a stir fry or beef/turkey chili with some veggies/beans mixed in. Depending on how busy I am during the day this can be anywhere from 4-8 pm.

If I have hunger issues later on I will drink cold water or unsweetened vanilla almond milk (It's crazy, IIRC, an entire half gallon is only 200 calories).

<comment><USER5> Cashew milk is similarly low-calorie.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> A couple of thoughts:

It's worth noting that both of the breakfasts in the study were high in high- glycemic carbohydrates. It would be interesting to see if the result holds when eating something like eggs and bacon for breakfast.

Second, since most people fast overnight, you get the double whammy of low insulin (making fat cells more willing to give up stored energy) and a caloric deficit in the morning. It seems plausible that extending the period of time when that is the case would result in fat loss.

I've personally had pretty good luck (~34.5" to ~32.5" waist measurement over a couple of weeks) with eliminating most carbohydrates between about 5PM and 10AM.

</comment><comment><USER7> This is why it's hard to take the field of nutrition seriously.

"New study finds peach fuzz makes you lose weight"

5 years later

"New study finds peach fuzz makes you gain weight"

<comment><USER8> Did you read the study? Or did you just read the report about the study?

<comment><USER7> I'm not criticizing the study, but rather lamenting the constantly-shifting landscape that is the field of nutrition. Every few weeks or months, a new study comes out claiming that everything we knew about nutrition before was wrong.

It is profoundly discouraging for a lot of people.

<comment><USER9> This usually has little to do with the field of nutrition or the studies themselves. It has to do with how the media reports the findings of the studies, usually without properly understanding them and without putting them into context. Everything has to be revolutionary, has to prove everything else wrong, even though it's extremely difficult to perform a valid scientific study that proves anything wrong.

My wife has a long-time friend who became a nutritionist, and she'll tell anyone that will listen that most people have a pretty good idea of how to eat right if they don't over-think it, but it becomes very difficult to put it into practice, because everything we do to make food convenient tends to also make it bad for us. Another issue is that medical doctors don't take nutritionists seriously (despite medicine also being a constantly-shifting landscape), and rarely pay attention to diet for anything other than controlling your weight, blood sugar, and cholesterol. This is why we end up with things like "Irritable Bowel Syndrome", which, for most people is likely an undiagnosed food intolerance (and given the most common ingredients in processed foods, it's probably soy or lactose).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Studies have shown that overweight people don't necessarily eat more calories or have less active lifestyles than their normal weight peers [1][2][3][4].

A major factor that contributes to excess weight is the absorption rate of dietary lipids in the gut, which can be influenced by anatomy, gut microbiota, genetics, and other characteristics [5][6][7][8][9]. The rate at which the body absorbs fat from food during digestion plays a key role.

[1] [http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/24527563](http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/24527563)

[2] [http://www.livescience.com/23057-overweight-teens-kids- calor...](http://www.livescience.com/23057-overweight-teens-kids-calories- weight-loss.html)

[3] [http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22006481](http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22006481)

[4] [http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23320866](http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23320866)

[5] [http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3601187/](http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3601187/)

[6] [http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/brainwaves/the-food- figh...](http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/brainwaves/the-food-fight-in- your-guts-why-bacteria-will-change-the-way-you-think-about-calories/)

[7] [http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-gut- bacteria-h...](http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-gut-bacteria- help-make-us-fat-and-thin/)

[8] [http://ajpendo.physiology.org/content/296/6/E1183.short](http://ajpendo.physiology.org/content/296/6/E1183.short)

[9] [http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3213306/](http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3213306/)

<comment><USER11> _Studies have shown that overweight people don 't necessarily eat more calories or have less active lifestyles than their normal weight peers [1][2][3][4]._

These appear to be observational studies based on self reporting. There are multiple studies that showed overweight people underreporting their caloric intake by up to 50%. Interestingly, people with normal and less than normal weight ofter overestimate their caloric intake, such as [1].

There are enough clinically controlled studies done that prove that caloric intake is the primary determinant of weight.

[1] [http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/1454084](http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/1454084)

<comment><USER10> The accuracy of self-reported energy intake using the 24-hour daily recall method has been shown to be consistent across BMI levels:

"Accuracy of recall was not related to body mass index in that the obese men recalled food intake as accurately as the nonobese men." [1]

Accelerometers were used in the Chinese study to measure physical activity:

"No differences in PA [physical activity] and SB [sedentary behavior] were found across different BMI categories." [2]

A European study where the childrens' parents were doing the reporting rather than the subjects themselves concluded:

"The data suggest the belief that overweight children eat more than non- overweight children is not correct." [3]

Studies on identical twins showed that caloric intake didn't account for differences in weight between twins. Specific types of gut bacteria present in low-weight individuals were found to have a protective effect against obesity however. [4][5]

There is little difference between the energy intake of most overweight people and their normal weight counterparts. Factors like gut biology and intestinal absorption play a much more important role.

The Nutrition Science Initiative was developed to address the need for more clinical research in this area. [6]

[1] [http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15054345](http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15054345)

[2] [http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/11753586](http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/11753586)

[3] [http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/24527563](http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/24527563)

[4] [http://www.amazon.com/The-Diet-Myth-Science- Behind/dp/029760...](http://www.amazon.com/The-Diet-Myth-Science- Behind/dp/029760919X)

[5] [http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2014/11/141106132204.ht...](http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2014/11/141106132204.htm)

[6] [http://www.wired.com/2014/08/what-makes-us- fat/](http://www.wired.com/2014/08/what-makes-us-fat/)

<comment><USER11> _The accuracy of self-reported energy intake using the 24-hour daily recall method has been shown to be consistent across BMI levels:_

 _CONCLUSIONS: Under controlled conditions, the USDA five-step multiple-pass method can_

Yes. We need controlled conditions.

 _" No differences in PA [physical activity] and SB [sedentary behavior] were found across different BMI categories." [2]_

 _The parents of children recorded dietary intake for a week using the food weighing method._

No. Please let the scientists weigh the food under controlled conditions.

 _A European study where the childrens ' parents were doing the reporting rather than the subjects themselves concluded:_

No. Please let the scientists weigh the food under controlled conditions.

 _Studies on identical twins showed that caloric intake didn 't account for differences in weight between twins._

The ScienceDaily link does not give much relevant information. So they found sets of twins whose weight differs, and the gut bacteria composition differs. Interesting. What did they do next to disprove that caloric input determines body weight? Did they assign twins to certain diets to see how body weight changes? No, and the word "calorie" is not even mentioned at all.

In fact, all I get from the article is correlation - lack or presence of certain types of bacteria is correlated with body weight. Here's an easy possible confounder: what if lack or presence of bacteria increases or lowers the appetite, causing caloric intake to change and thus leading to weight gain or loss?

