Intel Refreshes 2nd Gen Xeon Scalable, Slashes Prices - <AUTHOR> https://fuse.wikichip.org/news/3352/intel-refreshes-2nd-gen-xeon-scalable-slashes-prices/ <comment><USER2> I'm sort of amazed they haven't dropped prices more; I guess they can still charge a premium to anyone who wants their AVX512 (? I think that's it) performance to be as high as it can be. Otherwise, most of these processors have already had an epyc shit taken on them.

I was just again pricing processors and if that 7302 isn't the real killer in the Epyc lineup I dunno what is. It craps on pretty much anything and everything Intel has, and is only about $1100 right now (pricing is inflated, but meh).

It's pretty crazy how cheap hardware is compared to the cloud these days; sure, it's not in a data center or if it is that's a headache of its own... but it is really fucking cheap. I personally think a lot of mid-sized orgs could benefit from moving a lot of their non-production environments to an on- prem server. The VPN is probably already locking people out, causing connection headaches anyway, so it's not like you're gonna have less connectivity than you did ;-)

<comment><USER3> Public cloud is a giant scam to make sure 80% of VC money trickles back up to the big three. Most of these startups in Soma could run their product on a single threaded C++ server. But that's not cool and trendy. You're supposed to pretend that you could suddenly become Google overnight, so you need The Cloud(TM), microservices, and all kinds of redundant garbage.

<comment><USER4> Great. Show me how fast you go to market with a web application and mobile backend written as a single threaded C++ application. Also please tell me how long it took to secure and set up and maintain the server.

Startups do, and always should, focus on getting to market faster so they can get feedback from real customers.

I will take going to market faster over saving a few dollars on server costs everytime I'm given the choice.

Mature products' and companies' use cases are more nuanced.

<comment><USER5> > _Show me how fast you go to market with a web application and mobile backend > written as a single threaded C++ application. Also please tell me how long > it took to secure and set up and maintain the server._

Let's not go crazy, Apache on metal is a very simple setup and at least as secure as S3 out of the box. Platform spread and simplicity are just lost concepts, that's all.

<comment><USER6> I'm not sure it'd even be possible to run Apache on bare metal; it has too many dependencies on OS facilities.

I'm curious if people are running bare metal web servers. I'd think there's enough lookup, modules etc that it wouldn't be worth it (small embedded applications like IoT frobs excepted)

<comment><USER7> Bare metal just means not a VM. The machine still has an OS.

<comment><USER6> That doesn't even make sense. Wouldn't that be "non-virtualized"?

"Bare metal" has meant right on the bare hardware (silicon) since the 1960s. I don't think I've ever heard anyone use that expression in any other way.

<comment> apk-d Not really a cloud developer, so I looked up a couple of links and I haven't been able to find any uses of the term _other_ than referring to a single- tenant machine that you have complete control over, as opposed to virtualized solutions.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bare- metal_server](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bare-metal_server) [https://www.ibm.com/cloud/bare-metal-servers/hosting- solutio...](https://www.ibm.com/cloud/bare-metal-servers/hosting-solutions) [https://www.ionos.com/digitalguide/server/know-how/bare- meta...](https://www.ionos.com/digitalguide/server/know-how/bare-metal- servers-definition-and-structure/) [https://www.rackspace.com/library/what-is- a-bare-metal-serve...](https://www.rackspace.com/library/what-is-a-bare-metal- server)

<comment><USER8> For web, yes. For embedded systems, "bare metal" means running without an OS.

<comment><USER9> That's both correct and irrelevant because this entire thread is about running Apache, which is clearly about the web, considering Apache is a web server.

<comment><USER7> You know whats funny? If be excited to see Apache run embedded on hardware.

This comment is claiming way too many victims. Shame, it'd be a rather exciting experiment!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Too little, too late.

After years of ruthlessly milking us I just hope they loose a big market share and become equals with AMD. The consumers can only benefit from that.

<comment> 1e-9 I whole-heartedly welcome AMD's new offerings and have completely switched to buying servers with AMD CPUs, but I have to disagree with the characterization of "ruthless milking" by intel. There was no instituted monopoly here. Others were free to compete, but they failed. Intel's high prices motivated AMD to create something better and now they have. If anything, the high pricing was a screwup on intel's part and good for the consumer. Intel could have better protected their lead by charging less (but not as less as now) to discourage competition. I'm glad they didn't, even though it cost me for the last few years. Now that there is a valid competitor again, maybe we will see better conformance to Moore's Law.

Edit: To clarify, I will not argue that intel has a clean record of competitiveness. My point is that they didn't "ruthlessly milk" the consumer with high prices. Instead, they stuck a knife in their own back by charging excessively high prices without sufficiently innovating. This created an opportunity for AMD and motivated them to create something better.

<comment><USER11> > Others were free to compete, but they failed.

This is...not accurate. Extensive cross-licensing agreements between AMD and Intel formed over the years are the only thing that permit AMD to compete. New competitors are effectively locked out of the x86-64 market entirely at this point. There is a decided lack of freedom to compete in this market at the moment.

Intel has also been found to have illegally engaged in anticompetitive measures on a number of occasions in order to lock AMD out of competing in many market segments.

<comment><USER12> So maybe it's time to create a successor to x86-64. Nobody is preventing that from happening.

<comment> yjftsjthsd-h Depending on what qualifies, ARM is there today, or will be soon if Apple has anything to say about it.

<comment><USER13> Apple's not really in the server market, though.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Isn't competition great?

<comment><USER15> You certainly can't tell by the amount of people getting hyper sensitive in this thread.

<comment><USER14> Yeah super weird why people have such visceral reactions to this. It's beyond my post grade. Likely something to do with tribalism and do sports teams with intel being one team and amd being another

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Milan should be released within a month, ahead of the NDA roadmap like Rome was. I hope pricing is cut more on Rome when it's released, because I'm currently building a Supermicro home virtualization server/workstation.

</comment><comment><USER17> I wonder how many "microservice in the cloud" applications could run on a 8-16 node raspberry cluster and 1 dedicated database server.

</comment><comment><USER18> Competition works.

</comment><comment><USER19> I can't wait until this happens with last-mile internet access too, and, in a funny twist of circumstance, quality electric cars.

What other long-moated industries are going to crack open in the next half- dozen years?

<comment><USER20> Honest question: do you think Teslas are, on the whole, overpriced? I am neither an owner nor an expert in electric cars, but I have been routinely impressed with the rate at which the price has come down. I don't doubt that the $35k Model 3 configuration is probably non-sensical (at $35k minimum spec seems silly) but also it seems pretty competitive for an electric car that can replace a gas car. My personal hunch has always been that the price for relatively cheap Tesla configurations that make sense probably are limited by volume and initial cost of R&D and scaling up manufacturing. (Of course almost any company does some market segmentation for better or worse, so I'm sure the prices of options are non-sense.)

Not to say the prices won't go down. But I actually didn't think the reason they were high was due to mature, moated companies. My personal belief is that Tesla would be foolish to rest on their success in such a way when other companies with a lot more resources are surely going to be competing more competently soon.

<comment><USER19> No, I don't think they are super overpriced, I just think the quality isn't there yet. Hopefully we can see higher quality all-electric options at similar or lower price points.

Tesla's service reputation is the main reason I still currently drive an ICE. (Before that, it was their laggy touchscreen - my gas guzzler has an iPad on a bracket on the dash, which does not lag.). Also I'm never going to drive something that spies on me; I had the GSM radio transceiver removed from my current vehicle.

