Ask HN: Recommendation for a command-line only OS? - <AUTHOR> My dream for an OS is a linux/unix based pure command line environment, where I could split the screen or otherwise instantiate multiple shell sessions with a simple shortcut. As close to the metal as possible.<p>Does anything like this exist? Or can it be configured to exist? <comment><USER2> Minimal Install of CentOS-7: [http://buildlogs.centos.org/rolling/7/isos/x86_64/CentOS-7-x...](http://buildlogs.centos.org/rolling/7/isos/x86_64/CentOS-7-x86_64-Minimal.iso)

Use YUM to install new software.

</comment><comment><USER3> in the command line all unixes/linuxes Are pretty much the same. Personally I only run linux on VPSes and ocasonally in a raspberry pi for fun. Always only using the command line. so for distros anything really, ubuntu, debian, arch, centos, puppy... . for shell session tmux or screen.

</comment><comment><USER4> I'd use Ubuntu server + tmux + emacs/vim. Hard to work without a web browser these days though.

</comment><comment><USER5> Any Unix -- OpenBSD is good. Linux.</comment>


A New Map Traces the Limits of Computation - <AUTHOR> https://www.quantamagazine.org/20150929-edit-distance-computational-complexity/ <comment><USER2> Url changed from [http://www.wired.com/2015/10/major-advance-reveals-limits- co...](http://www.wired.com/2015/10/major-advance-reveals-limits- computation/), which points to this.</comment>


What if we knew when and how we'd die? - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20180618-what-if-we-knew-when-we-were-going-to-die <comment><USER2> Retirement financial planning would be easier. If I knew I would die at 80, I'd know how much money I needed to be able to retire. I'd know when to start taking Social Security. I'd know how much I could spend in a year after I retired.

I'd also be able to leave my affairs in a decent state for my survivors, instead of in a mess.</comment>


Patagonia Tests New Sustainable Legal Status - <AUTHOR> http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-01-04/patagonia-road-tests-new-sustainability-legal-status.html

<comment><USER2> Although it's interesting to formalize it, it's never really been the case that directors of normal companies are legally required to maximize profits above all else; they're generally given extremely large leeway to run the company as they see fit, as long as they're up-front with investors about what they're doing and why, and aren't engaged in shady things like trying to benefit insider shareholders at the expense of external shareholders. More: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3227980>

This probably will still help, though, because many directors of normal corporations _believe_ they have stronger profit-maximizing duties than courts have actually ruled that they do, and they're in any case worried about even unsuccessful shareholder lawsuits.

<comment><USER3> This Forbes blog post provides some context regarding the culture of publicly traded companies, earnings guidance and "maximizing shareholder value": [http://www.forbes.com/sites/stevedenning/2011/11/28/maximizi...](http://www.forbes.com/sites/stevedenning/2011/11/28/maximizing- shareholder-value-the-dumbest-idea-in-the-world/)

This is prevailing practice for publicly traded companies -- I feel like these Benefit and Flexible Purpose Corps are more about allowing companies to be publicly traded without having to play this game through setting social expectations than through real structural differences. (To be taken with a grain of salt as I'm not a lawyer or a financial professional, just someone that's been an individual investor.)

<comment><USER4> >> I feel like these Benefit and Flexible Purpose Corps are more about allowing companies to be publicly traded without having to play this game through setting social expectations than through real structural differences.

As someone who works at what was, until Patagonia, probably the largest B-Corp around, I'll comment on this.

Yes the idea is that with these legal designations and social/environmental charters written in to the company by-laws it will allow for, someday, a B-Corp to go public and not have to change the way it operates. The oft-cited example of "what went wrong and why we need this" is Ben & Jerry's.

When Ben & Jerry's was bought by Unilever in 2000 the new ownership shut down a handful of their social programs and stopped sourcing products from local farmers, among other changes. Other companies were concerned about that happening to them in the future, and thus B-Labs.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> There are actually several arguments against these so-called "stakeholder society" initiatives that most people don't consider at the outset. For example:

1\. These concepts generally come with weaker governance for company managers, allowing them greater latitude to act inefficiently in general. By contrast with maximizing shareholder value, managers can undertake almost any program under some pretense or justification, ranging from excessive empire building, to justifying sweetheart deals with friends at greater cost citing "environmental" concerns. This doesn't matter for Patagonia because it's family-owned, but this would be a huge problem with making this a widespread practice in the Fortune 500.

2\. Widespread use represents a de facto tax on businesses through less efficient operations, but without the control of the political process to direct it. Even if you aren't in favor of governmental interference, it is generally better for organizations that are going to have charitable aims to be directly accountable, whether via the democratic process or the donation process.

3\. Returns to shareholders, in light of the returns that go to other stakeholders, are reduced, thus potentially reducing the amount of financing available from capital providers.

So it doesn't really matter if Patagonia does this, but doing it on an economy-wide scale would potentially be a big mistake.

<comment><USER6> These remarks really need to be compared to the situation in Germany. A large degree of stakeholder democracy is enforced by law. In Germany, any company with more than 50 employees must allow workers some representation on issues of hiring and firing, and any company with over 300 employees must provide funds so that at least one worker can work full-time on workers concerns. Representation on the Board, by workers, is common. And the result seems to be a highly efficient system.

Compare that to the American experience, in which fraud and abuse has been widespread: Enron, Worldcom, the S&L Bailouts, CountryWide, Wachovia, etc.

As programmers, we know that bad code can be written in any language, and clearly fraud can be committed under any legal system. Still, we also know that each language tends to encourage certain habits, while discouraging certain other habits. Obviously one can find examples of fraud in Germany and efficient operations in the USA. However, it is striking how few scandals ripple through the German business community, and how very competitive German manufacturing firms are.

Given the comparison of Germany to the USA, I'd be cautious about dismissing systems of stakeholder democracy.

<comment><USER5> The system in Germany is different in that it names a particular set of stakeholders, namely workers, and gives them a formal place in governance controls. To my knowledge, German managers do not have to take into account the objectives of suppliers, the local economy, or society at large in their decision making. While it's similar, it actually addresses the first point I made, as compared with the California law under discussion.

German companies have much more concentrated share ownership, which gives them an advantage for corporate governance that perhaps makes scandals less likely. Also, they are a product of the German culture which is very different from American culture.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> As a long-time admirer of Patagonia and other companies that incorporate sustainability and social responsibility into their businesses, it is great to see this happening. If nothing else, it draws attention to alternative business goals and provides some degree of legal protection to certain public companies.

</comment><comment><USER8> _"Under current law, shareholders can sue corporate boards for not maximizing profits"_

Wow, I never new that. Granted I know very little of the legal implications of incorporating, but still. I wasn't expecting it to be so plain. Corporations have a legal obligation to not care about anything but money. Explains a lot.

<comment><USER9> It's not that simple. Boards have certain duties to act on behalf of the corporations, and not their own personal interests. Since concepts like "the good of humanity" are so vague, and can be interpreted in mutually exclusive ways, the theory is that those decisions should be made by shareholders with their own money, not with the company's.

Take a "sweat shop", for example. There is one view that they are exploitative and that low wages overseas should not be tolerated. There is another view that those wages generate income in areas of the world where it is greatly needed. How is a board of directors to decide which view to take? Which shareholders should they listen to?

So boards have been defined as the people who watch the business for the good of the business. And they're given great leeway in doing so. (You can't sue them for making bad business decions, for example - only fraudulent or grossly negligent ones).

Bundling charity with business is an interesting idea, but I'm not sure it's better than separating them, or if there isn't an inherent contradiction in the two when you apply it to large public companies.

After all, profits can always be used to better humanity without the conflicts I've described _after they've been given to the shareholders_.

I'm a little skeptical that it will change much, but we'll see. It will be interesting to watch.

<comment><USER10> > I'm a little skeptical that it will change much, but we'll see. It will be > interesting to watch.

Likewise, on both counts.

Though I think it's important to remember, even if this enterprise fails the state of California is a big enough experimental setting to provide all sorts of interesting (and possibly even useful) new data.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> The popular hospitality exchange Couchsurfing recently incorporated as a B corporation as well (they were a non-profit before.)

<http://www.couchsurfing.org/about.html>

<comment><USER12> They raised ~$8million from Benchmark and Omidyar. It's pretty interesting that Benchmark Capital invested in a corporation that "is dedicated to creating public benefit." Not at all surprising to get it from Omidyar, of course.

[http://techcrunch.com/2011/08/24/couchsurfing- raises-7-6-m-w...](http://techcrunch.com/2011/08/24/couchsurfing- raises-7-6-m-will-users-cry-sell-out/)

Will be interesting to see how they monetize

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> I worked on getting the first Benefit Corporation legislation passed in the United States. Specifically, Maryland was the first state to pass this type of corporation and a company I co-founded was the first company to change from a Delaware C Corp status to a Benefit Corporation. You can check my affiliation out here: [http://brandoncwhite.com/blog/a-new-type-of-company-a- benefi...](http://brandoncwhite.com/blog/a-new-type-of-company-a-benefit- corporation/)

There are still a lot of questions and issues around this type of corporation as has been pointed out. There certainly is a void that will ultimately get filled through case law at some point in the future. Having said that, I think it's a step in the right direction for companies that want to add some level of protection around their "Triple Bottom Line" philosophy. Ben and Jerry said that has this sort of corporation existed they would not have sold Ben and Jerry's. But, it does not mean that it's a fit for all companies. The start-up that I am working on now is not a benefit corporation and we probably will not become one. Not because we do not want to take into account the aspects of a triple bottom line, but rather because at this point it's not something at the core of what we are doing.