 _The Nutrition Science Initiative was developed to address the need for more clinical research in this area. [6]_

Yes. As long as all food is measured by the scientists and there is no possibility the participants are getting extra food elswere, or not eating what they are supposed to eat, I'm very eager to see the results.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Losing weight comes down to a pyramid. The bottom of the pyramid is a calorie deficit. It's simple science and fact that eating less calories than your maintenance calories (basal metabolic rate) will cause you to lose weight. Once you tackle that, you can move up the pyramid and fine tune to maximize the weight loss by incorporating tactics such as meal timing, quality of ingredients, types of food eaten, or different macronutrient percentages. But without the bottom of the pyramid, there can't be anything on top.

<comment><USER13> I guess it's trivial what you say about calorie deficit but the trick is how to not devour that tasty something that you know is there in your fridge when your plan to eat less for a few seconds is only your second priority.

Humans get hungry after 4h of not eating with exception of when we sleep. So less sleep results in more craving for food but eating a ton, minutes after waking up results in hunger 4h later.

I wake up … with an appetite but usually don't crave for food for some hours, so that's a good chance to if not skip then at least delay a meal, so hopefully that day you go to bed with just two meals.

The opposite worst thing you can do is to stay up just a little longer to eat on your way to bed.

<comment><USER9> The first trick is to not have that thing in your fridge, and I know as much as anyone how hard that trick can be to pull off (one helpful part is to go to the store after you eat). In fact, the only quick meal/snack I tend to have on hand is oatmeal (or occasionally yogurt).

I regularly eat 10-12 hours after I wake up, and rarely feel hungry before I hit the 10 hour mark, unless I make a habit of eating during that time period. If I decide to follow a whim to eat breakfast on two or three consecutive weekdays, I will be hungry at breakfast time on the following day, regardless of what I ate the day before, or when I last ate. The worst part, though, is that it sometimes takes longer for that hunger to stop coming at breakfast time every day than it does to get it to start coming in the first place.

Something else that helps, for me, is to get at least some amount of exercise first thing in the morning. I take a short (~1.5 mile) bike ride over a fairly mild route (mostly flat or downhill) on most mornings (when it's not raining). In my unscientific observation, it kick-starts my metabolism, which it needs, since I'm definitely not getting exercise at work. After that, I primarily have to keep my mind busy, as boredom typically leads to eating just to do something.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> There's a 'natural/evolutionary' argument to be made in favor of skipping breakfast too: most animals do not store food and need to hunt or forage as and when hunger arises. This requires a certain amount of time and activity. So it's unlikely that animals have evolved a need to eat first thing in the morning.

<comment><USER15> Are you aware how broad a term "animals" is? The term includes hawks, ants, turtles, snakes, trout, leeches, sharks, jellyfish, lions, coral, alligators and many more. It includes all vertebrates, but it is not limited to vertebrates. The diversity of eating habits in animals defies easy generalizations. Maybe jellyfish do skip breakfast, but that does not tell you whether humans should skip breakfast.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> But no-one _really_ cares about weight - they care about body composition. That is key to understanding all of this, and it's missing from these results. Who cares if you lose weight if it's muscle wasting away? Who cares if your weight stays the same but you're losing fat and gaining heavier muscle?

<comment><USER2> But certainly they collected body composition data in the course of the study, it just doesn't make the headlines?

<comment><USER17> Yes, but I think it points out the major problem with health articles in general is that culturally many people have reduced improved health in the general sense to the mantra of "losing weight". Pretty soon people have internalized it, and reading a sensational attempt at summarizing legitimate scientific studies becomes just a token discarded atop of a huge pile of ideas that people used to temporary assuage the regret of being a slave to the hedonistic garden of delights manufactured for them by the food and entertainment industries.

Okay, maybe I'm laying it on a bit thick, but seriously I think every single person in America can come up with 5 no-brainer ways to improve their health that would move the needle more than trying to eke out some mass effect of eating breakfast or not, it's just that people want the easy fix, and frankly there really is none. We just don't have the genetics or the instincts to cope with the sedentary lifestyles we've created for ourselves, and the only way out of it is get serious and develop healthy habits one bit at a time.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I researched Yokozunas and here's my findings.

They skip breakfast every single day and exercise for at least 5 hours before breakfast.

After lunch, they sleep. With plenty food and no physical activity, the body converts the food to fat. Same thing happens after dinner - sleep.

Before electricity, people ate dinner before sun down. This left enough time for some digestion and burning of excess energy.

My conclusion:

Skipping a meal is a great idea. The question is when. I've decided that the best time to skip a meal is dinner - not breakfast. Or as I tell my friends, Sleep Hungry.

Edit:

Yokozunas in Japan have perfected the art of inputting normal sized people and outputting obese people. I figured doing the exact opposite is the key to weight loss.

<comment><USER19> Any success?

<comment><USER18> I'm not over weight. Just a beer belly I grew from college. It's reduced a lot. The only exercises I do are 5 measely sit ups in the morning and cycling at night (if I eat late to burn up the meal before sleep.)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> The advice that "breakfast is the most important meal of the day" is, as I recall, based on similar junk science. They looked at lots of kids, recorded how often they ate breakfast, then looked at how well they did in school.

The kids who ate breakfast did better in school. Yay, breakfast is good for you.

Or, possibly, the correlation between eating breakfast and doing well in school has another explanation. One possible explanation of the correlation is that kids who don't eat breakfast are poor, and the poor statistically dont do as well in school due to other factors.

<comment><USER21> Can you find this study? Many studies are dodgy, but I am incredulous the study was this much dodgy. How can the study observing grade not controlling for socioeconomic status ever pass the review?

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Not eating makes you lose weight. Doesn't matter when you eat, eating less, and eating better food (fresh, non-processed. If it doesn't run, grow on a tree/plant, or swim, don't eat it) will make you lose weight.

<comment><USER23> > Not eating makes you lose weight.

Exception being the cases when it doesn't [http://bradpilon.com/weight- loss/fasting-for-weight-loss/can...](http://bradpilon.com/weight-loss/fasting- for-weight-loss/can-you-gain-weight-by-fasting/)

<comment><USER11> What he described in this article was not just fasting, but a sequence of fasting and non-fasting days. Of course, if you fast for a day, and the next day eat all the calories back and more, you will gain.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Instead of skipping the breakfast, try not to eat after sun-set. Trust me, you'll love the difference you'll see after a few months.

Disclaimer: I'm following this principle every single day from past 2 years.

</comment><comment><USER25> Skipping breakfast is part of the "carb backloading" diet. Seems to work well.

<comment><USER26> You also have to lift weights of at least 70% of your max on a regular basis. It also has a single specific limit on carb intake for every body type.