AIUI if you do that to a Tesla you never receive future updates, even to features you paid for in advance.

More competition in the EV market is going to be awesome. Right now it's just a bloodbath where Tesla can basically do whatever they want, because until very recently every other EV was simply hot garbage.

<comment><USER21> You've never owned an EV but you're perpetuating the notion that they're of __unspecified __poor quality compared to ICE vehicles?

I have a Nissan Leaf and a Tesla Model 3 and both are of comparable quality to ICE vehicles. They are in two different categories in terms of materials finish but neither is bad quality. The fit and finish of both is average to above average in the industry.

<comment><USER19> I've driven several different instances of every model of Tesla and I've toured their California factory. I am well acquainted with what Teslas are and are not.

<comment><USER21> You made a blanket statement about EVs as a whole and didn't qualify it in any way.

So what's poor quality about Tesla's? An what's your basis for comparison?</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


New York Times learns the possible risks of programmatic advertising - <AUTHOR> http://pando.com/2014/03/24/oof-new-york-times-learns-the-possible-risks-of-programatic-advertising/

<comment><USER2> This is one of those cases where humans are so good at seeing patterns they'll intuit the presence of an intelligence (artificial or otherwise) where none exists. The only algorithm here is "Apple paid for a placement on this date", rather than anything content-aware.

(With regards to how actual content-aware ads treats this sort of case: My recollection is that waaaaay back in the day AdSense shipped with a "death and tragedy filter" such that if it detected the page was about them it would turn ads off. The Google which made that decision is no longer - these days it's an unchecked-by-default setting controlled by advertisers. Somewhat surprisingly for Google, the filter was _really_ unsophisticated - on the order of a simple keyword blacklist. Some of my SEO buddies had CMSes which would flag words thought to be problematic for writers, so that an innocuous phrase like "Getting your taxes done doesn't have to be a Greek tragedy" didn't end up killing ad revenue from the page.)

</comment><comment><USER3> As a comment on the site says - this is almost certainly _not_ programmatic advertising but a premium placement paid for by Apple at least a few days ago.

Also, I don't see how this is intellectually stimulating, of interest to a Hacker, or anything other than a mildly amusing picture. Amusing pictures have a place, but this doesn't seem to belong here.

</comment><comment><USER4> This is not newsworthy. If you hit the refresh button enough times on upsetting news stories I am sure you will find a somewhat offensive ad every now and then.

</comment><comment><USER5> I've worked with Apple on homepage advertising and believe the likelihood of that placement being programmatic is very low.

<comment><USER6> Agreed, I worked for MSN.com for a while, and any ad placement like that is not your random, average 'served from doubleclick' style ad. It's premium, and planned, human controlled.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> > reproduced without further comment

Maybe you should add a comment? What's the problem?

Only thing I can think of is the jet in the ocean and a picture of the ocean, but that's a stretch.

<comment><USER8> Well, "iPad Air" text in an underwater scene has more unfortunate resonance with a story about an airliner crashing into the ocean than just the "ocean" connection.

In a print newspaper, this is the kind of association of advertiser and story that would have been actively avoided by a human (and which, from what I've heard -- though I have no direct experience -- advertisers would be irate about and even cancel accounts over if it _wasn 't_ avoided.)</comment></comment>


Ask HN: How do I get notified of comments? - <AUTHOR> How can I get notified when someone replies to my post or comment? I can't believe such basic functionality is not built in. <comment><USER2> There was a service at [http://hnnotify.com/](http://hnnotify.com/) but sadly it seems to be down of late.

See here: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10521491](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10521491)

</comment><comment><USER3> You can submit a pull request to.. oh wait you can't... never mind.

You can complain about it until they add it just to shut everyone up.

</comment><comment><USER4> You have to press "threads" in the top menu bar. It shows your comments and their replies.

<comment><AUTHOR> Doesn't show comments to my post. For example I didn't See your comment until I went to my profile then clicked submissions. #hugefail</comment></comment>


Smoking around the world - <AUTHOR> https://ourworldindata.org/smoking <comment><USER2> Obligatory bikeshedding:

It's really frustrating that, in the first two visualizations, whose only difference is that one shows data for women, and the other shows data for men, they chose to use two different color scales. It makes it difficult to compare between the two.

For example, if you weren't paying close attention to the scales, you might easily get the impression that a greater proportion of women than men smoke in France and Chile.

<comment><USER3> There are all kinds of quirks and questionable decisions in this presentation. It's good data but I found myself doing a double take every other chart.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> It seems that it's impossible for people to show charts without making mistakes in data presentation. This website is literally for showing data, and I'm not an expert and I still see errors all over.

For instance: Secondhand smoke deaths by age [0]

They show absolute numbers. You can see that for 70+ year olds, the quantity is increasing at 2016 compared to 2010 and 2005. But, how do we know that it is because the rate is increasing, or just because there are more 70+ year olds? If they had shown each age range divided by the total amount of people in the age range, it would have prevented this.

Every time I see absolute numbers in any kind of data visualization, immediately an alarm goes off I start to analyze whether that makes sense or they needed percentages, and many many times they messed up.

[0] [https://ourworldindata.org/smoking#secondhand-smoke- deaths-b...](https://ourworldindata.org/smoking#secondhand-smoke-deaths-by- age)

</comment><comment><USER5> Isn't it incredible how much the smoking culture of America has shifted over time? If only the forces who put the anti-smoking effort into motion could come together and work towards making renewable energy, alternative commuting methods, or universal healthcare acceptable ideas in this country.

I used to smoke a pack a day and I'm glad I don't anymore.

<comment><USER6> Over the weekend a friend of mine pointed out that while nicotine use has dropped, cannabis use has heavily increased. As if, the rise on tobacco prices has driven folks to alternative drugs.

I wonder (and if someone on HN knows how, please share) if you were to track use and abuse of pills, stimulants (including things like 5 hour energy), cannabis and other forms of what's becoming not-so-recreational drug usage — what would we find?

<comment><USER7> Well at minimum we mostly know that alcohol and tobacco are on the higher level on the "harm" spectrum than other illegal drugs.

My takeaway is American drug usage has been shaped by a lot of socio economic factors that do not have human or societal health ramifications. There needs to be a total, science-backed overhaul of drug policy for this reason.

<comment><USER6> > Well at minimum we mostly know that alcohol and tobacco are on the higher > level on the "harm" spectrum than other illegal drugs.

I don't know who "we" is, but don't count me in that group.

[https://unitedrecoveryproject.com/10-most-dangerous- drugs/](https://unitedrecoveryproject.com/10-most-dangerous-drugs/)

And that's by frequency.

[https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/from- krokodi...](https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/from-krokodil-to- purple-drank-the-worlds-10-most-deadly-street-drugs-a6719541.html)

That's by potency.

Sure. Don't get me wrong. Nicotine is bad for you, so is Alcohol, but it doesn't make you do this: [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miami_cannibal_attack](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miami_cannibal_attack)

<comment><USER8> I'm not going to trust an article that says that using ketamine gives you HIV.

<comment><USER6> You probably shouldn't trust any information thrown at you without critical thinking (including the first three articles that came across my Google search).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I quit the damn thing some 13 years ago and I've never looked back since. Best decision I've ever made. Earned back my life, I'm in my mid forties and my physical endurance is way better than what it was in my twenties. The thing that most smokers don't realize is that smoking is like taking heroin. You're addicted to a substance that's slowly and silently killing you. Just a couple of years ago I lost a very good friend of mine from lung cancer. He was smoking three packs a day and the cancer ended him in less than six months.