Overall, I think it's at least a good option for those that would like to focus on a triple bottom line. How exactly the law is interpreted will be interesting to see how it plays out.

</comment><comment><USER9> Can someone explain why this is necessary or why a corporation would want to be put under what I assume (it's tough to tell from the article) additional legal risk of "benefiting humanity?". Could you not now be sued for "not being green enough" or worse, not being "good" enough, where "good" is defined by the shareholders? I don't get it - regular corporations currently have a lot of flexibility. What does this new form accomplish?

<comment><USER11> There is indeed additional legal risk -- shareholders (but not other stakeholders) can sue for not taking actions that "benefit humanity" as measured by a required independent audit.

However, this is balanced by the legal protection offered to the company when it does do something that does not strictly increase its profits.

It comes down to your values though -- if you believe that the most important thing is to make money while leaving yourself open to the smallest cross- section of legal liability, that's exactly what a standard corporation is for. If you believe that your purpose is to build a better world, and you need an organization with cashflow to do it, you had fewer options in the past. Now you have two more, at least in California.

<comment><USER14> So if such corporation would be public and it would oppose, say, SOPA and I believed SOPA creates great public benefit and owned shares of such corporation, I could sue it for not promoting the public benefit and actually force the company to come out and support SOPA? How that makes any sense? And how the courts would even decide such case - no legal definition of public benefit exists or even possible?

If you wanted to make profits and to build a better world, what prevented you from setting a regular company and a charity and have the former donate to the latter? A lot of people donate millions of dollars this way.

It looks like it's one of those feel-good laws that everybody pats themselves on the backs about how they promoted public benefit and nobody even thinks about how it would work or what would be the consequences...

<comment><USER11> The nonprofit that is behind the B corporation initiative has this to say about legal liability:

 _Will the B Corp legal framework create additional liability for our Board of Directors and officers?_

 _It is the opinion of our attorneys that adopting the B Corp legal framework to expand the definition of the 'best interests' of the corporation should reduce the liability for Directors and Officers by creating legal protection (called 'safe harbor') for them to take into consideration the interests of multiple stakeholders when making decisions, particularly when considering financing and liquidity scenarios. Adopting the B Corp legal framework will, however, give shareholders additional rights to hold Directors and Officers accountable for taking into consideration these same interests when making decisions ‐‐ and that of course is the whole point._

From the FAQ for investors and directors: [http://www.bcorporation.net/resources/bcorp/documents/FAQs%2...](http://www.bcorporation.net/resources/bcorp/documents/FAQs%20-%20Investors%20and%20Directors4.pdf).

In your particular scenario involving SOPA/PIPA, the company's executives can straightforwardly claim that they acted in good faith to promote the interests of the broader business sector that they are a part of, and thus they would not be liable for their actions.

<comment><USER14> The thing here is that if they can claim good faith and it is a protection for them, then the whole setup is meaningless - they could always claim "we thought it's a good idea" even if shareholders think it's a terrible one. Public good is a matter of opinion, and anybody can claim any opinion.

If, however, this provision is not toothless and useless, then I don't see how it can not create additional potential liability. Of course, it can play both ways - i.e. the management can both claim public good as defense for controversial actions and be attacked on public good grounds for them. It's just an additional complication, compounded by absence of any clarity on the question of what the said good is.

It is telling that your document does not give a clear answer to the question of additional liability, basically saying "we're reducing liability, no, wait, we're increasing it and it's a good thing!".

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> It is ironic that we castigate Chinese SOEs for having a dual purpose of profit maximasiation and seeking the "general welfare of society" (worded differently in China or Russia) and then commend it here. The structures are, at least in writing, shockingly similar.

The problem is that generating shareholder value is objective and empirically validate-able. Having these other systems increased the complexity of the system - bad - while giving it a dual qualitative raison d'être.

Present structure of a for-profit corporation paired with a non-profit foundation is less ambiguous.</comment>


Emergence - <AUTHOR> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emergence

<comment><USER2> I don't really understand where this post is supposed to be going, but I agree with Yudkowsky regarding all the "emergence" I've ever heard about:

 _A fun exercise is to eliminate the adjective "emergent" from any sentence in which it appears, and see if the sentence says anything different...Does not each statement convey exactly the same amount of knowledge about the phenomenon's behavior? Does not each hypothesis fit exactly the same set of outcomes?

Before: Human intelligence is an emergent product of neurons firing.

After: Human intelligence is a product of neurons firing.

Before: The behavior of the ant colony is the emergent outcome of the interactions of many individual ants.

After: The behavior of the ant colony is the outcome of the interactions of many individual ants._

<http://lesswrong.com/lw/iv/the_futility_of_emergence/>

<comment><USER3> _Does not each statement convey exactly the same amount of knowledge about the phenomenon's behavior? Does not each hypothesis fit exactly the same set of outcomes?_

No.

When you talk about an emergent property, you are saying that there is an issue of scale to pay attention to. Below some threshold the phenomena does not show up. After another threshold it clearly shows up. And this is sometimes a useful piece of information.

Take, for example, the statistical algorithms used by Google translate. Effective translation is an emergent behavior of the corpus the algorithm has to run off of. If you provide it with a small corpus, you get garbage translations if anything. If you provide it with a large corpus, you get good translations. And the knowledge that size matters is sometimes useful information. For one thing it tells you that the results from a small corpus are not indicative of how effective the algorithms are.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Obviously the utility of the concept depends on how it is defined, but I have always understood it in the following two senses:

1\. The "self-organization" of novel entities. The paradigmatic example is the glider in Conway's Life automata. Gliders have properties their substrate entities (the individual life cells, perhaps) do not: direction, motion, information transmission, speed, and a whole logic of destruction/creation (from which, e.g. Turing machines can be constructed). Are gliders as ontologically "real" as the substrate cells and update rules that comprise them? I don't know, but clearly they are novel in some sense, and the term "emergent" seems to naturally apply here.

2\. Conflation with the notion of "downward causality". Downward causality is a concept that arises mostly in philosophy of mind. The basic idea is that it seems to be the case that conscious entities control their bodies (including, to some extent, the neurons in their brains - for example if I want to imagine a pink elephant presumably "I" am causing some neurons in my head to fire differently than they were before I was envisioning a pink elephant). And yet, conscious entities as we believe are comprised of their bodies (including, to some extent, the neurons in their brains - presumably their is some necessary subset of neural activity in my brain comprising my conscious volition and the like). Downward causation is the idea that from certain patterns of activity arise sub-patterns that control or have causal influence on the underlying activity. And in this context the term 'emergent' seems appropriate.

</comment><comment><USER5> The concept of emergence seems a general term (as this can be seen on the Wikipedia page with the multitude of subjects covering "emergence"). But on the biological side, there is a simple experiment that can lead to nice emergent structures. Just take a cup of black tea with sugar and leave a bit in the bottom of the cup. In the next days, you usually see nice patterns coming from the bacterias activity...

</comment><comment><USER6> "Emergence" seems to me like a placeholder term. These are terms that scientists throw around for "something interesting is here, but we don't understand it yet... but we sort of know it when we see it."

Other examples: dark matter, dark energy, etc.

<comment><USER7> Wouldn't "gravity" be a better example? We don't truly understand the underlying reason for it, but we can observe its effects.

<comment><USER8> Yes. I'd argue emergence is the phase where the phenomena is first being discovered.</comment></comment></comment>


Amazon S3 Transfer Acceleration - p-pat-ni https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/aws-storage-update-amazon-s3-transfer-acceleration-larger-snowballs-in-more-regions/ <comment><AUTHOR> TL;DR

Newer, larger "snowball" appliance (current = 50TB and newer 80TB version), as well as access in additional international regions.

Network optimized S3 uploads (faster inbound transfers) for an extra 4 cents/GB.

Sidenote: I'm curious if you can get the same speedup for inbound transfers by using a Cloudfront distribution in front of your S3 bucket for no additional charge (no cost for inbound transfer on either service).

<comment><USER2> We played with this a bit using both cloudfront and other cdns. While we did see some small improvements, it wasn't nearly as good as we were expecting on the upload side. It may be fixed now, but there were also many issues getting the proper headers to pass through cloudfront to s3 for chunked uploads.

<comment><USER3> This might not be the right question, but:

Did you test using S4CMD with many threads as opposed to S3CMD?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Anyone know if the quoted cost of $0.04/GB for Transfer Acceleration is instead of the $0.03/GB for standard S3 ingress, or in addition to it? Ie. is the final cost per GB $0.07 or $0.04 when using Transfer Acceleration?

 _Edit:_ as pointed out to me below, there actually is no ingress cost for standard S3 uploading. The $0.03/GB is monthly storage. So the cost of this service is $0.04/GB instead of $0.00.

<comment><USER5> > Anyone know if the quoted cost of $0.04/GB for Transfer Acceleration is > instead of the $0.03/GB for standard S3 ingress, or in addition to it? Ie. > is the final cost per GB $0.07 or $0.04 when using Transfer Acceleration?

S3 ingress is free. You're thinking of storage pricing.

<comment><USER4> Ah yes of course, thanks. I took too brief a glance at the S3 pricing page.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Did anyone else have some pretty terrible results from the speed tester? I was pretty optimistic seeing their sample screenshot - am I missing something? [http://i.imgur.com/UwNBGf3.png](http://i.imgur.com/UwNBGf3.png)

<comment><USER7> If it makes you feel better, the accelerated ones are slower for me!

[http://i.imgur.com/n6DhyHj.png](http://i.imgur.com/n6DhyHj.png)

<comment><USER8> Same here, got 11%-24% slower in most regions, and only 3% faster in US- EAST-1. Sao Paulo got 60% faster, though.