Sleep is probably the best diet in existence.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> I think it is more of a drink coffee lose weight argument.

</comment><comment><USER28> Yes, not eating helps you lose weight.

</comment><comment><USER29> I _never_ eat breakfast and I'm fat.

<comment><USER13> Interesting. How long between last and first meal?

(Apart from the individual case not being representative.)

<comment><USER29> usually eat at noon or after, then dinner. I don't snack, never eat sugar. I think it's because of the portions I eat :| alcohol might be for something as well.

<comment><USER30> 1 bottle of beer is usually between 100 and 300 carrots, depending on what type of beer and how much alcohol is in it. Alcohol is a significant source of calories.

Have you tried not drinking for a few months?

The rule of thumb I've heard is that 1 pound of weight can be lost with a 3500 calorie deficit. If you drink between 10 and 30 beets a week, cutting beer could cause you to start losing weight.

<comment><USER31> carrots? beets? Thanks for the laughs, autocorrect.

<comment><USER30> I'm not going to touch the parent in case anyone else needs a laugh.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> Eating less helps you lose weight. News at eleven. Seriously, how difficult is it to understand that? Once when I was in the US I had some pancakes for breakfast and on the side was a huge chunk of white mass that looked like a scoop of vanilla ice cream. I took a large bite and oh boy.. it was butter. Plain butter. That chunk alone was about half of the calorie need of an average young person. Oh, and then there was the maple sirup, chocolate, and artificially sweetened orange juice. No wonder the US is so obese.</comment>


Firefox alpha beats Chrome on its own V8 Benchmark Suite - <AUTHOR> http://v8.googlecode.com/svn/data/benchmarks/v6/run.html <comment><AUTHOR> I just got the following scores FF9a2 4900 against Chrome dev 3400.

Seems like Chrome can no longer claim to be the fastest browser with the fastest JavaScript implementation.</comment>


Fun with the halting problem - <AUTHOR> http://foldr.me/fun-with-the-halting-problem/

<comment><USER2> Toying with the halting problem is fun, but all it really shows here is that you can't infallibly figure out if code is dead, because that means solving the halting problem. Of course, there are tons of ways you _can_ figure out dead code: both statically (say, code after some code that you can prove unconditionally returns or raises) and dynamically (if during six months of operation no-one has called a piece of code, it probably might as well be gone).</comment>


Ask HN: Is it possible to overwhelm a web-crawler with infinite links? - <AUTHOR>

mysite.com/:id
shows some text, links to
mysite.com/:id+1
Would a crawler keep hitting these infinity of pages? What scale would it take to bring down a crawler? <comment><USER2> Consider that every page that the crawler must download is a page's worth of bandwidth your server must deliver. If these pages are generated, your server need to spend the computation to generate that too.

Add to this the fact that a crawler is able to stop and back off if its resource constraints are being overwhelmed, but as a webserver that may be serving content that is "mission-critical", for lack of a better phrase, your server probably needs to maintain a low latency. In addition, there are multiple web crawlers out there, that could hit your server at the same time.

Given that, I think the scheme you've described is a mug's game, where for every dollar's worth of damage you do to a crawler, you're doing more than a dollar of damage to yourself.

</comment><comment><USER3> It might be possible to kill a naive crawler with some infinitely-spiralling link web. However, most modern crawlers are built with this in mind and will stop after a certain recursive level is met.</comment>


Mozilla Lays Off 250 - <AUTHOR> https://techcrunch.com/2020/08/11/mozilla-lays-off-250/ <comment><USER2> Big discussion of original source, currently on the front page: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24120336](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24120336)</comment>


Ask HN: Review my new Web app - Weekis - <AUTHOR>

Please share your feedback on this side-project I've been working on lately.
Weekis is a minimal, unobtrusive and focused week planning tool - http://weekis.com
There are thousands of to-do lists, week organizers, productivity apps, time and task managers out there. Most such apps are overwhelming, bloated or obtrusive. Weekis is different in that it is minimal and unobtrusive.
I developed Weekis out of my own need to manage my weekly tasks better. While it requires discipline to manage time, I think that the discipline must come from within, rather than enforced limitations, nagging or nudging.
I've been using Weekis for the past few months and I've felt a clear improvement in my task management. I no longer procrastinate (as much).
Weekis requires no obligation. It doesn't throw constant attention-seeking, concentration-breaking alerts or reminders, yet it will make it easy for you to recall your weekly tasks and focus on what's important. Weekis provides a clear week view, without the clutter of dates or time slots.
You can create as many tasks as you want, but you may find that Weekis intuitively promotes the "do less" principle, by encouraging you to only have a few, more important, tasks each day.
I'll appreciate your suggestions. <comment><USER2> I like it!

I developed a weekly planner myself (<http://weekplan.net>) and I like the layout you have.

A killer feature for me would be to be able to have sub tasks. (It would allow me to group my tasks by projects for example)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for your suggestion. Your app looks nice too.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Nice little app. I've been thinking about something similar for a while but didn't have the time. I'll give it a try over the next few days and see how it goes.

</comment><comment><USER4> The navigate away warning on the main/demo page (without being signed in) is unnecessary and reminiscent of early alert("Welcome to my site!"); messages.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for your suggestion. I've removed the warning message now.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> real simple. real useful. already started using it -- feel free to email me if looking for feedback in a few weeks

<comment><USER6> First thing I thought when I read this is, oh no, not another time- tracking/to-do list software. There are so many, even ones that make the same exact claims that you did about being overwhelming.

However - I like this. Anyways the UI was simple enough to get me to start filling it out. It will be something else to see if I keep using it or not.

Would also be open to feedback in a week or so.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Link: <http://weekis.com>

</comment><comment><USER7> It's completely broken when viewed in Flock :(</comment>


Ask HN: Open-source applications having Metadata-driven user interface - <AUTHOR> Are there any open source applications that follow Metadata-driven user interface? Any good reading resources will be helpful as well. <comment><USER2> Can you provide more details? What is a metadata driven UI?</comment>


Scrape UFC.com for ranking data and render in Material UI React app - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/chambaz/ufc-rankings <comment><USER2> Interesting but the UI could use a lot of work.</comment>


Playing B-Ball with Obama: 6 Steps to Crossing Anything Off Your Bucket List  - <AUTHOR> http://www.fourhourworkweek.com/blog/2012/04/04/playing-b-ball-with-obama-6-steps-to-crossing-anything-off-your-bucket-list/

<comment><AUTHOR> Very cool that these guys are from Canada and friends with someone I know. Reminds me of PGs ambitious startup ideas, the more ambitious and far fetched the less competition as people write off what is possible before they even begin.</comment>


You can now set your status on GitHub - <AUTHOR> https://blog.github.com/changelog/2019-01-09-set-your-status/ <comment><USER2> All sarcasm aside, this feature is absolutely the wrong direction. Github may have some things in common with social networks, but it operates on a longer- term scale. It's the difference between a book and a paragraph. People who care about this sort of daily minutia can find it plentifully on Twitter and Facebook. Github is great for finding out what people _have been up to_ , without caring about _what they 're doing this second_, and that's what was great about it.