To anyone reading this as a smoker. Quit the fucking thing. You won't miss it and there are ways to quit that aren't as harsh as cold turkey. Just seek medical advice and move on.

<comment><USER10> My dad was a smoker most of his life. He quit in his 50s. Years later I asked him if he missed it, and his answer was "every single day."

<comment><USER11> I _love_ tobacco. It smells wonderful (no, not cigarettes: tobacco itself, as anyone who's ever smelt pipe smoke will confirm). It tastes delicious (albeit not as good as it smells). It feels wonderful. It even cuts down on appetite, which is a plus in this day and age!

I quit smoking for love, but I miss it every time I think of it. Nonsmokers have no idea what they're missing. It's sheer bliss. The sooner we can figure out how to have noncarcinogenic smoke, the better.

<comment><USER12> I really enjoy the smell of pipe tobacco, and some pipe smoke is actually rather pleasing.

Personally I would still never smoke, if nothing else because I've had to clean out the tar and gunk from old televisions and stuff. That shit is nasty.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Is that right that the USA has fewer smokers than New Zealand and Australia?

New Zealand and Australia have made massive efforts to reduce their rates of smokers. They both have plain packaging, tobacco products aren't allowed to be visibly on sale (in New Zealand, they won't even tell you what they have, you have to guess and hope they have it in stock). They also have the most expensive tobacco in the world. A 25 pack of Marlboros will set you back AU$32 (US$23).

That doesn't seem right that the USA, which has in general put a lot less restrictions on tobacco and has much cheaper tobacco, has a lower incidence of smokers than Australia or New Zealand.

Anecdotally, most daily smokers I know aren't smoking 20 a day either.

<comment><USER13> _A 25 pack of Marlboros will set you back AU$32 (US$23)._

I don't smoke, but a pack in CA is, according to DDG, US$8. For comparison, 25 x US$8 = US$200.

<comment><USER14> The comparison is US$23 to US$8.

In Australia, it's US$23 for a pack of 25 cigarettes. Not a carton of 25 packs of cigarettes.

<comment><USER15> I actually really like that cigarettes are so expensive the above poster made that error.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> What's going on in Indonesia? Men are increasingly smoking like chimneys, while the rest of the world is more or less on the same downward trend.

It only being men also suggests it isn't a suddent economic change like lifting tobacco taxes. Some cultural change suddenly made it cool for _only_ men to smoke (again).

Is Mad Men running on every channel?

<comment><USER17> I work in Indonesia a lot and that data makes sense.

Every man I know smokes. That's not an exaggeration. It's ridiculously cheap, and with incredibly low income for most of the population, its the only vice that's allowed for most people.

A couple of guys on an island in the middle of nowhere once said it helps with the mosquito's (they also keep large fires lit for the same reason) but not sure if anyone else thinks that.

<comment><USER18> And none of the women?

Do they all smoke kretek cigarettes?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I remember one of the big chocks for me when I arrived in Germany from Brazil was to see how common is to see people smoking, not only in the street, but inside bars, clubs.

My state in Brazil banned cigarettes inside buildings when I was very young so going out and coming back smelling like a chimney was like going back in time.

<comment><USER20> Not sure how it is now, but when visiting Germany a few years ago it was also weird to see tobacco normally advertised on billboards, while it is illegal in most EU countries.

<comment><USER12> Germany has toned it down a lot, but they still have cigarette vending machine at most train stations and randomly scattered around towns, at least in southern Germany.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Very disappointed in EU here! Such a disgusting habit that kills and leads to large quality of life loss later in life.

Needs to be severely reduced or banned altogether.

Seeing 15 year olds smoke is a huge societal failure.

<comment><USER22> > Very disappointed in EU here! Such a disgusting habit that kills and leads > to large quality of life loss later in life I agree in part but the > libertarian in me thinks that people should be free to do what they want to > their bodies provided it is not at the expense of society as a whole. For > example banning smoking in offices, public buildings, spaces, etc is a good > thing. Banning people from smoking in their own garden is not.

> Seeing 15 year olds smoke is a huge societal failure. Yes and no. General > trends suggest they are smoking less and drinking less alcohol compared to > previous generations. It probably just stands out more relative to the > general population. Alas, youth is lost on the young :-)

<comment> shady-lady > the libertarian in me thinks that people should be free to do what they want > to their bodies provided it is not at the expense of society as a whole

society is burdened in the 50% chance scenario that they develop lung cancer, alongside other medical problems which smoking exacerbates as well as being a contributory factor to others.

<comment><USER23> People die of something. It costs no matter what that is. So there's some extra cost since they're dying sooner (maybe?) It's more complicated than 'Hospital costs!' since those are pretty unavoidable no matter how you die?

<comment> shady-lady We generally don't shoot people in the head when they've been diagnosed with lung cancer so society doesn't save any money there. So the extensive treatment required to treat lung cancer is greater than somebody not getting treatment because they don't have lung cancer.

To be more succinct, there's a large difference between a person requiring lengthy treatment for lung cancer(hospital + morgue) before ultimately dying compared to somebody dying due to old age(morgue).

<comment><USER23> Nobody dies of 'old age' any more. They die of something that was under treatment in general. That's all.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> What is up with the daily cigarette consumption in Suriname? 108 cigs a day can't be a normal average right?

<comment><USER25> I spotted that! Considering that only 6.1% of people smoke in Suriname, and of that 6.1%, 0% are men, and 0% are women... I'd say there's something up with that data.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> While I quit daily smoking years ago I will never give up cigars. Even my doctor has zero issues with that. According to the CDC there is essentially no risk even smoking up to five a day. I am definitely substantially lower than that though.

<comment><USER27> > According to the CDC there is essentially no risk even smoking up to five a > day

No risk or unknown risks? Last I looked into it there was no research on the health effects of smoking < 5 cigarettes a day either.

<comment><USER28> There are some risks in terms of your mouth/lips. Cigars are a lot less harmful because it's customary not to inhale them, you can obviously but the vast majority of cigar smokers don't. They also appear to be far less addictive than cigarettes, personally I would say they aren't addictive at all, during the winter in the UK I don't smoke any for 3-4 months, during the summer I only smoke a couple a week.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Why on Earth did they shade the percent of men smoking darker than the women? That means in countries where about the same proportion of women as men smoke, which is most countries, the female map is colored as having a higher percentage than men because they made the key identical minus 10%. This makes me irrationally angry.

<comment><USER30> I was trying to figure out why countries had more women smoking than men which I've never observed anywhere, with regards to smoking or really any dangerous habit.

<comment><USER31> Actually, as some one who grew up in Ukraine I did see somewhere that there, teenagers had more girls smoking that boys.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> The worst part is lung diseases often take decades to appear. People who quit smoking after doing it for a few decades may be hit with COPD late in life just when they can least afford it. Compounding other health problems they may already have.

COPD: "Long-term exposure to lung irritants that damage the lungs and the airways usually is the cause of COPD." \- nhlbi.nih.gov

I worry about the vaping trend I think there is going to be a massive amount of people diagnosed with COPD in 30 or 40 years.

<comment><USER33> Always hard to know with science in the news but I thought that there was some good science that showed that even quitting late in life significantly reduced the risk of smoking related illnesses compared to those who did not stop. I thought that was quite interesting that even after say 30 years you could change the odds fairly dramatically.

<comment><USER32> I've seen that too something like "after an hour your blood pressure returns to normal. After a few days you can breathe easier..."