Regardless of my results, I've gotta hand it to Amazon on a really kickass speed comparison page. That's a great user experience. It immediately tells me whether I should be using this or not from my particular corporate network without requiring me to waste a day or so trying it out.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Secure Connection Failed

An error occurred during a connection to aws.amazon.com. Peer attempted old style (potentially vulnerable) handshake. Error code: SSL_ERROR_UNSAFE_NEGOTIATION

Really,Amazon?

[https://www.ssllabs.com/ssltest/analyze.html?d=aws.amazon.co...](https://www.ssllabs.com/ssltest/analyze.html?d=aws.amazon.com)

No PFS, TLS 1.0 only, No HSTS or HPKP ??

</comment><comment><USER10> > The name of the bucket used for Transfer Acceleration must be DNS-compliant > and must not contain periods (".").

Source: [http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonS3/latest/dev/transfer- acce...](http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonS3/latest/dev/transfer- acceleration.html#transfer-acceleration-getting-started)

> The bucket names must match the names of the website that you are hosting. > For example, to host your example.com website on Amazon S3, you would create > a bucket named example.com.

Source: [http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonS3/latest/dev/website- hosti...](http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonS3/latest/dev/website-hosting- custom-domain-walkthrough.html)

...

Looks like they don't want you replacing CloudFront with Amazon S3 Transfer Acceleration - which is a royal pain for some of my use cases (internal facing websites that don't need a full CDN).

<comment><USER11> S3 Website Hosting is distinct from CloudFront; you can create a CloudFront distribution backed by a bucket with any name. You can combine the two, but it isn't required.

[http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonCloudFront/latest/Developer...](http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonCloudFront/latest/DeveloperGuide/MigrateS3ToCloudFront.html)

[http://docs.aws.amazon.com/gettingstarted/latest/swh/website...](http://docs.aws.amazon.com/gettingstarted/latest/swh/website- hosting-intro.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Looks like they're using the Cloudfront infra to have files sent to s3 via cloudfront. Uploads to a cloudfront edge down the street will be a lot faster than the s3 datacenter.

Will this allow the HTTP sliding windows to be optimized more in any way? Any idea if this could approach UDT upload speeds for large files?

</comment><comment><USER13> Still no ipv6 for S3?

<comment><USER14> Do you have IPv6 only devices you'd like to support?

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> I went to try it but don't see it as an option!

<comment><USER16> It will be released by tomorrow.

<comment><USER15> Thanks!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> is there a way to run the benchmark from CLI? i would like to run the benchmark on our servers to see if we can get an improvement.

<comment><USER14> You can setup a socks proxy pretty easily with ssh -D 1080 <your server name>, then set localhost:1080 as your socks proxy and run the test.

<comment><USER18> That's a great solution if you want to benchmark your proxy.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Do I understand this correctly that Cloudfront is still the better option for fronting static assets like JS and CSS?

<comment><USER10> You don't actually have a choice:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11531357](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11531357)

<comment><USER20> That is not correct. You can host a website from an S3 bucket without using CloudFront. Although of course, downloads will come directly from the S3 bucket and not from a CF edge location.

<comment><USER10> Huh, just what did you think I was saying? Of course you can put CloudFront in front of S3 website hosting!!!

You _can 't_ use S3 Transfer Acceleration with S3 Static Website Hosting.

<comment><USER20> My apologies, I misread your comment.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Does anybody have a sense of how fast uploading to S3 can get? I'm on a gigabit link here in Singapore, uploading to Singapore instance of S3 (via ARQ) - and I'm disappointed that I rarely see better than about 40 Mbits/second.

<comment><USER22> I'm in Singapore, uploading to Oregon, 100mb, took minutes , I changed to upload via signed cloud front requests, takes 15s to upload 100mb now...

<comment><USER21> I presume you mean 100 MB (or just plain 100 MBytes) - so, 53 megabits/second. So a little better, but nowhere near 1 gigabit (which I presume you have, it's so cheap here - not that it seems to be useful for anything other than great speedtest results)

<comment><USER22> I use homeplugs because the router and computer are in different rooms. So I only get about ~300mbit from my room. I've never actually tried from next to the router.

My point was just that I get better results using CloudFront than using S3 or Multi Upload S3.

Sharing what I can :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> I wish Azure would improve Blob Storage. It is really a shadow of S3's capabilities.

</comment><comment><USER24> What's the fastest & cheapest way to get data off Amazon's cloud services?

<comment><USER25> It depends entirely on the quantity of data.

For huge datasets, Snowball will be fastest & cheapest (literally shipping data).

<comment><USER26> As they used to say, never underestimate the bandwidth of a van filled with harddrives.

<comment><USER27> Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes hurtling down the highway.

<comment><USER24> Always IP over Avian Carriers: [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/IP_over_Avian_Carriers](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/IP_over_Avian_Carriers)

&&

Sneakernets

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

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Is the improvement also applicable when uploading files from the s3 management console into an accelerated bucket?

</comment><comment><USER29> I'm not seeing this in my buckets. is this going to roll out gradually ?

<comment><USER30> It's turned on tomorrow.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> Still no uploading of gzip'd data to S3, amirite?

<comment><USER20> What stops you from uploading gzip'd data to S3?

<comment><USER31> It stays gzip'd once you've uploaded it.

<comment><USER20> Well to be fair, that is not the same as "you can not upload gzip'd content".

Your complaint seems to be "S3 doesn't automatically gunzip gzip files that I upload", which sounds like the desired behaviour to me. i.e. if I ever upload gzipped content to S3, it is because I want it to be served compressed over HTTP, or because I am moving a compressed backup file to S3. In neither case would gunzipping be desirable, although I do appreciate that compressing during the transfer, and decompressing on the other end, could save some bytes during transfers.

<comment><USER31> My complaint is that I can't upload a gzip'd file and have it decompressed on their end, yes.

Yes, the other things I could have meant would have been odd, so I'm not sure why you spent time typing them out.

<comment><USER20> > Yes, the other things I could have meant would have been odd, so I'm not > sure why you spent time typing them out.

It seemed clear that you were either confused about what features were supported by S3, or not expressing your complaint correctly. The reason behind typing them out was trying to politely point this out, while describing some of the real-world use cases for using gzip'd files in S3 (partially to highlight why it would not make sense for S3 to gunzip files automatically).

I felt this would be a more useful comment than "you are wrong, you can upload gzip'd files to S3", or just downvoting your comment for being incorrect.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> "What's a Snowball?"

Animated YouTube by Amazon explains: [https://youtube.com/watch?v=9uc2DSZ1wL8](https://youtube.com/watch?v=9uc2DSZ1wL8)

<comment><USER32> Even with that, I don't get it.

"Moving lots of data either requires a huge pipe, or a ton of storage disks."

With that, they offer their Snowball device, which, if I'm understanding correctly, holds up to 50TB (now 80TB), which they physically ship to you, and then you ship back to them. How does this fix either of the constraints (disk space / connection pipe)?

<comment><USER33> So you have 50TB of images to send me and a 10mbit internet pipe. Is it faster to FTP me the file or mail it on a hard drive?

<comment><USER32> To you and @nxzero, I'm not debating whether it's better or worse, I'm trying to find out if I'm actually understanding it right. From some of the other comments, it appears that it is just a matter of them sending you a physical disk -- it makes sense now.

<comment><USER33> Yes they mail you a fancy disk, you fill and mail back.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> Amazon S3 Transfer Acceleration is natively supported in FREE CloudBerry Explorer [http://www.cloudberrylab.com/blog/amazon-s3-transfer- acceler...](http://www.cloudberrylab.com/blog/amazon-s3-transfer-acceleration- support-in-cloudberry-explorer-v4-6/) and CloudBerry Backup [http://www.cloudberrylab.com/blog/amazon-s3-transfer- acceler...](http://www.cloudberrylab.com/blog/amazon-s3-transfer-acceleration- in-cloudberry-backup-4-8-2/) from day one. Check it out!</comment>


New Mozilla CEO on what happens next - <AUTHOR> http://blogs.computerworlduk.com/open-enterprise/2011/03/mozilla-moves-on/index.htm

<comment><USER2> Some interesting stuff in there</comment>


Wealth Inequality in America: A Race Between the Stock and Housing Markets - <AUTHOR> https://promarket.org/wealth-inequality-in-america-race-between-the-stock-and-the-housing-market/ <comment><USER2> Lol. Such posts have been coming up a lot lately. I'm not sure if there's a dissonance in what people understand vs what they vote for.

US has been making the rich richer. If people want some kind of redistribution, vote for higher taxes for 1% wealth (not the same as income) and higher capital gains taxes while reducing taxes on labor.

<comment><USER3> It's also strange that the central bank decided to inject the money into the stockmarket in which only top 10% participate. The goal was to reduce the yield of the stocks to encourage investment in smaller companies but it backfired because owners of stock care more about the resulting appreciation than in the loss of dividends as a percentage of share price. Basically capital gains taxes are too low and dividend taxes are too high.</comment></comment>


Introduction to GPUs and to the Linux Graphics Stack - <AUTHOR> http://phd.mupuf.org/publication/2012/11/24/introduction-to-gpus-and-to-the-linux-graphics-stack/

<comment><USER2> FWIW, _This is a French technical conference for open source hobbyists. The talk was ~50 minutes long._

 _The talk is in French_

+1 for the topic. Alas, I am not a French speaker (and so, cannot benefit from it). This might be of interest to French speakers within the HN community.