<comment><USER3> My heart sank a little when I saw this appear on my profile last night. I don't understand which demographic this is meant to target or what the point of it is, I just can't think of a single reasonable use case for it.

<comment><USER4> > I just can't think of a single reasonable use case for it.

MS didn't acquire GitHub because they cared at all about the technology. It was the exact same strategy as LinkedIn. It's all about tracking us, the developer community, and keeping their finger on the pulse of where things are going. Generating more click event data to further profile your tastes for future commercial use by Microsoft. What other possible reason could there be?

<comment><USER5> MS cares about developer mindshare. Through GitHub they have access to the worlds largest software developer social network (well it's almost a social network). The large number of open source projects on the site provide a moat and a network effect.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Now I just need a Winamp plugin that changes my status to tell everyone what song I'm currently listening to, and I'll feel like I'm back in the 90s. :)

<comment><USER2> I hate to say it but I feel like the 90s was a better time all around for the casual computer user.

\- You had total customization over your computer, every app was skinnable including Windows or MacOS itself

\- Linux was in a great spot, finally becoming usable as a desktop OS with a ton of fun toys and UI/UX experiments that got a lot of us into Linux before we knew about CLIs

\- Products were sold per-unit instead of *aaS, so when you bought something, you knew you could use it as long as you needed to

\- Social networks didn't exist, so if you wanted to interact with people, you had to learn something - which is what made geocities and later MySpace fun, since people had to learn a little HTML in order to update their friends on their current status, and could use that new skill to decorate their "home" page

I miss the 90s. I want to bring that back. That's why I got my kids PICO-8, at least it's a little taste of the good old days!

<comment><USER7> Oh man, you and I remember 90's Linux very differently.

<comment><USER2> True, I may be thinking of 2000s Linux. Compiz and the wobbly windows examples were fresh in my mind from the other day's HN discussions.

<comment><USER8> Except those are rose tinted glasses youre wearing imo. Linux isnt worse today than it was in the days of yore, it just hasnt kept up as well in your mind. Computing as a whole has improved so much that linux couldnt keep up with your higher expectations.

<comment><USER2> Linux today isn't worse, but laptops are much more prevalent now, and they're harder to support drivers for than desktops. Especially Apple laptops which I've been using for a long time now, they're notorious for not being that easy to get Linux running smoothly on. Some people can manage it but more people have trouble. I've wasted dozens and dozens of hours trying to get Linux working smoothly on this thing and I just gave up a few years ago. But when desktops were king and the internet just started to become mainstream and everyone was flooding into that new space, it was a great time for desktop Linux.

<comment><USER9> Yep. I've been running dual boot OSX/mint for some time and god the hardware has never been happy about it. Especially with regard to the GPU and multi- monitor support but I suspect also with regard to battery usage and other power issues. It always ran just cool enough that I did not do anything about how hot it was. The display issues cropped up so that I could at least anticipate when it would occur and try to minimize that. GPU computing... well these old macbook pros with Nvidia chips were dogs anyway. Would a windows laptop fair any better with Linux? Honestly asking because I really want a solid Linux laptop for HPC/computational engineering development but not sure what to do.

<comment><USER10> I've never hand multi monitor problems with Linux. I'm running Mint on my MacBook.

The only thing that was difficult for me, was installing my webcam drivers.

<comment><USER9> Wow - that is interesting to hear. Let me toss in a caveat by saying that I had 2 different multi-monitor setups that I transferred between while running straight off the machine quite often as well. Typically problems would crop up after shifting to or from the non-mac monitor setup. Never tested the cam on the linux side.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I'm surprised everyone here missed the point by so much. This isn't a status update in the Facebook or Twitter sense. It's akin to the same feature that exists on Slack and GitLab already. It's useful to mark when you're on holiday or otherwise not working like usual, so teammates know what to expect from you.

<comment><USER12> Looking at my GitHub to find out if I am on holiday seems very strange.

It makes sense on Slack, an application for communicating with people.

<comment><USER13> Almost all of my open-source collaborations on Github have been so informal I wouldn't even tell anyone directly that I'm, say, away on vacation in the issues section, but I could see myself setting this status or appreciating that someone else set it.

Though I think HN is too old-hat to really understand how anyone could like these sorts of social features, and it's to their own detriment.

<comment><USER14> Seeing someone's status when you mention them, assign them a ticket, etc is a very welcome addition imo. The "taking time off my side projects" status example is amazingly spot-on as well.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Coming soon:

GitHub now reminds you what commits you made on this day last year.

<comment> basil-rash You're joking, but I'd actually find that kinda fun. Every day / every commit would be excessive, but maybe reminding you of large PRs/issues you closed this time last year?

<comment><USER16> I'd like that feature. There's no reason why GitHub can't have a little more pizzazz. A lot of us spend a great deal of time writing code, why not have some fun with it? As long as the core features remain intact and unencumbered with trivial things, I for one welcome the additions GitHub has been making and look forward to their continuing development.

<comment><USER15> Without getting into too deep a discussion of features, this development attitude of "implement everything, let them use what they want" is historically awful. The developers lose focus on what they are making, the users lose focus on what they are using. Eventually a platform that does a great job of any of the ten things that yours does poorly is a superior product and its creators are praised for shipping such a clean and minimal product.

<comment><USER16> It's a status update for your profile page, what's with the slippery slope arguments here? It's not like they implemented a social feed where you can post updates, making it more like a legitimate social network.

<comment><USER15> What? I was referring to the development philosophy that I saw reflected in the above comment. I even said that I was not referring to any specific features, including this one.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Can I not simply wire it up to all the other bloody stupid status displaying apps that pervade my life?

Set phone to DND. Set auto responder on email client(s). Set away status on various desktop apps. Set away on various web apps. Set away on work mobile (cell) apps. Go home.

Actually I don't bother with any of that. I don't answer the phone or any apps when I'm not "there" or can't be arsed or am busy. It's what people have done for millennia.

<comment><USER18> I guess we need SaaS: Status as a Service

<comment><USER19> Isn't that originally all twitter was? At least that's how I remember it being described when it first came out: "It's a service to store your AIM-style status messages"

<comment><USER20> 2019: "send Microsoft feedback on Twitter about their Github blog post".

So Twitter became a Swiss army knife.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I see a lot of skepticism in this thread. That was my _initial_ impression too, but I actually think this is a good feature now that I think about it.