It's always good to quit but as with genetics people are different. A few rare cases where a person smokes until their 90s and never seems to be affected. But I'd say most people who smoke are not so lucky. Sure maybe in the short term and yes it's great for the ex-smoker and the people around them but late in life illnesses pile up and COPD is a big risk.

My dad smoked but quit around age 30 now he has two lung diseases: COPD and IPF. It's possible one or both are related to his work as an oiler on a ship. He was always around fumes, dust, paint, exhaust but his smoking probably had a lasting effect too.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> In India they show vary serious warning message with photo on each cigarette box ,

but I did not see the same think in Japan (I am not sure about other countries)

<comment><USER35> There are massive warnings on the packs in New Zealand. I believe they can't use any branding at all on the packs in Australia.

<comment><USER36> They can include the brand name in Australia, but the format is precisely specified including valid fonts and sizes. Names are also regulated so they can't imply a health claim (like afaik "Mild").

It would be instructive to do an image search for "Australian cigarette packaging" if you want to see exactly what they look like. I gather a lot of smokers like to use boxes to put their cigarette boxes in so they don't have to see them, but I don't know any smokers so that's just hearsay.

<comment><USER17> As an Aussie smoker with friends who also smoke, the packaging makes absolutely no difference to us. It was an oddity when it happened, everyone spent time comparing which photos were the most disgusting and now its just background.

Also people buy smokes they like the taste of, the packaging/brand had/has no effect on what people buy.

<comment><USER12> But is that not simply the perspective of someone who has already smoked for a number of years, and who doesn't really care about the presentation?

As far as I understood, the point was to make the packaging less enticing to potential new customers?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> Price per pack or as the chart outlines 25 cigs, seems to be wrong for Canada.

A single pack can cost 11$ CAD to 15.50$ CAD, with cartons costing ~100$ or higher.

Where as in the US you can find 5-8$ pack, and cartons as low as $30$ USD.

The chart shows Canada and USA in the same price/color category.

Canada has been taxing more, and price keeps going up to curb smoking.

Currently trying to implement basic plain packaging.

I would say alot of teens are skipping cigs and straight to vaping. Where as many adults are quiting cigs or switching to vaping.

I also know of people who increased cannabis use to cut down/stop smoking cigs.

Someone else noted the effectiveness of nicotine... Which is misunderstood. I am someone who use to smoke a pack a day, to vaping for oral fixation.

My nicotine intake increased with vaping, but the satisfaction was not the same.

The satisfaction in cigs comes from mix in nicotine and increase in carbon monoxide in blood stream mainly.

If anyone is trying to quit, suggest reading: Alan Carr - easy way to quit smoking. Has helped many people including myself in understanding the sensations and what little control it has over you really.

</comment><comment><USER38> What's odd about this is that women in "richer" countries smoke more on average than women in developing nations, but conversely, when it comes to men, men in developing nations smoke more on average than men in developed countries...

<comment><USER39> This could be explained by women in developing nations simply having the least amount of money out of all of these groups and not be able to afford it- otherwise I could imagine women in developing nations would also smoke more than women in developed nations.

<comment><USER40> There might also be more of a social stigma against women smoking. In the West smoking amongst women was portrayed as dangerous and sexy, while for men it was just part of a hard day's work. That sort of marketing would translate better for men than for women in more traditional cultures.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> I have anecdotally observed much higher rates of smoking among friends and on the streets in South Asia (mainly India) vs. USA, but interestingly the data seems to indicate the opposite.

<comment><USER42> A few points about smoking in India: * Ban on smoking in public places, streets is not strictly followed at all * Cigarettes are available in every nook and cranny. There is hardly a road side tea shop that doesn't sell cigarettes * Cigarette sticks can be bought (as against buying a entire pack), more so in road side tea shops

</comment></comment><comment><USER43> Would be interesting to see the same data for vaping.

</comment><comment><USER33> I forgot where I heard it but there was a discussion on the radio that indicated that smoking in the US was for a long time was done more by the wealthy... and then the trend shifted to the wealthy quitting and the poor smoking more.

There was also a lot of questions regarding nicotine being used to cope with other issues since nicotine is pretty effective.

</comment><comment><USER44> I wonder why in Australia, where cigarettes cost the most, the 'taxes as a share of price' is also not the highest on the map.

The tobacco companies just charging more and blaming the tax... Turkey, France, Chile, Finland have tax contribution of over 80% !!

</comment><comment><USER45> This is so sad for Greece and for us who doesn't smoke

</comment><comment><USER46> What is going on in Chile?

<comment><USER47> It's really interesting, they have a much higher percentage of people who smoke, but the number of cigarettes they smoke a day is far less than even in the united states.

</comment></comment><comment><USER48> One of the few things I despised about traveling in Europe was people smoking inside like it was the 70's. Almost lost it over a couple puffing away in the dairy section of the super market, managed to keep my mouth shut.

Shame because I otherwise loved my time there.

<comment><USER49> First of all, as other comments have mentioned it's really not a common sight in Europe. Actually, I haven't seen anybody smoking inside a supermarket during my whole life living in Europe (>30 years) and traveling there extensively. Secondly, even if it were common, your indignation seems strange as you come to a different culture and judge people according to your customs. Do you honestly believe that the whole continent should suddenly start behaving differently just because you went traveling there?

<comment><USER50> Agreed, although my time here in Europe has been much more brief (moved to Berlin in 2017 then Estonia 2018) I've never seen anyone smoking in a supermarket or nearly anywhere else inside in Europe with the exception of Berlin bars which are egregious offenders but I would consider an anomaly in W. EU at least

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER51> Mauritania in Africa had the highest number of cigarettes smoked every day in 2012 ( more than 40 a day ) but the number of deaths from tobacco smoking was in the lowest..

Is this skewed data or do a lot of people die there for other reasons?</comment>


iOS 7 vs. Android – A Quick Feature Comparison After the WWDC Keynote - <AUTHOR> http://www.droid-life.com/2013/06/10/ios7-vs-android-a-quick-comparison-after-the-wwdc-keynote/

<comment><USER2> There isn't a huge amount of features in this release that are taken from Andriod that I can see. There is certainly an inspiration in the look and perhaps some of the feel, but most of the similarities they raise here are just obvious extensions to existing features (sometimes from things they did actually borrow, like Notification Centre).

Command Centre is a pretty obvious implementation of something people have been asking for since pretty much the first iPhone release.

Lock screen notifications is again an obvious feature, requested since the notification centre was released.

The multitasking UI is a relatively obvious UI if you're going to show app shots. It's as similar to WP7 as any of the other features are to Android, but they don't seem to be aware of that.

iOS has had swipe gestures on list items since forever. The new style looks a bit like Mailbox because that's how a flatter Google/WP7 style is going to look. Mailbox isn't swipe gestures to reveal menu items, Mailbox is swipe gestures to move between inbox states. They're completely missing what makes the swipe gestures in Mailbox so good.

The swipe left bevel to screen gesture isn't about revealing a drawer, it's about navigating back. It's useful, it's not revolutionary, but I didn't think they played it up as such.

</comment><comment><USER3> Sure, Apple is playing catch-up in some areas. They are inspired by Android, which certainly took ideas from the success of the iPhone (and both have been influenced by WebOS, Windows phone, etc etc). Not a story, really, it's simply good competitive pressure at work.

</comment><comment><USER4> Apple certainly did copy a whole bunch of ideas from Android. But honestly, I think every single one of them looks much nicer on iOS 7.