<comment><AUTHOR> The slides are very informative (The reason I submitted it)

<comment><USER2> OK. I see. Thanks for pointing out.</comment></comment></comment>


The future of Ruby is....Java? - <AUTHOR> http://blog.headius.com/2009/07/jrubys-importance-to-ruby-and-erubycon.html

<comment><USER2> Not intending to start a flamewar with VM/Intepreter implementations, BUT I have to agree with the article.

When I was evaluating on platforms for a rewrite of xp-dev.com, I did seriously consider using RoR with JRuby, but there was some parts missing here and there (including some bugs) that it was just not worth the risk for the scale of the project.

I ended up going back to a Java web framework, thinking, I'll keep a close eye on JRuby and see if it can be used in future projects.

The JVM is an excellent VM - things like having the ability to set heap sizes, JMX and all the readily available sugar that comes from it is well worth trying to support as many languages into it, and for that reason, Ruby needs the JVM. Re-implementing things like JIT, GC is just not worth the trouble. Ruby hackers can actually focus on real, hard productive features and essential bug fixes which would be a better use of their precious time.

* JVM here refers to Sun's JVM implementation, not the spec. JRockit is pretty good as well.

<comment><USER3> >things like having the ability to set heap sizes

Oh that has always irritated me, and others - having to know what to set it to up front - interesting that you like it?

<comment><USER2> I don't think it's "having to know what to set it to up front" - its more experimentation and seeing what has the best performance. Too big heap and poor code, you might end up having really, really long GC pauses. Too small heap and you'll be out of heap space.

I like it as there's only so much physical memory on a server, and there's only so much virtual memory a kernel can provide. Swapping is not a good idea if you're looking into performance, and hence limiting the heap size can turn out to be a good strategy to ensure that your application does perform within expected boundries.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> If Charles really believes this then he needs to assign a bit more priority to some of bugs / feature requests that revolve around java integration. I wouldn't mind using JRuby to replace various java oriented tasks but the lack of various features such as full support for annotations makes it impossible.

He's definitely right about one thing though - JRuby has to some extent missed the bus here - Groovy now does just about everything I need and it would now be a big sell to win me back to using JRuby (which was not true 1 or 2 years ago).

</comment><comment><USER5> I'm honestly really thrilled with all the choices on the JVM; not just JRuby, but Java, Clojure, Groovy, Scala, Fan... and they all play together incredibly nicely. It's an amazing productivity boost to be able to use a dynamic language (like Ruby or Groovy) to handle all the business logic and glue code, while at the same time being able to take advantage of the speed of pure Java when you need it.

<comment><USER6> This is so true, and I'm really curious which of the dynamic options will take the lead on the jvm.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Except that almost all these comments seem to assume a long-running / web process.

Start-up times and memory requirements for the JVM are just horrendous; I can't write a serious command-line tool in Java because of these constraints. Even Scala has a compiler-tool which runs as a background task (fsc) because of this.

<comment><USER6> let's hope mono catches on!

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> "If we can leverage JRuby to grab 1-2% of the Java market, we'll _double_ the size of the Ruby community" - that's pretty incredible.

IMHO it could be smart of the community to put some effort into getting JRuby on Rails working smoothly on Google App Engine. GAE makes deployment and scaling, traditionally RoR's weaker points (though much improved since Passenger) almost a non-issue.

<comment><USER9> I would have agreed with you on "Rails sucks to deploy" two years ago, when I started working with it, but the ecosystem is much, much better now. I don't use Passenger in production (no real benefit to a single-app developer whose app already works with Mongrel) so I won't comment on it, but Capistrano is mature to the point where deployment to a VPS is very, very painless.

You should see how much fun the deploy procedure is at my day job (Big Freaking Java Enterprise App) compared to "cap _1.4.2_ deploy".

As it happens I am looking at a stack of evaluations for the talk I gave internally about GAE, which included redoing an internal app on it. "Deployment is a non-issue" was not my experience. It is documented in the traditional Rails manner: as comments on blog posts, most of them out of date. It includes a lot of steps which are transparently bandaids over broken, like "Freeze Rails then delete the ActiveRecord gem to save on files because GAE has a hard limit on how many you can put in a WAR." It... bugger, meeting, will complete this thought later.

<comment><USER9> Meeting over.

Other things not working on GAE, at least in my limited experience:

1) There is no way to run the console, period, which is a nuisance to my typical development style.

2) There appears to be no good way to do testing, which is a showstopper for many Rails developers. (I don't do TDD personally so not a big deal for me.)

3) Warble (wonderful software, don't get me wrong) has some performance issues, at least on this computer. (30 seconds to change one line in one file.) That wouldn't be a problem except...

4) ... I can't get GAE to operate locally with Rails, which means development has to be done by edit, deploy, edit, deploy, edit, deploy, which combines all the development speed of Big Freaking Java Enterprise Apps with the rich your- IDE-will-spot-typos-for-you power of Ruby. (/sarcasm)

5) You can't use ActiveRecord on GAE, which sounds like a nuisance until you realize how much of Rails magic depends on ActiveRecord being there. Validations, for example. (This was a major GOTCHA! for us.) I hear this will be mooted with Rails 3.0, which allows DataMapper (which will support Google's data store) to be dropped in in place of AR, but it is one of the major issues making me tell my bosses "The exploratory app was a big success, but the platform is not ready for us to take it to production yet, even though you have one production-ready app sitting in front of you."

<comment><USER8> Once you're at the capistrano level, deployment is a different game.. I'm talking about relatively small projects (I wouldn't deploy a big project on GAE anyway, if only to avoid the lock-in to Google)

I totally agree on most of issues you raise (once GAE Rails would work locally, console, testing etc could be resolved I suppose) - I would definitely not build any size Rails project for GAE right now. But if Rails community would put some work into that, I think it might be a great rapid dev/deploy/scale solution.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> As someone who has spent a lot of time in those "lumbering" organizations, I tend to agree.

While it isn't unreasonable to expect professionals to learn multiple deployment scenarios, the sad truth is that it can be hard to arrange to have such professionals.

Expecting someone who's career has revolved around JBoss/WebLogic/Tomcat/whatever, to come to grips with the vagaries of mongrel clusters is a recipe for failure. Not only does it mean learning something new, something they may regard as a "toy", it is a solution which exists outside of their domain, i.e., a threat.

That doesn't mean it can't be done, but it does mean being able to say "it's a war file" is a huge and important lever.

</comment><comment><USER11> Not to take away from the discussion, but is anyone else attending eRubyCon (<http://erubycon.com/>) that Charles mentions in this article. Would be nice to meet and put faces on a few fellow HN'ers.

</comment><comment><USER12> that's not so bad. clojure's past, present, and future is also java.

</comment><comment><USER13> scala is a better language than ruby anyways. if you rubyists want to promote your language you had better get serious about staking out your turf on the jvm, which is (i'm sorry to say) the only non-microsoft place where the enterprise can find serious concurrency and gc.

the various full stack rubies are cute, but if i don't have grown up concurrency then i'm not interested.

<comment><USER5> Sounds like someone needs a hug.

<comment><USER13> weak.

<comment><USER13> you're entitled to the downvotes, but I had hoped that they might be accompanied by a reply or two.

without that i'm left wondering if the disagreement/disapproval comes from ruby advocates with no facts to back their arguments or people who think that underendowed "office space" jokes are a valid retort for ruby fans with no facts to back their arguements.

I guesss maybe I do have a case of the Mondays, but you have undergraduate class project garbage collection and worse threads. Go charge $300 dollars a seat for your motivational ruby seminar or something. Scrum's at 11am.

<comment><USER14> If you were looking for replies, you might want to consider re-phrasing the way that you comment. A good way to engeder goodwill from others is to start off by talking about them, and not about yourself. Compare "If you were looking for replies," (starting to talk about what you want) vs "Scala is a better language than Ruby anyways." (which is an automatic trollish statement that puts your intended audience on the defensive right from the beginning)

Now, first of all, it's entirely possible that the Ruby community as a whole doesn't care about getting into the enterprise. I don't pretend to speak for the whole community, and obviously (via the article), some do. Competing on the JVM may not be the best way to promote the language as a whole. As you've said, the space is getting crowded, and if Ruby bets its cards on being the dynamic language of choice for the JVM, and then misses its target, how would that look? I won't deny that JRuby is an awesome thing, as I personally would like to see Ruby used (almost) everywhere. However, it's not as if, say, PHP gets maligned because it's not 'enterprisy' enough. It does for totally different reasons, and well-deserved ones at that. But the language is doing quite well without being able to be run on the JVM.

As far as concurrency and garbage collection go, I think it's hardly fair to judge all of Ruby on 1.8.7. YARV holds quite a bit of promise, and just goes to show how with just a little bit of care, Ruby can be made to be on par with every other language out there. See the link below for the comparison between 1.9 and 1.8. Now, in a pragmatic sense, this doesn't affect things _right now_, but they do change the near future quite a bit. So yes, Ruby's concurrency and gc may not be the best, but it's not as if there's no improvement or work being done.

[http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/u32q/benchmark.php?test=al...](http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/u32q/benchmark.php?test=all&lang=yarv&lang2=ruby&box=1)</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


MOV is Turing-complete (2013) [pdf] - <AUTHOR> http://drwho.virtadpt.net/files/mov.pdf <comment><USER2> I honest to goodness thought this was going to be about the video container format. In retrospect this makes much more snse.

<comment><USER3> Isn't PDF almost Turing-complete?