As one example: it will be nice to know if a coworker is out of office or on extended PTO, like vacation. There are usually other "profiles" which display the same information in an organization, but this is a useful place for it too if you're about to e.g. tag someone in an Issue thread.

</comment><comment><USER22> Contrary to the opinions here, I find this to be a very useful feature for the same reason I like vacation auto-responders in email. No I couldn't care less if you're "feeling the groove" or some nonsense. But a friendly reminder to someone assigning me a review that I'm in vacation, or swamped in meetings all day would be very useful to me and my team.

<comment><USER23> Preach!

Also as irritating as vacation mail can be, at least now I know that you aren't talking to me because you aren't here, rather than you're just giving me the silent treatment because I made a disparaging comment about Tori Amos's latest album.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> It's pretty clear that public non-chronological, timelines, posts, profile pages, and messaging will follow, along with a mess of spammy recruiters. Then, leetcode style scoring so that employers who can't interview their way out of a paper bag know who to hire. Can't wait to see where else they'll stuff "sponsored content".

<comment><USER25> They had, and removed messaging already

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> Who exactly wanted this feature? Are they going to try monetizing Github with data mining? Mining commit history for personal metadata could be a (thoroughly despicable) gold mine.

</comment><comment><USER12> GitHub Stories! Share screenshots of your app or source code and they disappear after 24 hours.

<comment><USER27> I tried to reply to this with a single thumbs up emoji but HN wisely screened it out.

<comment><USER28> Wow. Just now I noticed that I've never seen emojis here. ¯\\_(ツ)_/¯

<comment><USER27> It would have been a funny response to a funny comment, but in the balance it's much better that they are all screened out.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Is this "feature" due to the new ownership? I really don't like the direction it's going.

Soon, we might not be able to make PRs without making our friends "help", and people will be making accounts for their cat.

When my (non-coding) teenage daughter signs up, I'm leaving!

</comment><comment><USER30> This is a good reminder that I don't use GitHub the way they expect me to. I don't use their notifications. I don't really ever look at my profile. Certainly not enough that I would go to it regularly to (even think to) update my "status".

I'm wary of "slippery slope" arguments but I do NOT want a(nother) social network in my life. It's hard to imagine how this doesn't evolve into GitHub Chat, etc, especially with GitLab buying Gitter, etc. No thank you. Thankfully there are ever increasing (and OSS) forge platforms, it seems.

It is a bit amusing, however, to imagine hypothetical horrible, naggy, even more self-promotional LinkedIn/GitHub integrations.

</comment><comment><USER31> The ONLY context in which this makes sense is allowing users to indicate whether they are looking for work or projects to contribute to. Let's hope all the excessive stuff (stories, timelines, etc) mentioned in these comments never come to fruition.

If you dislike this feature then you need to take ten seconds out of your time to submit feedback through 'set status' interface.

<comment><USER23> Also:

\- maintainers are all on holidays, that PR is not getting touched this week \- the person who accepted that issue has not been active for a week, perhaps I can pick it up \- the person who accepted that issue is active today, maybe there will be a PR to review later! Check with them to see howmit's going and maybe schedule some time tomorrow to review the PR

Heaps of use cases.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> Dear GutHub,

Please stop mucking about with pointless stuff like this and make your search functionality not totally suck.

Yours faithfully,

All devs everywhere.

</comment><comment><USER33> Another place where I would need to update my status before leaving for a holiday. Ergh..!

<comment><USER34> Maybe they can make a plug-in for Slack. That way when I update my Slack status it goes to GitHub as well. :/

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> Status: Migrating to another platform

This is a really useful feature for indicating that an account is vestigial despite occasional blips of activity. I hope they implement something similar with LinkedIn.

</comment><comment><USER36> While we're griping about GitHub changes, why did they change the reaction emoji style? They look flat and enervated where before they were vibrant and visually distinct.

</comment><comment><USER37> Is GitHub going to be Microsoft's way of getting their own social network? Seems better than Google's approach I guess

<comment><USER38> That's what LinkedIn is for.

<comment><USER29> They might merge the two...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> Is it just me or is this like really stupid?

</comment><comment><USER40> So, MS shipped their first feature in Github :-)

errrrr, actually - second (after unlimited private repos)

</comment><comment><USER41> This is reminiscent of the UNIX "finger" command usage from 30 years ago.

</comment><comment><USER42> ...why?

</comment><comment><USER5> Will they provide end to end encrypted chat next?

<comment><USER43> No, they weren't bought by Google

<comment><USER5> GitHub is a social network of sorts. There's definitely a network effect and a moat with the large open source projects on there.

It'll be interesting to see where Microsoft take this. GitHub is fundamentally a collaboration tool so chat would make sense.</comment></comment></comment>


The rise of Xavier Niel says a lot about French business  - <AUTHOR> http://www.economist.com/people/displaystory.cfm?story_id=14402214

<comment><USER2> There is a small mistake in the description of the Free subscription : the broadband is 20 Mbits per second, not 2.

Personal remark : this guy is freaking awesome, always seeking to disrupt markets to lower prices. The Free triple-play subscription (unlimited broadband, cable TV + free phone calls to most of the world) is so cheap it's a freaking no-brainer. Before, it used to be an exercise in comparison shopping : what operators are available in my area, are they good, what are the prices. Now, you just get Free and stop worrying. They have a bad reputation for customer service, because, just as Google, they like to automate everything (heard that their back-office is huuuuuge).

If he could get the license and disrupt the mobile telecom market, that would be great.

About the Freebox, the set-top box they provide to subscribers : as if everything they do is not hard enough, they designed custom hardware and software for their combined set-top box/cablemodem. Ok, the UI is not Apple level, but it provides lots of awesome stuff : a TiVo like DVR, video broadcasting, FTP and HTTP servers, a Wifi (802.11-N !) access point, a router and more.

<comment><USER3> So how does he manage to cut his prices so low? Does he use automation and other methods to improve efficiency?

<comment><USER2> They have an online self-care system - you use it to signal a problem and the system runs diags on the Freebox, phone line etc. Yup, completely automated.

Unfortunately, if your problem falls between the cracks (something new, that is not in their list of common troubles) then it can get tricky, and you need to replace the Freebox. They'll replace it for free, of course, but it's still a hassle make the demand, get the delivery (UPS usually), install the new Freebox, send the old one in. This is all completely automated again, and the Freebox warehouse is outsourced to a specialized company. Free only has engineers : hardware, software and (lots and lots of) telecom guys. BTW, one of their top VPs wore a teeshirt saying "Go away, or I will replace you with a small shell script". So yeah, these guys love automation, they are hardcore engineers, nerdy to the core.