<comment><USER5> Honestly, i liked it more before.

<comment><USER6> Have you seen it on a phone? The new UI looks horrible on a projector, but pretty nice on a real emitting IPS display.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I'm an Android user but these kind of articles are terrible. The tone is very us-vs-them and belittling, and it looks like the author didn't even do proper research before writing.

Take the swipe to delete gesture. This has been in iOS since the very beginning. Or the snarky comment about slideout navigation drawers – I wonder if the author bothered to watch the presentation, because it's still a plain old navigation controller with an updated animation. It's not the Facebook drawer.

And don't get me started on "stealing". It's clear there is a lot of inspiration here but that goes both ways.

</comment><comment><USER8> My phone runs CP/M and already has all these features.

</comment><comment><USER5> iOS is definitely playing catch up to the other OS's. Competition is good for everyone though :D</comment>


Cancer has returned? Steve Jobs may have just six weeks to live - <AUTHOR> http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1357743/Cancer-stricken-Apple-boss-Steve-Jobs-just-weeks-live.html

<comment><USER2> Related:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2228842>

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2228854>

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2230042>

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2230497>

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2230702>

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2231730>

</comment><comment><USER3> A marriage made in heaven (or was that hell?) the joke US National Enquirer and the joke UK Daily mail.

If anything they say turns out to be true it will be a blind co-incidence and probably a shock to those responsible for the text.

</comment><comment><USER4> I find it kind of sad posting rumors and gossip about somebody's health on HN even if he is Steve Jobs that definitely has huge impact on technology.

</comment><comment><USER5> I really hope this is unsubstantiated gossip.

Wish him the best, and a full recovery.

</comment><comment><USER6> The Daily Mail: The Bastion of Truth</comment>


Modulr.css Straightforward – Modular – Pure CSS. Suggestions – Welcome - <AUTHOR> https://decorator.io/modulr/ <comment><AUTHOR> Hi everyone, this fw is still in progress. I'm working on node.js CLI and few angular.js examples before official release. Feeedback and suggestions are most welcome... :)</comment>


Experiment HN: Remove Numbered Listing - <AUTHOR>

I tend to not give much attention to the news items that are towards the bottom of the front/news pages, more so to the ones on the 'next' pages, and I think part of that might be due to the number rankings next to them. My mind attaches some sort of numbered value, which could color the way I view the submission quality-wise. I'd imagine others might be doing the same. Might be interesting to see if there's more user engagement with submissions if those numbers are completely removed. <comment><USER2> I think I tried this when I was writing it, and without numbers the page seems too unstructured. You need something, and bullets don't do it.

<comment><USER3> You could do an iTunes-esque stripe pattern, alternating between white and some other contrasting color.

This site does something similar: <http://slickdeals.net/>

<comment><USER4> Oh god. Please don't use zebra stripes. That's even harder to read.

<comment><USER2> IIRC Reddit had those originally, and I learned from their example it was a bad idea.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I didn't consciously notice that items have numbers next to them until a few days ago. The numbers communicate the same thing as the relative position. So I doubt it makes a difference for me.

</comment><comment><USER6> I thought it would be pretty interesting to view the listings without numerical rankings, so I whipped up a script which removed the rankings.

As of now, I haven't really noticed much impact on the way I use HN, but maybe it's going to take more time. I think it would make a more positive impact if the points score was removed for the titles.

The greasemonkey script is at: <http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/60421>

</comment><comment><USER7> I don't notice the numbers anymore - they're just bullets to me. But even when I deliberately look, I don't apply any importance to them. It feels kinda random to me - I've seen stories with < 10 points beating not-particularly-old stories with > 100 points. I know there's a formula but since I don't know what it is.. it's random to me :-)

</comment><comment><USER8> I use the numbers mostly when browsing pages (with "More"), since there is no other indication of what page you're on.

</comment><comment><USER9> As I write this, #30 on the front page is yesterday's #1. Just remember that from time to time and you might not give the numbers so much significance.

</comment><comment><USER10> How about just randomizing the order on the front page? That's a more standard approach to testing something like this...

<comment><USER11> How about just leaving it alone? I like the numbers.</comment></comment>


The Darknet Project: netroots activists dream of global mesh network - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/open-source/news/2011/11/the-darknet-plan-netroots-activists-dream-of-global-mesh-network.ars?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=rss <comment><USER2> I remember hearing about China usurping 15% of western internet traffic for 18 minutes. This was accomplished by having nodes report as being the next closest hop in the network path to the packet destination. In a decentralized darknet project, I imagine such an issue being much more widespread. In fact, I would imagine a darknet project would actually play in to the hands of the government. It would be perfectly plausible to infest the darknet with millions of your own nodes reporting as the next best hops thus inserting themselves in the middle of all darknet traffic able to analyze data as it flows through the system. Obviously, a darknet would utilize encryption for traffic but all bets are off when you potentially have a constant man in the middle and no centralized authority on trusts. What's worse, and more to the point of playing into the hands of the government is that a darknet would give them (the government) a concentrated focus area. If I were to categorize the percentage of traffic that was "interesting" for regular internet traffic vs. the percentage of "interesting" traffic of all darknet traffic then I would imagine the darknet having a much higher ratio of noteworthy to junk traffic. If I had a limited amount of resources to invest in analyzing and decoding secure traffic I would obviously point my tools at the most richly dense data source.

<comment><USER3> Man in the middle attacks may not work as well as you think. While it is possible to create false information using this darknet mechanism, it is possible using things like PGP to ensure that you are getting data from the same node. Of course, you have to figure out how to set it up right from the beginning; if someone messes with you before you know what their key is supposed to be, they can feed you false information.

You might be able to overcome this by using a many-to-many authentication mechanism. But realistically, what could the government hope to accomplish by feeding you false information? (this is the only thing they are likely able to do). Consider:

There is no way to back track traffic and discover who sent the request.

Once you realize a source is feeding false information, you know to never trust that source again.

It is easy to imagine a decentralized rating system for the quality of information provided by various keys on the network. Keep in mind you can't really fake who you are. You are your public key, no one else can publish under your public key but you.

EDIT: I highly recommend reading the freent paper: <http://freenetproject.org/papers/ddisrs.pdf>

<comment><USER4> > There is no way to back track traffic and discover who sent the request.

If you control a vast majority of the nodes, this is simply incorrect.

<comment><USER3> Sort of. The only way to tell if a person made a request is if you control all the nodes that this person is connected to. If you do not control even one node that a person is connected to, there is always the possibility that the request came from this other node, not the real node. This is because the difference between making a request for something on your behalf and making the request on someone else's behalf looks exactly the same as far as another node is concerned.

This is how freenet works. Of course, in freenet there is a time to live associated with each request so it will die eventually if, for example, the searched for item is not present on the network at that time. You could figure out that it's from a particular node by seeing what the time to live is from that node, but small amounts of random variance in time to live values can effectively ensure that both requests don't live forever and that it is suitably difficult to determine the origin of the requesting node.

Now, it is certainly possible with enough concerted effort to find out what a user is doing with some statistical probability that a user is looking at something, but you can rarely be absolutely sure.

<comment><USER5> I think 100% certainty that a node is the originator of a request is not necessary for most purposes. If you are thinking of a court case, then maybe, but only if there is no corroborative evidence.

And in other situations where people might want to use a darknet (e.g. a repressive regime) a few false positives aren't going to bother anyone concerned.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> "The US State Department seems to view decentralized darknets as an important area of research for empowering free expression _abroad_."

(my emphasis). Depressing!