<comment><USER4> I believe at least doubly so (in addition to postscript you can embed JavaScript)

</comment></comment></comment><comment> a-wu relevant:

Chris Domas' movfuscator: [https://github.com/xoreaxeaxeax/movfuscator](https://github.com/xoreaxeaxeax/movfuscator)

Presentation: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R7EEoWg6Ekk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R7EEoWg6Ekk)

<comment> caleb-allen I wish Chris Domas still did presentations. I believe he was hired by Intel and I would guess that they would have asked him to stop publicly presenting.

Smart hire on their part, but his presentations are legendary to me!

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> A related project: the movfuscator, which converts programs into "mov instructions, and only mov instructions": [https://github.com/xoreaxeaxeax/movfuscator](https://github.com/xoreaxeaxeax/movfuscator)

"The inspiration for the compiler is the paper "mov is Turing-complete", by Stephen Dolan."

</comment><comment><USER6> 2015: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9751312](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9751312)

2013: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6309631](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6309631)

(Links are for the curious. Reposts are fine after a year or so: [https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html))

</comment><comment><USER7> It's actually a shame that there is no `mov rip, ...` instruction. That would make it truly Turing-complete. ARM has this instruction! (Of course, jmp [...] works just as well, but it isn't called mov)

<comment><USER8> Movfuscator [0] (which expands on the paper) managed to find a way to jump using just mov - by using a faulting mov.

[0] [https://github.com/xoreaxeaxeax/movfuscator](https://github.com/xoreaxeaxeax/movfuscator)

<comment><USER7> Yeah, I remember this. It requires setting up a custom signal handler though. IIRC something similar is used to get system/library calls (which also can't be expressed purely with mov instructions, normally).

If I recall correctly tom7 had a cute trick to get looping behavior in his ASCII-only compiler for 16-bit Intel ([http://tom7.org/abc/](http://tom7.org/abc/)) which was to make the program 64KB exactly, such that the program counter just loops around at the end. I suppose that's another option to get _pure_ mov-only code.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I did not understand how mov could be used for comparison. Is a register set to a certain value if the contents are already the same value when it's trying to write?

<comment><USER10> If you are comparing values X and Y, just write 0 to address X and 1 to address Y. Then read address X.

If X and Y are equal, then you would have written first 0 and then 1 to the same address, so the final read would give you 1.

If X and Y are different, then you would read back the 0 you wrote to address X.

<comment><USER11> It took me a bit to grok this but I think I finally understand it. Super clever.

Now, how would you do greater than / less than comparisons?

<comment><USER12> The native and super inefficient way would be basically the same: write 1 to all addresses greater or equal to X, and 0 to all addresses less than X, then read from address Y and see what you end up with.

Probably a more clever trick out there though.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> [https://pragprog.com/magazines/2012-03/the-nor- machine](https://pragprog.com/magazines/2012-03/the-nor-machine)

</comment><comment><USER14> FYI is the same Stephen Dolan from here:

[https://github.com/stedolan/jq](https://github.com/stedolan/jq)</comment>


The Partial Control Fallacy - <AUTHOR> http://pathsensitive.blogspot.com/2016/06/the-partial-control-fallacy.html <comment><USER3> I mostly agree with this, but don't discount the idea of only improving by a couple percent. Most things (like grants) are stack ranked, and if everybody has between an 85% and 95%, a 10% improvement could put you at the top of the list.

There's a similar argument about athletics. Sure, the people who win gold medals and get MVP at the Super Bowl have amazing genetics, but they also worked crazy hard to get there. _Your_ hard work isn't going to get you a gold medal, but if _they_ didn't work for it, they wouldn't get it either.

The core message is good, though: if you don't have whole package, don't apply the polish. But if you think you have a shot, don't think you can skate by on what you already have.

</comment><comment><USER4> > Applying that to the above, and you can see that, if I worked infinitely > hard on my essays, I could only make my apps 11% better versus not doing > anything at all. (At least to the extent that it really does follow that > rubric [the essay being worth ten percentage points of 100], even if I > submit a blank essay.)

This is wildly incorrect. _Assuming you have a perfect score on every other part of the rubric_ , the maximum improvement you can get through the essay is 11% of your non-essay score. Without that assumption, the maximum improvement is positive infinity percent.

<comment><USER5> So? This text is aimed at people who care about the final 10%. People who score zero on every other part of the rubric aren't falling into the partial control fallacy.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> This is such a useful concept! Surely someone gave it a name much earlier, right?

Edit: The closest thing that came to mind is the idiom "penny-wise and pound- foolish".

<comment><USER7> Parkinson's law of triviality (aka bikeshedding) could be considered a subset of this behaviour.

<comment><USER8> Bikeshedding is when a group of people form opinions about, and squabble over something frivolous and irrelevant, but appealing to the lowest common denominator.

Offer a group of people the opportunity to design a nuclear powered aircraft carrier, and no one says boo, but ask them which color is prettiest for a shed to park their bikes in, and suddenly everybody puts in their two cents, ad- nauseum.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Although they may give out a "rubric"; this is just a smokescreen. In most places, Grad School Fellowships are basically awarded based on 1) whose advisors are hotshots and 2) whose advisors are willing to play politics for them. Very little else matters, unless your essay is a steaming pile.

If you strongly desire a fellowship, I recommend researching which professors' students have gotten them in the past. Then, make sure you are on good terms with your PI, that the PI thinks you are a hard worker (whether or not you actually are), and write milquetoast essays that hit all the science buzzwords and PC stuff ("I'm interested in mentoring minorities"[0] - whether or not you actually do any of that).

[0] I actually did mentor minorities and didn't write about that in my essays, taking a more frank approach about what I thought was wrong with minority recruitment, and I lost out on a fellowship to a guy who now is a professor and has exactly zero nonwhite nonasians in his lab. Let's just say they don't really care about honesty and followthrough.

Incidentally, this student also had a research project where all of the data presented in the primary paper were artefacts of the preparation method (It didn't affect the overall conclusion). I confronted the student about this and even went through the process of repeating the experiment with a better prep, resulting in data that actually made sense. Some of the figures were completely invalid, and one of the subsidiary conclusions was wrong. I suggested that he issue a correction and at least stop talking about the subsidiary conclusion, but he continued to present it at several conferences afterwards, and as far as I can tell, the data have not been corrected in the literature. But he did get that fellowship. And now, is getting NIH grants. Your tax dollars at work.

</comment><comment><USER10> It's a great point, too bad the author is focused on loserisms like winning competitive awards. Most ironic of all is applying for a Thiel fellowship because it's prestigious.

From "Competition is for losers" ([http://www.wsj.com/articles/peter-thiel- competition-is-for-l...](http://www.wsj.com/articles/peter-thiel-competition- is-for-losers-1410535536)):

"Always prioritize the substance of what you're doing. Don't get caught up in the status, the prestige games. They're endlessly dazzling, and they're always endlessly disappointing." -Peter Thiel

<comment><USER11> > Don't get caught up in the status, the prestige games.

Easy to say if you're a billionaire.

<comment><USER10> An entrepreneur needs to create some unique value. That won't happen if you're following the same path as many others. Prestigious paths are very competitive, and they're competitive for precisely the reason that so many people are pursuing them. Thus competition is for losers.

Which is a better direction? Investing your energy in solving a problem where no good solution exists today? Or competing for a corner office?

<comment><USER11> > _If you 're going to succeed as an entrepreneur, you need to create some > unique value._

That's _a_ way to succeed.

> _That won 't happen if you're following the same path as many others._

Yep, and that's why Valve and Epic shouldn't have bothered entering the FPS goldrush after Id and 3D Realms owned the market. :|

> _Investing your energy in solving a problem for others where no good > solution exists today? Or competing for a corner office?_

How about doing _what gets me paid_? A lot of investors are seemingly more than happy to blow money on mundane rehashes of ideas in hopes of betting on the best rehash. There is no shame in being the not-quite-as-good rehash, if you get paid along the way.

Talking about "solving problems for others" is just a way of grandstanding pretending there's any more legitimacy to your narrowly-defined path of success as anything else. Lawyers and finance folks aren't solving _anything_ new for others, and yet they're better compensated than any of us.

Jesus, stop buying this bullshit...it is how we (developers and entrepreneurs) are getting taken advantage of.

EDIT: Also, how is spying on consumers and modeling their data making the world a better place or solving a new problem, exactly? At least Transium was kinda new in the search tech space. :|

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I think this is called bikeshedding.

<comment><USER13> Bikeshedding is from Parkinson's law of triviality [1], which essentially says that deciding trivial issues takes a disproportionate amount of time - <USER2> because there are many ways it could be done, and partly because non-trivial issues are hard to comprehend and are therefore easy to agree with.

This differs from the OP, where it is the ability to control an issue that is to blame - in Parkinson's law control is equal yet understanding is not.

Though of course the relation is strong.

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

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Amdahl's Law: if you toil and sweat to thoroughly optimize some step in a process that takes 10% of the time, so that it takes almost no time at all, you get only a 10% improvement out of it overall.</comment>


BitCoin story trends on HN - <AUTHOR> http://touchwoodsoftware.com/yctrends.html#BitCoin

<comment><USER2> On 31 May new bitcoin submissions started being fed into <http://twitter.com/bitrific>: the first being <http://twitter.com/#!/bitrific/status/75582386213101568> there were 36 subscribers then, now about 130. <http://twittercounter.com/compare/bitrific/month/followers>.

</comment><comment><USER3> I wonder if there's correlation between your graph and the value spike in bitcoins: <https://mtgox.com/trade/history>

This is really cool, I love the random things that come up(e.g. search for goats).

Also, I suggest you add the ability to compare multiple trends? It would be interesting to see the Bias's on HN when comparing say, Apple to Microsoft or Android to IOS.