Anecdote : some time ago they launched a new version of the Freebox. It was supposed to be for new subscribers and replacements. People (especially geeks, but mostly everybody) asked for replacements, because the new version had a bigger harddrive and some new features. Free had to replace many more Freeboxes that forecasted. So many of the consumer reports among the lines of "My Freebox broke so I had to have it replaced" should be more like "I invented a problem to get the free upgrade".

Furthermore, you can replace the HDD with a bigger one or connect an external HDD - that's how you recognize a geek in Paris - his ADSL modem is tuned.

<comment><USER3> Amazing. Thanks for the info. I think I love the company already. The t-shirt was funny. The free trademark is also clever. The freebox is also an interesting piece of equipment <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freebox>

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Coincidentally a similar thing is occurring at the moment in Canada.

[http://www.theglobeandmail.com/globe-investor/the-minnow- in-...](http://www.theglobeandmail.com/globe-investor/the-minnow-in-the-shark- tank/article1293594/) "Canada's telecom giants are fighting a pitched battle to keep Globalive out of the wireless pool. But CEO Anthony Lacavera and his Egyptian partner are determined to bring competition to the industry. Is this the beginning of the end for the cozy wireless establishment?"

Unsurprisingly the three existing companies are trying to lobby the government to keep this new entrant out.

<comment><USER5> Unfortunately the government when selling new spectrum also sold large amounts of it to the existing incumbents. The prices are so high here that the incumbents shouldn't have had a chance to bid. Canada is among the highest in mobile rates in the Western world. Here's hoping Globalive will shake things up.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I hope he succeeds because the prices for mobile service is atrocious compared to internet and landlines. I fail to see how the 3 operators are never brought up on charges of market collusion. But Sarkozy is best friends with two (Bouygues/Vivendi) and Orange/FT has it's unbreakable union. I can see why it's happening, but they just busted Apple/Orange exclusive contract, the same courts should be going after the big 3 operators.

The freebox is quite nice. I might have gone with them if the customer support wasn't so horrible. A friend dropped them for Wanadoo/Orange because they own the lines and are quicker on the support problems. But they do cost more. I ended up with Neuf, who was bought up by SFR. If they don't get their act together and put fibre in my building I will drop them for free. I just received a letter from free stating that fibre is now available in my neighborhood.

If their phones are as flexible as the freebox then this will be very interesting.

<comment><USER7> Hang in there - I'm working on the replacement for the neufbox right this minute, and it is a _very_ cool piece of kit.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> For 29,99€ you get:

28 mbit/s Free calling to 90 nations HDTV 100 channels and more pay channels Video on demand remote access to the video recorder Access to 3 million wifi spots in the country

</comment><comment><USER9> Come to Canada, starting in Quebec! It's even worse here.

</comment><comment><USER10> "If he succeeds in disrupting another business, the establishment may have to acknowledge him."

"He forced the incumbent cellular providers to innovate."

The article relies too heavily on tropes like these, IMHO.</comment>


Ask HN: Have you faced any racism in selection process of "ALLOW REMOTE"companies - <AUTHOR> I am an Indian and I consider my self a very competent programmer
1) having won lots of programming contests nationally and internationally
2) being from a good college in India where you need 99 percentile for entry ( trust me 99 percentile in India is a LOT , Over 2,000,000 students give exams every year )
3) been first hire of a startup and hired/managed team of over 40 and having actually delivered products in market with users .
Recently I started applying for some remote jobs and I think there are issues .
Being from India , there is a lot of "India" mentioned on my resume . I got 1 response from about 10 companies I applied and shortlisted once I started looking for a change . 1 Response !! .... I thought something is wrong ... I applied with near to same credentials , same projects I worked on ... just posing as a US citizen , I got fucking 100% response ??? Whats going on ? Why companies pose as a global and open companies when they are not ? <comment><USER2> "Remote" and "international" do not mean the same thing. Hiring someone to work out of an office in their home in the U.S. has entirely different tax and legal implications than hiring someone to work out of an office in their home in another country.

Repeat your experiment but say you're located in Canada.

<comment><USER3> It is as well quite a common requirement: "North America" \- "USA and Canada only".

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Did you accidentally mention that your HN username is _" racistcompanies"_?

</comment><comment><USER5> I wont say that its REMOTE specific ... It happens in general too ... I can say for Dubai , generally south Asians are paid way less than other europeans and western counterparts for same job , same expertise ! ..

</comment><comment><USER6> Long time lurker, created an account just for this. I have been trying to use wfh.io/blah blah to find remote positions but have never gotten a positive reply, it was mostly "oh went cant have someone in India" or "We were looking for someone in the EU timezone"

As another comment mentions, dubai is a good example, i got an offer negotiated the hell out of it, kept negotiating, i was told to my face ( over phone ) that "you are not from Europe, you fall under a different pay grade"

So yeah. IT DOES HAPPEN.</comment>


Conference call simulator - <AUTHOR> http://conferencecall.biz/ <comment><USER2> Oh, man. I wrote this thing with my buddy @weinventyou.

<comment><USER3> It's pretty funny considering I work on one of those meeting products. It's also an excellent reminder for me of all the UX pain points involved in distributed meetings. Tech can be great but if UI has any friction, the overall UX will suffer.

<comment><USER2> If it makes you feel better, I hate video conferences but will readily admit they've made my life easier!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I've seen this before and still can't figure out if it's an ad or a Godspeed You Black Emperor song.

<comment><USER5> Not enough guitars for Godspeed, I reckon, but it definitely deserves a place alongside "Telephone and Rubber Band" ([https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RWZ4pve5Mkc](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RWZ4pve5Mkc)) and "Opus Number 1" ([https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KqB8v14U_zs](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KqB8v14U_zs)). Any other good telephone related tracks?

<comment><USER6> Laurie Anderson - O Superman. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vkfpi2H8tOE](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vkfpi2H8tOE)

Plaid & Bob Jaroc - War Dialer: [https://youtu.be/sfLQ8EEoKeU?t=22s](https://youtu.be/sfLQ8EEoKeU?t=22s)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I was only able to get through about 30 seconds before cringing, but does it eventually include someone who spends 10 minutes eating an apple dipped in dorito chips?

It's always the person who has a $500 microphone set up too, so you get to not only hear them chew, but you can even hear the inner workings of their esophagus swallowing every bite.

<comment><USER8> > _does it eventually include someone who spends 10 minutes eating an apple > dipped in dorito chips?_

My favourite was a conference call on which, for ten minutes, we heard someone's three year olds puking, crying, screaming and crapping themselves while the mom tried to clean up with the mute button accidentally disengaged.

<comment><USER9> Why didn't someone say "Hey Helen, you know you're not on mute right?"

<comment><USER8> > _Why didn 't someone say "Hey Helen, you know you're not on mute right?"_

Helen was dealing with puking, crying, screaming and crapping themselves. We were taking too long planning a budget.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I feel like this would be good visual art display at the MoMA.. you know the videos that play endlessly in some dark room behind a black curtain...