<comment><USER7> To be fair, another interpretation is that darknets are not needed in the US because you can use the regular Internet for free expression.

<comment><USER8> Like donating to whistleblowing websites like WikiLeaks.

<comment><USER9> To be fair, that was more of a private business decision on the part of PayPal than it was a government mandate. But I get what you're saying, and I agree that internet is not as open, even in the United States, as it could and should be.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> mike-cardwell I can't help but think that projects to overlay a darknet on our existing Internet infrastructure are several orders of magnitude more likely to succeed.

<comment><USER6> Overlaying on existing infrastructure is a faster way to get up and running, but ultimately a darknet that depends on another network is vulnerable to that network's centralized 'off' button.

<comment> mike-cardwell This is true. I think it's the only practical approach given current technology though.

When somebody comes up with a £50 home wifi access point that has a range of a mile or more inside an urban environment, _that_ is when we'll get a proper darknet.

<comment><USER10> Why would you need a mile in an _urban_ environment? Trace out a circle with that radius in Google Earth; it's an absurd range.

The idea is that you have a pretty high density of users. 100 meters would be more than enough to cross any street and reach several buildings away in any direction. Even in an American suburb, it'd reach a few houses away. That's a realistic goal: 100 meters, not 1600.

<comment> mike-cardwell Because none of my neighbours will have the hardware. And if they don't have it, I'm not getting it because it's a waste of my time.

If you expand the number of neighbours to all of those that are within a mile of me, you increase the likelyhood of finding somebody by a large amount. I would buy kit just because I'd be interested in finding these people.

Chicken/Egg etc

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> After reading the article and skimming some posts on their subreddit, I think the idea generally concerns the capabilities of consumer electronics to 'replicate' the Internet in a completely decentralized fashion. By doing so, there's no central authority managing your packets, and if you want to visit a particular node (i.e., to visit a web site), the problem becomes analogous to the stochastic shortest path problem, which is NP-complete. So, wouldn't this system require P = NP for it to have any viability at all when factoring in the effects of latency and downtime?

<comment><USER12> Most NP-complete problems can be approximated quickly enough for practical purposes.

Decentralized routing is a hard problem, but there has been a lot of research with pretty convincing results. I'm not sure if it scales to the size of the internet, though.

<comment><USER11> That's the point, though: I don't know if you can find an 'approximate' solution to decentralized routing, since you need precision. Do you have any peer-reviewed articles evidencing these convincing results? I'd be extremely interested in learning some more about this.

<comment><USER13> Who is the current centralized authority that figures out the shortest routes today?

<comment><USER11> Difference in definitions: I read "approximate solution" as an "approximate route," as in the node choices are approximated (potentially leading to a wrong final node, or losing packets at a dead end). Instead, finding approximately the shortest route that doesn't lose packets and gets you to the correct node would presumably work.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Looks interesting, but it seems to be just a talking shop at the moment, without any actual goods to show yet.

 _it's hard to imagine that TDP will ever move beyond the conceptual stage. The group behind the effort is big on ideas but short on technical solutions for rolling out a practical implementation_

I like the idea of using WiFi as hardware, since it's a technology that's almost everywhere now.

</comment><comment><USER15> This is interesting. I've been toying with a darknet idea, but it's not going to mirror the internet. "My" version is limited to plain text and packets no larger than 1kb, if even that. It'll show up on TechCrunch eventually, but I want to talk with some people first.

</comment><comment><USER16> I'd like to note that "the Internet" is a vast, broadly-scoped amalgamation of routers and different network topologies. They don't use one kind of hardware or software to manage it all. Any successor or parallel alternative network should be as (if not more) flexible to achieve it's goals.

I'd also like to suggest that the network be powered purely by standard Internet client machines and off-the-shelf hardware. Custom software would be necessary, but it's better to rely on a random guy with a quick installer on a USB key than custom hardware mesh routers deployed by professional installers.

<comment><USER17> Lucky for us, the new IEEE 802.11 was ratified in September and includes (finally) 802.11s for mesh networking. There is support in Linux and FreeBSD for several of the most popular wireless drivers. The open source router firmware dd-wrt also supports 11s.

<comment><USER16> That is pretty damn cool, but I think for a serious "alternate Internet" to succeed, OSI layers 1 & 2 should not matter. An application installed by a regular user needs to be able to do most of the heavy lifting with most generic off-the-shelf hardware to get a really decentralized open alternative to take off like wildfire.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> They should do some kickstarter projects around this. I bet they could find a load of libertarians going all nuts over the idea. Wouldn't mind throwing some money at it myself.

</comment><comment><USER19> It would be pretty interesting if Republic Wireless allowed their phones to connect to the Darknet. There'd be no technical reason why they wouldn't, except perhaps they'd need to beef up their cheap Android phones with mesh protocols to form their own nodes.

(Referenced HN thread that also happens to be on the front page: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3208563>)

</comment><comment><USER20> Here is a comprehensive list of open mesh/protocol links [http://openmesh.wordpress.com/2011/01/30/a-list-of-open- sour...](http://openmesh.wordpress.com/2011/01/30/a-list-of-open-source-ad- hoc-network-and-routing-protocolsplatforms/)</comment>


Everything you need (and don't need) to know about PHP's type system - <AUTHOR> https://thephp.website/en/issue/php-type-system/ <comment><USER3> It actually makes me really happy to see more positive comments on a thread about PHP. It is an incredible workhorse, and doesn't get the credit it deserves.

I'm often amused by developers that revile PHP, while going on to use another language, which suffers from a similar set of problems to PHP, oftentimes with poorer performance and more complex toolchains.

PHP deserves a little more love, imo.

<comment><USER4> I always used and use PHP because it gets the s$$$ done.

But truth be told, the hate is deserved. It never was a particularly efficient language, which might not matter that much, but it _was_ riddled with gotchas, warts and horrible solutions to many technical and _social_ problems.

Today PHP is faster than many alternatives, many of its warts got fixed, but I cannot brush off the fact that it's still based on a poorly-designed base and runtime library.

I'm still using PHP when it makes sense, in the same way I'm still using perl where it makes sense.

<comment><USER5> I agree with both statements, it gets shit done but has its rough edges. Its improving though and I doubt there's a perfect programming language out there. At the end of the day what matters are results and how quickly you went from idea to production and PHP is one of the good ones for that matter.

<comment><USER6> I think "rough edges" is an understatement. It has serious design flaws and inconsistencies which are probably never going to be fixed due to backwards compatibility. It's like C++ now, tons of language features are added over the years but non of them is able to repair the language, similar to a game of Jenga, the tower will collapse eventually.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> > Important to notice that casting an array with numeric keys into an object > is valid, but one can't dereference its value because property names may not > start with numbers.

Not true, actually. The (admittedly obscure) syntax to access a property beginning with a numeral is `$obj->{0}`. Usually when this happens it's because someone was trying to be clever with JSON.

<comment><USER8> There's another way to get a variable starting with a numeral - <USER2> extract(), I think.

<comment><USER7> I've seen a few workarounds, each worse than the last, including casting back to array, round-tripping through JSON with the array flag set, and reflection. Hence the public service announcement that this is perfectly doable with the correct syntax.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Adding a static analyzer (like Psalm [1]) to the mixture makes PHP's types _much_ more powerful. Psalm can use docblock annotations to attach more complex types to functions and variables, including:

* A "list" type representing a non-associative array

* Types representing specific kinds of values, like numeric-string or non-empty-array, as well as exact values as types (like true and false, or string constants).