<comment><AUTHOR> thanks, comparative trends is definitely something I'd like to include although not sure how to fit it into the UI right now.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Here's a better one re: BitCoin: <http://touchwoodsoftware.com/yctrends.html#Noobs>

<comment><AUTHOR> ha, I did pick the BitCoin example after seeing some seemingly pointless submissions rush to the front page due to having bitcoin in the title.</comment></comment>


Major Windows flaw was reportedly discovered by the NSA - <AUTHOR> https://www.cnet.com/news/major-windows-10-flaw-was-reportedly-discovered-by-the-nsa/ <comment><AUTHOR> "News of the security flaw comes the same day that Microsoft is ending support for Windows 7. The company has encouraged people to upgrade to Windows 10 to keep their PCs and laptops secure. " Hummmmm...</comment>


Ask HN: What is your favorite YouTube channel? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> Primitive Technology [https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCAL3JXZSzSm8AlZyD3nQdBA](https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCAL3JXZSzSm8AlZyD3nQdBA)

Confreaks [https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCWnPjmqvljcafA0z2U1fwKQ](https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCWnPjmqvljcafA0z2U1fwKQ)</comment>


Eating Vegetables Doesn't Stop Cancer - <AUTHOR> http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/04/08/eating-vegetables-doesnt-stop-cancer/

<comment><USER2> There is a related paper that I can't seem to find. The gist of which was:

Studies on the cancer-fighting prowess of many antioxidants often fail to mention that your body naturally synthesizes a lot of antioxidants (e.g. melatonin and glutathione). While ingested antioxidants are known to protect cells in vitro and theoretically do so in vivo, relative to naturally synthesized antioxidants they might account for little additional protection.

(If someone could find that paper, I'd appreciate it.)

</comment><comment><USER3> Garbage study. They only looked at vegetables as a group - which probably included potatoes and the like (possibly in the form of french fries). They didn't look at particular subclasses of vegetables. And they also didn't look at raw versus cooked (where previous studies have found significant reduction for colo-rectal cancer rates for raw broccoli but no reduction for cooked broccoli).

<comment><USER4> How does that make it a garbage study? Just because it doesn't divide up "vegetables" into tinier classes doesn't mean it didn't valuably disprove a perfectly well-formed and plausible hypothesis about vegetables as a group.

<comment><USER5> It's the "vegetables as a group" part. The "vegetable group" is ill-defined because some vegetables (such as potatoes and corn/maize) have nutritional profiles more akin to grains, with higher glycemic index and lower nutrient density. I'd be very surprised if eating lots of broccoli and cabbage doesn't lower cancer rates; lots of potatoes, not so much.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> The underlying research article is

"Fruit and Vegetable Intake and Overall Cancer Risk in the European Prospective Investigation Into Cancer and Nutrition (EPIC)" by Paolo Boffetta, Elisabeth Couto, Janine Wichmann, et al. Journal of the National Cancer Institute Advance Access published online on April 6, 2010 JNCI Journal of the National Cancer Institute, doi:10.1093/jnci/djq072

I remember years ago reading a statement by Jerry Pournelle in Byte Magazine that he thought people eating more fruits and vegetables could prevent more cases of cancer than all the activities of the United States Environmental Protection Agency combined, but perhaps we now have to reject that hypothesis.

</comment><comment><USER6> For those who've read _The China Study_ , note that this is about increasing consumption of vegetables, not decreasing consumption of anything else (including animal protein).

<comment><USER7> Oh yes, the China Study.

<http://www.cholesterol-and-health.com/China-Study.html>

<comment><USER8> FUD promoted by the well known Weston A Price foundation a very successful pusher of fat in our diets. While their motives aren't yet clear (diary&meat industry lobby) their methods are clear:

[http://www.care2.com/causes/health-policy/blog/who-is-the- we...](http://www.care2.com/causes/health-policy/blog/who-is-the-weston-a- price-foundation/)

<comment><USER7> Or you could say the China Study is vegetarian FUD backed by other lobbies (soy, grains, corn, etc).

By the way, nothing wrong with fat in our diets, unless is tran-fats or excess omega 6 PUFAs (typically seed oils). Please read Gary Taubes also.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Lowers risk of heart disease or stroke instead. Sounds good to me!

<comment><USER9> But that means people eating more fruit and vegetables will actually increase the cancer rate in the society, as fewer people die before they develop cancer (which is an almost inevitable event in an ageing body). Of course, this is related to the effect that you can double the number of people that suffer from a aggressive form of cancer by finding a treatment that makes them live twice as long after diagnosis (if you count all current cases and not only all new cases). Statistics and epidemiology are, ahm, fun is not quite the right word.

<comment><AUTHOR> Looking for the "hard endpoint" of reduced all-cause mortality is always an important issue when studying a lifestyle intervention or medical intervention.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> However, eating fruits and vegetables is still necessary for proper bodily function and general health. There is no better reason to eat fruits and vegetables than this. Cancer fighting is a sideshow, although an important one.

There is also the potential benefit that if you eat more fruits and vegetables then you're less hungry for junk food.

<comment><USER7> > However, eating fruits and vegetables is still necessary for proper bodily > function and general health.

Tell that to (ancient) Inuit.

<comment><USER10> Hmmm ... interesting point.

Maybe it's: if you're not eating a total (ancient) Inuit diet, then fruits and vegetables combined with the relatively small amounts of protein and fats most other peoples eat is necessary ...

Hmmm

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Provocative Headlines Sell Newspapers

</comment><comment><USER12> I am not agreeing with the article: eating more vegetables should mean that you eat less meat which I would argue is more likely to be carcinogenic. Way off topic, but: before a very strenuous hike early this morning (last 5 pictures: <http://picasaweb.google.com/mark.watson/SedonaHiking2010#>) I 'carbed out' with miso soup loaded up with lots of 4 different kinds of veggies. I ate nothing else, and my energy level was great.</comment>


Google Home breaks up domestic dispute by calling the police - <AUTHOR> https://gizmodo.com/google-home-breaks-up-domestic-dispute-by-calling-the-p-1796755905 <comment><USER2> This is very troubling, despite this good outcome: here is an extra level of active surveillance and 4th Amendment erosion.</comment>


A Story about Symbolics Lisp Machines - <AUTHOR> http://kremlin.enterprises/post/129364443055/your-code-is-so-bad-we-had-to-make-etclocal <comment><USER2> "lisp machines were made by (pretty much) a single company (symbolics)"

Actually, there was a rivalry with another company that's really worth mentioning, LMI (see [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lisp_machine#Commercialization...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lisp_machine#Commercialization_of_the_MIT_Lisp_Machine_technology))

"the amount of engineering effort that went into these machines far outweighs what you might get in a modern computer" \- "the computer in front of you was probably purchased for a sum between $100 and $1000, and it represents $100 to $1000 worth of engineering. the kind of computer representing hundreds of thousands to millions of dollars of engineering are, well, pretty slick"

That's a pretty ridiculous comparison. The design of the intel chip in your cheap computer, and the fab process to manufacture it, really are worth billions. It's just automation and scale that brings the price down to a couple hundred.

<comment><USER3> Yeah... author should read Hackers before writing another word about history of computing, there is hardly a correct sentence in that blog post - [http://www.amazon.com/Hackers-Computer-Revolution- Anniversar...](http://www.amazon.com/Hackers-Computer-Revolution-Anniversary- Edition/dp/1449388396)

<comment><USER4> I'm reading this book for a class right now and, personally, haven't enjoyed it so far. It treats these people as though the MIT hacker crowd as though these people are/were gods and I think does a lot to dehumanize them. It just reads like a fluff piece that skips over technical details in favor of what feels like blind infatuation.

<comment><USER5> The writing is so bad that it distracts from the story. It once mentions that somebody had access to "the best computer in the world known to man." How many computers exist that aren't known to man? I don't blame the writer in that particular case, but the editor really should have known better.

In another case, Levy tells a story about a chess program with a bug in it. If I remember correctly, the program was in check, and moved a knight that didn't get the program out of check. In other words, it took an illegal move. Levy says the programmers were in awe of this program; wondering if it was inventing new rules to increase its enjoyment of chess. I have a hard time believing the programmers truly thought they had created a self-aware program that would modify the rules of a game to increase its own enjoyment. I'm sure they knew a bug when they saw it. Levy, on the other hand, apparently did not, or thought that his audience would overlook such a silly statement. I _do_ blame the writer for that one, and wonder why the editor didn't flag it as well.

There are good books on computer history. And there are good books about computers from the early days (written in the early days). "Hackers" is not one of those books.

<comment><USER6> P.J. Plauger had an article once about a co-worker who coded a chess program, which had two serious flaws: he got the search algorithm wrong, so that it was very easy to beat; and he didn't program it to lose, so that it would start to add pieces back in when it was about to. Plauger wrote, If you think kids enjoyed beating it, you should have seen their glee when got it to cheat.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Great acquisition! I'm jealous.

Symbolics stuff isn't as rare as the post claims; you can still buy the Symbolics OpenGenera LISP environment for running on top of DEC's UNIX on an Alpha. [0]

In addition there's a port to x86-64 Linux floating around that lets you run it on top of a 2007-era Ubuntu in a VM [1]. There was also the MacIvory series of expansion boards that were a LSI-based Symbolics machine that you could fit in a Mac and run OpenGenera in a window.

Dave Schmidt at Symbolics was still selling hardware (a complete system could be had for under a couple grand) up until a couple of years ago; last time I contacted him he said hardware sales were now stopped so that what's remaining can be used for service/support contracts.