<comment><USER11> Agreed. It's evocative, and _way_ better than the exhibit where the clown weeps at you continuously.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> I've been listening for about a half hour now. It feels like I joined a meeting and I'm completely ignoring it. It's so satisfying.

</comment><comment><USER13> This is, simultaneously:

* an all-too-realistic snapshot of corporate life

* a sobering commentary on the state of conference call norms and terribly interoperating related technologies

* if Bladerunner met Office Space

* a playbook on how to respond to various real-world conference call mishaps

* the funniest thing I've seen in some time

</comment><comment><USER14> Me: [finishes summarizing work items x,y,z]

PM: Ok, thanks, so could we just get an update on work items x,y,z

Me: ...

\---

I'm not mad. I'm just disappointed ... and mad. I assume he heard parts of what I was saying and it triggered some rudimentary pattern recognition in his brain stem that remembered he was interested in x, y, and z.

<comment><USER15> "Sorry, was I on mute?"

<comment><USER14> jachee? I guess we've lost jachee.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Almost real, it's just missing loud audio feedback loops.

<comment><USER17> Also no mystery heavy breather/loud typer.

<comment><USER15> Mine had a Loud Typer, and someone called on them to mute out. Just like IRL.

<comment><USER18> We have a guy with a mechanical keyboard on the team. After a while people just started muting him in Hangouts. It's not even the mechanical keyboard itself that's the problem, but the way it interacts with whatever noise- filtering algorithms Hangouts runs.

<comment><USER19> I love mechs. I hate that no business VoIP app has push-to-talk. I keep having to switch windows to unmute, talk, and mute myself.

<comment><USER20> > I love mechs.

Your office neighbors do not.

<comment><USER19> Nobody minds since we're in an open office anyway so everyone has to wear headphones to block all noise to get any serious work done.

Or, y'know, we work from home.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> From the same artist: [http://doonaldjtrump.com/](http://doonaldjtrump.com/)

</comment><comment><USER22> Reminds me of this one: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kNz82r5nyUw](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kNz82r5nyUw)

Makes me laugh every time.

<comment><USER23> That one is great. I totally lost it at the part with the dog. Scary and accurate.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> I could totally see this as a museum exhibit. Where I work, we regularly have people dial in from a downtown office and almost every call features sirens in the background. Needs more sirens.

</comment><comment><USER25> For some reason the desktop version has some background music (mobile does not it seems?) which makes it so much more relaxing.

<comment><USER26> The music is perfectly done, very understated and somewhere between soothing and menacing. I'm not even sure what to compare it to, some of the better produced podcasts maybe. Indirectly, Starship Titanic or Lot 2046 or something?

<comment> King-Aaron It reminded me of some of the 'hidden' tracks at the end of Tool albums.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> This is trauma inducing. Well done

</comment><comment><USER28> Dystopian and soul-crushing, just like the real thing.

The visuals remind me of Koyaanisqatsi - I'd love Philip Glass as a soundtrack.

</comment><comment><USER29> Listening to this at work is perfect, as all the noisy people who sit near me is bleeding through my headphones.

God, I hate open offices and conference calls/webinars.

edit: it's even better with multiple tabs open.

</comment><comment><USER30> This is a nice reality check for remote-work partisans.

Yeah, we have the technology, but in practice you get this...

<comment><USER31> Thats why async systems like issue trackers work well. Also has the benefit of having everything written down and searchable.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> Not enough "Hey, who just joined?"

</comment><comment><USER33> i only made it to like the 3rd audio sample and this is honestly and genuinely unbearable. great job capturing that feeling. good work.

</comment><comment><USER34> This is amazing. Belongs in a museum.

</comment><comment><USER35> this thing is great. don't have time to listen to it right now and see if it's changed at all, but when i listened to it last summer, i loved it. feels all too real.

i opened a radio show with 5 minutes of it once. then i sent it to some friends and half of them thought my email had been hacked and used to send out a phishing link (i felt bad after the fact for making it seem a little more ok to click on sketchy links).

</comment><comment><USER36> This is a little too real.

</comment><comment><USER37> This is oddly relaxing to listen to. It's as if it's the background noise for 90% of my day to day work.

</comment><comment> King-Aaron Wait, do you mean the _internet_ or the _internet_?

Ooh sorry, I mean the _interrrnet_ , not the _interrrrrnet_

</comment><comment><USER38> I find this to be genius / fun and scary - a perfect balance.

</comment><comment><USER39> Oh wow, when the dog started barking - amazing. This is dead on!

</comment><comment><USER40> Do I hear Kai Ryssdal?

<comment><USER40> This one?

[https://s3.amazonaws.com/conferencecall.biz/audio/78.mp3](https://s3.amazonaws.com/conferencecall.biz/audio/78.mp3)

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> Thanks, I hate it.

</comment><comment><USER32> Reminds me of the bank I used to write code for.

</comment><comment><USER42> I'm billing for this.

</comment><comment><USER43> Hit too close to home.

</comment><comment><USER44> This is so soothing that I fell asleep to it.

</comment><comment><USER45> I could watch this for hours.

</comment><comment><USER46> Sadly very accurate

</comment><comment><USER47> Hello... Hello...

</comment><comment><USER48> Do people still do conference calls nowadays?

Using Hangouts has kind of eliminated the conference call problem for me. Audio quality is great, you can see who is speaking or know who wants to speak if the mute icon disappears.

<comment><USER43> Even with Skype or hangout, someone at home always has a bandwidth issue so no-cam, also constant echo issues and typing sound almost triggers PTSD for me.

<comment><USER49> I've lost count how many meetings I been in where I completely lost what the speaker was saying because someone was clickly clacking on their keyboard the whole time. The requisite "Whomever is typing please mute yourself!", never works because the typist is never paying attention.

There should be an app that logs you into your mandatory conference calls so you can get the checkmark for attending, but completely isolates the user. Then, when you suddenly have to talk, and someone pings you, it will call you, and while its ringing it will play a pre-recorded, 'Oh damn, I think I'm having connection issues, can you repeat the question?'