* Typing on keys and values in arrays, e.g. array<class-string,int> for an array with class names as keys and integers as values

* Complex typing on the contents of associative arrays, e.g. array{foo:int, bar:string}

* Templated types on functions, like a function which returns an instance of a class whose name is passed in as a string:

        /**
         * @template T
         * @param T::class $class_name
         * @return T
         */

[1]: [https://psalm.dev/](https://psalm.dev/)

<comment><USER10> Psalm is nice, however I would suggest PHPStan as an alternative for people that encounter a lot of friction with Psalm.

For example, in a project using doctrine I have to add a bunch of is null/@psal-mutation-free annotations. As all the methods can return null.

However, if Psalm had support for something like phantom types, maybe I could tag entities returned from the database for whom certain fields are guaranteed to have values.

<comment><USER11> Adding Phan to this conversation initially created by the creator of a PHP, now in the hands of TysonAndre who does an insane amount of good work on it

<comment><USER12> For users of the intellij family (idea or phpstorm).

[https://plugins.jetbrains.com/plugin/10215-php- inspections-e...](https://plugins.jetbrains.com/plugin/10215-php-inspections- ea-ultimate-) is amazing and well worth the price.

It has a free variant which is still amazing but lacks all the inspections of the paid variant.

[https://plugins.jetbrains.com/plugin/7622-php-inspections- ea...](https://plugins.jetbrains.com/plugin/7622-php-inspections-ea-extended-)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Minor nits:

1\. "they all inherit from stdClass" \-- this is simply not true

2\. callables should've mentioned anonymous functions

3\. a special typed value can't be casted to anything. -- this is not true, NULLs can be casted to anything (it becomes 0, "", array() ) and even resources can be casted to anything with dubious utility value.

4\. casting should mention the intval() , strval() , doubleval() functions

5\. php does not support explicit type definition in variable declaration -- PHP 7.4 however supports typed properties. [https://wiki.php.net/rfc/typed_properties_v2](https://wiki.php.net/rfc/typed_properties_v2)

<comment><AUTHOR> I'll definitely edit the post adding the relevant bits you mentioned.

Two special notes:

About 1. stdClass, you're right and I don't know why I just took it for granted without even testing. My Bad.

About 3. casting special types, you're right again. I didn't phrase it properly. Casting null to other types won't yield errors and casting resources too. Their values are normally nothing we should rely on, but doesn't mean one "can't" perform such casts.

Thanks a lot for your comments, they are incredibly helpful! Cheers!

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> This is quite complete, definitely bookmarking for reference.

I've been knee deep in PHP for the last 6 months after keeping it at arm's length for probably 10 years. It's really quite incredible how much it's improved and I think the type system is the major factor for me. It's not perfect but damn - I can get some stuff done really quick now.

<comment><USER14> I'll add though; the real benefit only comes with heavy use of objects, like in Yii/Craft. If you've got keyed arrays everywhere it's still a hellhole.

<comment><USER15> Arrays can become collections.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> PHP rocks in 2020. Couple it with laravel or something and you get a solid platform to build a monolith-type web app with really fast performance.

<comment><USER17> Isn't Laravel the worst performing framework out there right now, like even Rails looks like a viable option in terms of speed?

<comment><USER16> Ruby is slower than PHP7+ by orders of magnitude. I doubt it.

<comment><USER18> Orders of magnitude? Do you thibk that PHP is at least x100 times faster than Ruby?

<comment><USER16> Alright, maybe an exaggeration. But the difference is huge. [https://benchmarksgame- team.pages.debian.net/benchmarksgame/...](https://benchmarksgame- team.pages.debian.net/benchmarksgame/fastest/php-yarv.html)

<comment><USER19> Well that is a benchmark with a set of specific mathematical problems like calculating pi digits. I would rather compare Rails with Laravel e.g. in terms of requests per second or speed of json deserialization. See [https://www.techempower.com/benchmarks/](https://www.techempower.com/benchmarks/) Symfony, Lumen and Rails seems to be somewhat equal in performance, but Laravel is a bit slower in respect to the benchmarked web related criterions.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I have to say I'm impressed by how far PHP has come. I haven't written any in years (well over a decade, even) but the commitment to improving a language many have written off as a dead end is laudable.

</comment><comment><USER21> While we are on the subject, does anyone know of a way of having required variable declarations in PHP, similar to the way Perl's "use strict" works?

This is one of my most common sources of bugs, and it is frustrating not having this be available, when it makes my life so much easier in Perl.

Lately I've been thinking about doing something crazy like implementing my own variable system...

<comment><USER22> > Strict typing mode. In PHP the declare(strict_types = 1); directive enables > strict mode. In strict mode, only a variable of exact type of the "type > declaration" will be accepted, or a TypeError will be thrown. The only > exception to this rule is that an integer may be given to a function > expecting a float.

[https://www.brainbell.com/php/strict- type.html](https://www.brainbell.com/php/strict-type.html)

<comment><USER7> Worth emphasizing that this directive applies per file, and affects functions _called_ (not those defined) in that file. Not sure if there's a mechanical reason for that, but if I'm writing a new class I'd like some assurances that it's being used correctly. If I could enforce strict types on _calling_ code, I could do away with a certain class of validation.

<comment><USER23> The point is supposed to be that once you write in a scalar typehint for a parameter, you don't need to do validation for it being the right type within the function: even if it's called from a non-strict context, that just means PHP will cast it before passing it. So you can avoid type checking code in your function but consumers can still use the more traditional and dynamic style of PHP if they want to.

I can't quite think of the type of validation you'd be able to avoid with the sort of "inverted" strictness you're describing.

Certainly I can think of issues people could have if not using strict types (basically, unexpected casts), but not things that you could actually validate from within the function.

<comment><USER7> Good point. My method may behave unexpectedly if you call `sum(true, false)`, but it's not identifiably different than `sum(1, 0)`. Sorry, it was late, and I failed to mention my actual use case: I work on a legacy application and want to enforce correctness on the new code I write. I'd rather write a new module and enforce that the calling code in the legacy app is using it correctly, than try to add strict types to the legacy classes.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Is there a good reason to still use php when you can use hacklang ([https://hacklang.org/](https://hacklang.org/)) which has much stronger type system. Some would even call it php++.

<comment><USER25> A lot of what Hack introduced to the PHP community has become available in suitably forward-thinking ways to allow for a sensible amount of backwards compatibility and are opt-in.

For example, you can set strict typing on a per-file basis.

`declare(strict_types=1);`

I believe that the performance difference between the two is negligible now too. So it really just comes down to personal preference/platform legacy.

But Hack is on a different path which is potentially going to make it harder to share code between PHP and Hack.

PHP still has by far the larger community.

Given the choice today, I'd run with PHP.

<comment><USER26> the only thing that sucks about strict typing is that there's no way to toggle it globally. so if you want to transition a codebase that's simultaneously actively being developed in other ways, you have to mess around with scripts that append it to the start of all php files/remove it again

<comment><AUTHOR> Nothing that tools like Rector can't help you with.

I believe this extra step is incredibly important, given most of your dependencies you won't control and forcing strict types to them is not very clever IMO.

<comment><USER26> I guess it wouldn't work if your dependencies weren't easily seperable from the rest of the code. in this case there are no dependencies, it's all custom cobbled together, for better or worse

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Completely unrelated but, if the site owners read this: pleas, make the CSS ::selection a different color from the background, please!!