I bought a Symbolics keyboard from him before that happened and wired up an adapter using a Teensy to give it a USB interface.

I know of a company in College Station, TX that used a number of Symbolics systems when they were new, and the owner refuses to get rid of them because they cost so much new. A friend that worked there until recently ranted one day that they were using one of the chassis as a stand for the coffee machine, and I wanted to cry.

(disclaimer: I own/run [http://www.lispmachine.net](http://www.lispmachine.net))

[0] [http://www.symbolics-dks.com/](http://www.symbolics-dks.com/)

[1] [http://www.cliki.net/VLM_on_Linux](http://www.cliki.net/VLM_on_Linux) [2]

[2] [http://weblog.mrbill.net/archives/2008/05/18/finally-got- ope...](http://weblog.mrbill.net/archives/2008/05/18/finally-got-open-genera- running/)

<comment><USER8> Check out #lispm on freenode for a current effort to bring a newer version of VLM up on native Linux/FreeBSD.

<comment><USER9> Is it better than #lisp? Spending just half an hour in #lisp, and you see more assholes than a Turkish Customs Agent.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Symbolics LISP machines were not really all that great to use. I used the refrigerator-sized one briefly, but it was more trouble than it was worth. We at Ford Aerospace switched over to Franz LISP on Sun 2 machines for real work.

Symbolics, the company, made unreliable hardware. Too much wire wrap. 1983 was late to be introducing a wire-wrapped CPU. The Sun 2 and the Symbolics 3600 both came out in 1983, but the Sun 2 was a 680x0 machine with a printed circuit backplane and far less hand wiring, fixable by swapping boards. Symbolics machines had to be fixed by on-site Symbolics repair people, and the service was both poor and arrogant. This was at the height of the false AI boom ("expert systems") of the 1980s, and some people (I could name names on the Stanford faculty) were saying that strong AI was right around the corner. For a while, Symbolics machines were corporate status symbols. When that bubble popped, so did Symbolics.

Symbolics' original networking concept was that all machines would share some huge memory address space, with shared memory over Ethernet. That never really happened. They also really did have multi-hour garbage collections at first, until they got the garbage collector and the virtual memory to understand each other.

Most of those fancy buttons on the keyboard didn't do much of anything. SHIFT, CTL, TOP, META, SUPER, and HYPER were all shift keys, so there were 64 possible shifts for each key, any of which could be bound in EMACS. This was cool, but not useful.

Which is the verdict on the Symbolics machines - cool, but not useful.

<comment><USER11> > Franz LISP on Sun 2 machines for real work.

The SUN 2 was a tiny machine in comparison. 1 MB RAM, 4 MB max. 16MB virtual memory.

> Sun 2 was a 680x0 machine

The Symbolics 3600 was also a 680x0 machine. ;-) It used one as its frontend processor.

> Symbolics' original networking concept was that all machines would share > some huge memory address space, with shared memory over Ethernet.

That was never a part of the Symbolics operating system. Not sure where you got that from.

> until they got the garbage collector and the virtual memory to understand > each other.

Which SUN never got.

> Most of those fancy buttons on the keyboard didn't do much of anything.

Actually they did.

> SHIFT, CTL, TOP, META, SUPER, and HYPER were all shift keys, so there were > 64 possible shifts for each key

There was a logical system behind it and different shift keys were used for different purposes. Not all combinations were used. It's not too different from any modern computer. My mac has command, option, control, fn, shift keys. Five. The Symbolics keyboard had shift, control, meta, super, hyper. Five.

<comment><USER10> Early Symbolics 3600 machines had 256K words (36 bits) of memory. Later machines doubled this. Early Sun 2 machines had 1MB of RAM. Later machines had a minimum of 2MB, needed due to OS growth. So they were roughly comparable in memory capacity.

<comment><USER11> I used a Symbolics 3600 much more memory, 4MWords IIRC. My own 3640 has 4MWord. A word was 36 bits wide.

> So they were roughly comparable in memory capacity.

Sure not: you could use a 3600 with 20 MB RAM and 150 MB virtual memory.

<comment><USER12> In the preceding generation of CADR Lisp Machines built by the MIT-AI lab, I seem to remember that half a megaword of 32 bit words was not uncommon, and at least one had 2 megawords.

<comment><USER13> The CADR could address 64MB of virtual memory, a fair bit more than a Sun-2.

<comment><USER12> 24 bits word addressed. The 25 bits for the LMI LAMBDA (a microcode hack that no doubt incorporated the 2 space copying GC), and 28 bits for the Symbolics 3600 family. In all cases I'm pretty sure too little ^_^.

There were a lot of Moore's law skeptics back then....

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I'm only just now starting to get on the Lisp bandwagon a bit... I've been working my way through _Practical Common Lisp_ bit by bit (no pun intended) and I have to say, I'm really liking this so far. I could see really getting into Lisp in a big way.

But... could one of you guys who knew the Symbolics machines help me out with something? What exactly made them so special, hardware wise? I mean, Lisp seems to run just fine on Linux on x64 hardware now. What advantage does one get from running Lisp on hardware which is custom tailored to it? Or would that even make sense nowadays IF something like the Symbolics Lisp Machines were still made?

<comment><USER15> A Lisp Machine today would be an anachronism. Hardware type tagging could be useful. But list efficiency and manipulation would likely be futile. Today, cache is king. Which means, linked lists are out. CAR/CDR? Let's not.

The glory days were not that glorious. There are stories out there of runaway garbage collections, that grinded on for _days_. Today you get garbage collections in your web browser that would embarrass any Lisp Machine ever built.

<comment><USER16> > _Which means, linked lists are out. CAR /CDR? Let's not._

Data structures are dictated by the requirements of what you're doing, not the machine. Linked lists are out? The C middleware that runs everything is full of "struct foo { struct foo * next; int other_field ... }".

Linked lists benefit from caching, like other kinds of data.

> _Today you get garbage collections in your web browser that would embarrass > any Lisp Machine ever built._

The garbage collection in your web browser is complete, utter garbage compared to what Lisp people were doing 30-40 years ago. Sorry!

(I will add to this comment later; I have to go to Task Manager and kill the web browser.)

<comment><USER17> > The garbage collection in your web browser is complete, utter garbage > compared to what Lisp people were doing 30-40 years ago. Sorry!

Can you back that statement up? GC has advanced heavily over the years (and still is).The first paper on generational GC was published in 1984, and I would imagine that it has drastically improved since then. I don't think that generational GC even landed in SBCL until sometime around 2005.

Without anything to back that up, your post just sounds like Lisp fanboyism.

<comment><USER11> You could read the chapters on memory management and GC in the Symbolics Genera 8 manuals: areas, generations, resources, ephemeral GC, generational copying GC, full GC, ...

[http://bitsavers.informatik.uni- stuttgart.de/pdf/symbolics/s...](http://bitsavers.informatik.uni- stuttgart.de/pdf/symbolics/software/genera_8/Internals.pdf)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I'm sure there are folks (archive.org?) who would love to help you make digital copies of all those tapes for historical purposes...

</comment><comment><USER19> I'm surprised a machine explicitly designed to write and run Lisp requires a two-key combo to make a parenthesis.

<comment><USER12> Look closely at the two keys to the right of "p", or this more clear picture of a full fledged Space Cadet Keyboard: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space- cadet_keyboard#/media/Fi...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space- cadet_keyboard#/media/File:Space-cadet.jpg)

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Did the Symbolics List Machines have Z80 processors in them? Or was it another machine in the MIT labs you're talking about?

"...by someone who had hand-wrapped Z80 boards in the MIT AI labs at one point".

</comment><comment><USER21> We use one of these in the lobby as a coffee table at my work.

<comment><USER22> You don't happen to work in College Station, TX?

(Search the rest of the current discussion for "coffee machine" ;) )

<comment><USER21> Texas yes, College Station no.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> The text is horrible on this page. :(</comment>


SpaceX – Starship Users Guide [pdf] - <AUTHOR> https://www.spacex.com/sites/spacex/files/starship_users_guide_v1.pdf <comment><USER2> This is really cool! It's more of a specification sheet than a user guide or operation manual though.

This is what a pilot's operating handbook looks like for an aircraft like a Cessna: [https://www.purdueaviationllc.com/storage/app/media/Forms/PO...](https://www.purdueaviationllc.com/storage/app/media/Forms/POH%20125-02-114%20Cessna%20RS_FAA_1-2.compressed.pdf)

<comment><AUTHOR> Interesting! Since a customer for a satellite launch is more like a passenger than a pilot, I see where the differences come from.

The Falcon users guide is far more detailed than the one for Starship currently is by the way. I shared the latter because it is brand-new and seems to indicate that SpaceX is already certain enough of their design for Starship to provide specifications for launch services.

Here is the Falcon users guide for comparison:

[https://www.spacex.com/sites/spacex/files/falcon_users_guide...](https://www.spacex.com/sites/spacex/files/falcon_users_guide_10_2019.pdf)

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Thanks for posting. In all this C19 mess SpaceX is a welcome relief to remember that humans are back reaching for the stars once again.

</comment><comment><USER4> Would love to see the Reference Manual! Need to know how to top up the washer fluid? change out brake lights? no problem!</comment>


Ask HN: Why does my webcam light turn on on a Messenger voice call? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> Do you have a webcam disjoint from your microphone? When you use your microphone in any application other than messenger, does the light turn on, regardless of whether it would theoretically require use of your camera?

</comment><comment><USER3> Next to what pizza said its also possible that they require the right to use your webcam just in case.