<comment><USER50> Zoom allows the call owner to mute everyone. That has been great for killing the typers.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: SirixDB – versioning through efficient snapshotting - <AUTHOR> I've already posted yesterday, but I'd really love to get comments, any kind of questions, suggestions and help would be greatly appreciated as it's an Open Source project of mine (and was for others during my studies at the University of Konstanz 6 years ago).
Since then I spent countless ours to bring forth the idea of a versioned storage system, especially well suited for analytical tasks for timd-varying data.
Especially I'd love to discuss what documentation you need, which next steps are necessary (JSON, Cloud...), API additions or changes...
I've updated the README quiet a bit, such that the set up of the asynchronous, RESTful HTTP(S) Server is easier :-) however I could use some help with the Docker stuff.
http://sirix.io <comment><AUTHOR> Key features are:

\- log-structured storage system with copy-on-write semantics especially well suited for SSDs (random reads, writes are batched and synced to disk when a commit is issued)

\- implements a novel versioning algorithm called sliding snapshot, which balances read/write-performance and has other beneficial characteristics. We also implement full, incremental and differential versioning at the page-level

\- stores hashes of the page-fragments in parent pointers in our main hash array based trie structure in the indirect pages as in ZFS. In the future these can be used to validate the integrity of the whole resource

\- compression of each page, as well as encryption in the future

\- for each XDM/XML-node in our on-disk structure we optionally store the descendant-count, the child-count as well as a hash of the content

\- a diff algorithm, which uses our stable node-identifiers and optionally hashes for comparisons of node-pairs in different revisions

\- a RESTful, asynchronous, temporal API written with Vert.x in Kotlin

\- several temporal XPath axis extensions, which could also be used for JSON in the future

\- several XQuery functions to open, diff, commit... a resource

\- opening revisions of resources either by an ID or via a given timestamp. In case of the given timestamp the revision is searched by binary search and either the revision is found or the revision, which is closest to the given point in time is opened

<comment><USER3> could you describe major differences and overlaps between your solution and Datomics, MarkLogic temporal documents ([https://docs.marklogic.com/guide/temporal/intro](https://docs.marklogic.com/guide/temporal/intro)).

Some compare with any other database 'time travel' feature would be helpful as well.

Thank you

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks so much for asking. I'm not sure how they are actually storing their bitemporal documents, but I think it must be some kind of a huge B(+)-tree maybe. I think the cool thing is that we have revision root pages and are able to reconstruct each revision in merely the same time.

We currently have a tree, very similar to how ZFS stores the objects on-disk. It's more or less a form of a hash array based trie. The number of levels of the indirect pages currently is static, but I'll change this and only create a new level once it's really needed as in ZFS.

During every change to the resources in Sirix never in-place changes occur, instead it does a copy-on-write of the involved page and a pointer to the former version is created. This is necessary for our versioning algorithms as it has to fetch at most N former versions of the page, depending on if the page has been modified (usually N should be between 2 and 5 or something like that). The index structures currently are AVL-trees (thus also versioned), simply stored as data records in the leafes, but it would be best to plug in a B-tree in the future.

On a higher level I have added many operations, which are usually not found in XML databases, for instance as our internal tree structure is a kind of persistent DOM firstChild/rightSibling/leftSibling/parent encoding I added move operations to move subtree. A path summary stores all paths in the resource and is kept updated at all times as are optional indexes on paths, elements, attributes or content-and-structure.

The interesting thing is with the help of extensions to Brackit(.org), which also has some basic JSON navigation primitives already built in I was able to add temporal axis. I added several XPath axis to navigate in time, for instance first:: _, last::_ , all-time:: _, next::_ , previous:: _, future::_ , past::*... we also allow diffing, opening a resource in a specific revision...

<comment><USER3> interesting. last:: -- I assume, means 'most-recent'.

maintaining pre-calculated 'most recent' is very useful (as long as I can ask 'what was most recent, say, yesterday at 1pm').

Most of the 'hand-made' append-only data schema design suffer from not being able to return 'joined' most-recent datums, quickly.

Because a 'usual' implementation requires doing join with select max on business or system (or both) time stamp

My understanding that both DBs I mentioned previously do copy of write for temporal data, but I am not sure if they do any document level-diffs.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, the revisions can be reconstructed in merely the same time, for instance it doesn't matter if you open the most recent revision or any past revision regarding system/transaction time. We also do not have to store the transaction time more than once (in the revision - root page).

And if you do a fine granular modification, we usually do not copy and rewrite the whole page with currently 512 records (it depends on the versioning algorithm you use).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I've been looking for something like this for a while for a project I had in mind.

I'm going to spend the weekend looking into this and will be providing feedback after.

<comment><USER4> Ok, I read through the github wiki and everything I could find - <USER2> comprehensive stuff.

Currently chunking my way through the phd paper. I created something similar to this but wholly in-memory in JavaScript for a client project.

My idea is a policy management tool so versioning and frequent change are quite important.

One thing I don't yet have a grip on is how this performs for my use-case (which will be a multi-tenant SaaS solution). I'm going to run some tests to evaluate what's possible here.

All in all, really good effort. I think for this project to be a success it will take people who know where to apply it / what to do with it. Maybe a suggestion for you is to add a section on the gh readme to highlight potential use cases as you see them (will give people who come across it a better idea of how they can apply this type of software).

Thank you!

<comment><AUTHOR> Very interesting, let me know when you need help or simply create an issue or whatever. Keep me updated:-)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> I just published an article:

[https://medium.com/@jojolichtenberger/how-we-built-an- asynch...](https://medium.com/@jojolichtenberger/how-we-built-an-asynchronous- temporal-restful-api-based-on-vert-x-4570f681a3)

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Has anyone an idea, why Travis doesn't build with Java11 because of Mockito and how to fix it?

[https://github.com/sirixdb/sirix/issues/59](https://github.com/sirixdb/sirix/issues/59)

I've mentioned, that I guess it's a transitive dependency and has to do with the order the dependencies are used, but I'm not sure. Does anyone know how to tell Maven to use the newer version?

Locally I'm getting a build success.

<comment><AUTHOR> [https://travis-ci.org/sirixdb/sirix/builds/473332290](https://travis- ci.org/sirixdb/sirix/builds/473332290)

<comment><AUTHOR> Okay, I guess simply there needs to be a newer Maven version on Travis and I messed up the release flag for the `maven-compiler-plugin`. That said, locally it already works with Java11 :-) ... just Travis fails as of now

<comment><AUTHOR> Working with Java11 now :-)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> A documentation suggestion:

"Why should you even bother?" and "Features in a nutshell" should be near the top, between "Table of contents" and "Getting started", because those are the things people will want to know first.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hmm, I wasn't sure or if a really short description and then setting up everything to get started isn't the best.

That said, I have to look at that section, as it might even be a bit dated.

<comment><AUTHOR> What do others think?</comment></comment></comment>


Twitch CEO apologises for pornography on Ninja's channel - <AUTHOR> https://www.bbc.com/news/blogs-trending-49317270 <comment><USER2> Unpopular opinion here:

This probably did more to promote Ninja on Mixer than if this had not happened.

What if..a big IF here...but what if this was orchestrated by Ninja in some way? An excuse for him be "outraged" and multiple news sources picking this up and reporting on it talking about Mixer...</comment>