</comment><comment><USER4> Are you in UK?</comment>


The proportion of medical procedures unsupported by evidence may be nearly half - <AUTHOR> https://www.vox.com/the-big-idea/2017/12/28/16823266/medical-treatments-evidence-based-expensive-cost-stents <comment><USER2> >As surgeon and health care researcher Atul Gawande observes, "Millions of people are receiving drugs that aren't helping them, operations that aren't going to make them better, and scans and tests that do nothing beneficial for them, and often cause harm."

I am not trying to defend doctors but the article left out a little detail that messes up the entire system.

Malpractice Insurance

In the United States, if God forbid , they happen to not do a procedure or precautionary test, and the patient ends up affected or imparied in some way or form, R.I.P that doctor's insurance.

Only in America can you sue to get that _witchcraft money_ ( apparently copious amounts of money brings someone back to life) when someone dies after surgery complications in that life saving procedure.

Doctors/surgeons are not God, their is always a risk in surgery.

<comment><USER3> People should be able to sue. It's the only natural incentive for good practice. Otherwise there's no consequences for poor practice.

On the other hand, people should also be able to lose those lawsuits, and should also be able to sue for unnecessary preventative procedure, and the basis of winning or losing should be based on empirical evidence pertaining to risk.

Insurance isn't the problem, nor are malpractice lawsuits. It's the inherent risk in the field. Malpractice issues are greatly overstated in health care debates.

<comment><USER4> Well, from what I see in the US, the risk to be sued actually encourages a lot more damaging procedures than it makes people rigorous. That's not to say people shouldn't be allowed to sue. Actually, there is really no good solution to this problem.

The best situation I have seen is where people do sue, but hospitals provide legal protection for their employees (public sector in western Europe). Employees there still fear for their jobs, but not enough to put patients through nearly as much useless and risky crap as in the US. Patients there are also far less prone to sue, since the success rate of legal action is low. All in all, everyone seems to benefit from a little less tension in the system.

Of course, you will always find people who feel (perhaps rightly so) that they were wronged, and that we should cut the hands of the bad docs. Finding balance in those matters is a difficult social exercise.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> After journal bias, conflicts of interests, and corruption, I now hold little remaining faith in the justice of "science". It seems the "scientific method" I learned decades ago is inconvenient to publishers and consumers alike. (Also, I've had personal doctors push drugs on me when it was clear they were getting a kickback).

It's frustrating when people read headlines and claim "science" in a conversation, when the root of the research is fraudulent and the observer has never attempted to verify. When I challenge their assumptions, they are incredulous that I would question "science".

<comment><USER6> Let's not throw the baby out with the bathwater. There's still plenty of excellent science being done every day; it's just not being written about in outlets like vox.com.

The solution to the problems you cite is more and better science.

<comment><USER7> Even more, it's only now that we're seeing some people apply a rigorous scientific and statical lens to medicine as a whole,

A good portion of that fifty or whatever percent of procedures that don't any backing evidence exist through being grandfathered-in from the medical tradition. Beyond the germ theory of disease, medicine circa 1900 was appalling in multiple ways.

Medicine continually advances, at least in parts. Hopefully that advance can continue against the grain of multitude of problems we see.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> If science advances one funeral at a time, what can be done about institutions that insist on bing wrong? The American Heart Association has a lot to answer for.

Sometimes doctors do good work, sometimes their training leaves much to be desired.

<comment><USER9> > their training leaves much to be desired

As someone who teaches pre-med students, I can attest to this! When I see their performance in my class and realise they are trying to become doctors and surgeons, I shudder to imagine being treated by them. I think easily 80% don't show enough competence at that point to have my trust in their abilities. I teach them a required experimental physics class and believe doctors should have a scientific mentality when it comes to treatment but very few come out appreciating the scientific method and how to approach empirical problems. I fear many will just end up treating patients with a cookie-cutter approach and cashing in.

<comment><USER10> Isn't it the case that every common diagnosis has an established "reasonable and prudent" treatment?

It seems to me that the main skill of a doctor is making the correct diagnosis. Once that's done, treatment (at least in the vast majority of cases) is going to be perfunctory.

And even the diagnosis itself is going to be, in most cases, the "most likely" condition that explains the patient's symptoms.

<comment><USER8> Sometimes a diagnosis is useful, sometimes it's a useless (harmful) simplification. People are always more complex than their diagnosis.

Specialists have a stranglehold on medicine: [https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/03/opinion/sunday/the- specia...](https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/03/opinion/sunday/the-specialists- stranglehold-on-medicine.html)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> The first day of med school they tell you "50% of what we tell you isn't true, we don't know which 50%."

<comment><USER12> Except for the diet stuff, that is totally based on rock solid evidence, there's no possible way that they've been dead wrong for 50 years and are covering it up. Just because a high fat low carb diet improves every possible health marker doesn't mean it's healthy!

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> a joke either from Gray's Anatomy or something similar: The dean of med school at graduation ceremony - "Half of what we've taught you here will be proven wrong in 5 years. The problem is what we don't know which half. "

</comment><comment><USER14> >> Before being randomized to receive the operation or the sham...

I know that people opt-in to such studies, but what exactly does a "sham" stenting procedure involve? I find it hard to believe that any hospital would insert something along a blood vessel and into a heart, or even just anesthetize a patient, for the purposes of staging a false surgery. These are commonplace but not risk-free procedures. What exactly does it take to convince someone that a piece of metal has been inserted into their heart? Are they presented with false x-rays and other records? Are they ever told the truth? How do they react when they learn that it has all been a sham?

<comment><USER15> Here is one example:

>"In all patients, a research invasive physiological assessment of fractional flow reserve (FFR) and instantaneous wave-free ratio (iFR) was done. After the administration of intracoronary nitrate, a pressure wire was placed in the distal vessel at least three vessel diameters beyond the most distal stentable stenosis.

[...]

In the placebo group, patients were kept sedated for at least 15 min on the catheter laboratory table and the coronary catheters were withdrawn with no intervention having been done.

[...]

After the follow-up assessments, study participation was complete, and patients and physicians were then unblinded to the treatment group allocation. Patients who had the placebo procedure had the opportunity to choose to undergo PCI after consultation with their physician."

[http://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-67...](http://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736\(17\)32714-9/abstract)

So it looks like they did an exploratory surgery on the sham patients, then just left them laying sedated on the table.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Ok, so how installing a shunt on a blocked artery can possibly _not work_? (Not alleviating chest pain is "understandable", not reducing the risk of heart attacks makes no sense to me)

This article makes some "hand waves" about how understanding of the disease was simplified [https://www.vox.com/science-and- health/2017/11/3/16599072/st...](https://www.vox.com/science-and- health/2017/11/3/16599072/stent-chest-pain-treatment-angina-not-effective) but the fact is blocked arteries don't let blood flow.

<comment><USER17> So ya that's what all cardiologists thought. Many still think this. They may even be right. But we don't have EVIDENCE that this does anything to prevent death, heart attacks or even reduce chest pain.

To be clear though, they aren't talking about ACUTELY closed arteries as in a heart attack or myocardial infarction, when there is a plaque rupture and a blood thrombus that develops to cut off blood supply suddenly. But rather, when blood flow, which has been slowly narrowing over years, starts causing chest pain on physical exertion, when the heart muscle distal to the narrowing is asking for more oxygen than the artery can supply.

We put stents in a lot of these people, because we like to try to help them, but there isn't much evidence that it helps. It may help, but we haven't been able to prove it yet. Or it may help select people, but we don't know which people to select. But many will still keep getting these stents. Medicine is tricky.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> I would hazard a guess that the overall proportion of business procedures unsupported by evidence is nearly half as well.

<comment><USER19> Are any? What kind of double blind business experiments have taken place?

<comment><USER18> You do realize that there are forms of "supported by evidence" which fall far short of double blind tests.</comment></comment></comment>


WeWork expected to announce major layoffs - <AUTHOR> https://techcrunch.com/2019/10/03/wework-layoffs/ <comment><USER2> Original reporting by Bloomberg, discussion here: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21152421](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21152421)

<comment><USER3> Is Business Insider Bloomberg?

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Read this earlier today: [http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2019/10/marketing- expert-scot...](http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2019/10/marketing-expert-scott- galloway-on-wework-and-adam-neumann.html)

Lots of choice quotes. :)

</comment><comment><USER5> First they should stop paying 100% commissions to real estate agents. Seriously, if you need office space cut a deal with an agent where you get back 80% of the rent paid for the term.

<comment><USER6> Can you post a source for your claims? 100% commission seems extremely fantastical.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> It's entirely possible this has been the state of the company for some time and senior management + SoftBank wanted to cash out via IPO. Everything's come crashing down.

<comment><USER8> It would have worked if it weren't for those meddling kids and the crazy valuation.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Is there a record for the fastest company crash and burn?

<comment><USER10> Let's be real: this was going to happen regardless of whether or not the founders and investors cashed out.

The only remarkable thing about the WeWork story is that the markets called BS before the IPO.</comment></comment>


Worse Is Better - <AUTHOR> http://www.dreamsongs.com/WorseIsBetter.html

<comment><USER2> 20 years later, it is definitely true that worse is better. But it will take another 20 years until this reach management.</comment>


Ask HN: Any Ubuntu phone OS users here? How do you like it? - <AUTHOR> Alternately - are there any still around? <comment><USER2> Thumbs up. You must accept that it is not going to offer the variety of features of other platforms. On its own merits it is solid and has much potential in terms of convergence and commitment to open development.

Support open computing or support profit-led walled gardens. Easy decision for some, tougher for others.

</comment><comment><USER3> Me, Android (Cyanogenmod) user :)</comment>