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for pointing this out. It annoyed me a lot as well. The whole "dark mode" css was a "better than nothing" thing, and now I'm collecting the "must fix" things. This is definitely on the list!

That said: the website is open source, feel free to submit a PR if you find time before I do :D

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> Main takeaway: strict types won't make your code faster!

It may make it slightly slower

<comment><USER29> The point of strict types is generally not speed, but rather, to make your code more correct.

<comment><USER30> Correct? I'd probably say predictable.

<comment><USER29> Eh. If MyPy complains that I'm passing an `Optional[Entity]` into a method where only an `Entity` can go, it's just helped me avoid a runtime error when I try to get `entity.name`. Not sure what the exact PHP equivalent is, but there's all sorts of bugs you can easily introduce if you're not careful with types.

<comment><USER28> PHP doesn't compile so all errors become runtime errors.

<comment><AUTHOR> Small correction: php IS compiled, just not the way we're used with the term. See [https://thephp.website/en/issue/php-8-jit/](https://thephp.website/en/issue/php-8-jit/) for more information.

The answers below show a good solution for this issue: use static analysis tools in build time and potentially even as a pre-commit hook.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: Simple Rust Microservices - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/fractalide/fractalide <comment><AUTHOR> Fractalide is a Rust programming platform that makes it simple to reason about efficient microservices.

The Nix Expression language provides a language compatible with a Continuous Integration - Hydra ([https://nixos.org/hydra](https://nixos.org/hydra)) and Code Deployment - <USER2> ([https://nixos.org/nixops](https://nixos.org/nixops)) and when combined with Flowscript, Fractalide's own actor oriented dataflow language, the two languages fuse beautifully to become a glue language that declaratively describes your microservice architecture, then lazily builds it, weaves it together and deploys it.

Soon we'll be stabilizing at 1.0, but it's suitable to take it for a spin now, especially with the new net_http module (github.com/dmichiels/frac_net_http)

We're using the C4 contribution contract, so you're welcome to contribute code!</comment>


How To Disrupt Technical Recruiting - Hire an Agent - <AUTHOR> http://jobtipsforgeeks.com/2012/09/17/disrupt/

<comment><USER2> I appreciate the proactive suggestion, but I don't think introducing agents as additional gatekeepers would be a good solution.

Think of how awful getting work in acting has become thanks to agents. Would we want to give the keys to the kingdom to a middle-person? And who would step up to be the first set of agents? I bet it would be the same recruiters we all love to hate.

Much has been said about recruiting and hiring and all that. I'll only add that I think the direction things are headed in seems to be that developers are going to start needing a portfolio by which potential employers can judge them.

<comment><AUTHOR> Actually, I'd see agents as a replacement for most recruiters, so it wouldn't add an additional gatekeeper the way I see it. Now you have candidate - recruiter - perhaps HR or company recruiter - manager, whereas you would simply replace the recruiter with an agent. In my vision, the agent would have a relationship with the candidate and often the hiring manager (that is true in my case, but I may be unique), so it would only be one degree of separation.

You would be able to choose an agent to represent you, so if you don't want to choose the ones you hate, choose the one that you actually might like! (There has to be one, no?)

I agree with your comments about portfolio, and clients are asking for GitHub info and such. I think that is where it is heading as well, but many engineers would still like someone else to do the job search legwork, negotiating, resumes, etc, which is where an agent comes in.</comment></comment>


Dress for the Job You Want - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/bhartzer/status/1208905677814542342 <comment><USER2> Of course these days the janitor doesn't work for the TV company. He works for a cleaning company that has the contract to clean the place. So nobody can just flip him over to a new job, even for an evening.

I wonder how this affect IT long term. So many people I know got into IT via the helpdesk and then moved up and sideways into another position. These days at many places the helpdesk is often widely separated (and sometimes outsourced) from the rest of IT. A lot less chance for the smart helpdesker to become a Sysadmin.

</comment><comment><USER3> These stories always seem to ignore the survivorship bias.

Also, just noticed you are posting your own tweets and are in SEO so this feels like self-promotion

<comment><USER4> Probably some survivorship bias, but ultimately how you dress and handle yourself is essential, and this is especially true for people who you are meeting for the first time.

When I was in high-school we had a few teachers who's motto was "Dress for success", they repeated it a lot, and we even had a dress-up day that people participated in. I took this advice to heart and have kept a close eye on both my appearance and grooming. I try and dress sharp, always slightly at or above the crowd but never below. This translates into 'business casual' for most software jobs I've been at.

Although it's impossible to measure accurately, I can say that in my personal experience, if you're the person dressed appropriately, the people who matter notice. I've been pulled into very important client meetings, ones that were way above my position, precisely because I was dressed much more professionally than the rest of my programming colleagues who insisted that a hoodie and flip flops were workplace attire.

I've also had the experience, a surprising number of times in my short career mind you, of seeing various clients and exec types come into my office, scan the room, and then decide to come talk to me. I asked one of them once why they came and spoke to me specifically as I was just a software dev. Their answer was something to the effect of "You just looked like you knew what was going on around here."

My thought on dress is simple; I am working to make my company/bosses look good. This means that I work hard and do a damn good job, and it also means that when a very important mucky muck steps into the office to see if they want to sign some big contract with us, I appear successful and confident. If I appear successful and confident, the client will be a whole lot more likely to feel at ease knowing they're not gambling their money or time away to someone who doesn't care enough to keep themselves groomed.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> They told me to dress for the job I want, but then HR told me I can't dress like Batman.

So, this doesn't always work.</comment>


Bitcoin Value Loses Its Mind as Trading Lags on the Mt.Gox Exchange - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2013/12/06/bitcoin-value-loses-its-mind-as-trading-lags-on-the-mt-gox-exchange/ <comment><USER2> MtGox is known for abusing the market and cancelling trades when the price falls significantly. It happened before [1].

One way to look at it is that they prevent a bank run. The other perspective is that they trick people into thinking the market price is higher than it really is, making unaware people lose even more money as they buy at the high price and the crash happens anyway, just over a longer time.

[1] [http://www.malwaretech.com/2013/11/mtgox-nearly-breaks- bitco...](http://www.malwaretech.com/2013/11/mtgox-nearly-breaks- bitcoinagain.html)

<comment><USER3> I also can't help but wonder if insiders of sites like MtGox are taking advantage of their market knowledge.

<comment><USER4> This issue goes well beyond "market knowledge." MtGox _is_ the market; they control the order book, trade matching engine, data feeds and even the custodian accounting system. If you own your very own completely unregulated trading exchange and deposit syatem then you have a big incentive to cheat the market. One way to do so would be to allow your own trades to jump the queue in the order book. By ensuring that your order are always filled ahead of everyone else's (even when you place them later in time) you would have a massive advantage if you start doing market making trades. Another dimension is that MtGox plays not only the role of an exchange but also the role of a custodian for US dollar accounts. MtGox's systems decide how many USD a particular trading account has for buying Bitcoin. This incentivises them to create US dollars "out of thin air" for their own trading account and then use those fictional US dollars to buy Bitcoin from MtGox customers. Combining these two advantages (money "creation" power and total market book control), they could extract huge sums of money from customers through trading without even having to invest a single dollar from the "real world." And if this market making strategy were to go wrong and MtGox loses too much fictional USD currency they could simply reverse the trades! Worst case scenario, if they lost too much money, they could just disappear without paying out customer USD balances. This is why real financial exchanges are heavily regulated and the different roles are played by different legal entities (eg exchange role vs custodian role).

<comment><USER2> > Worst case scenario, if they lost too much money, they could just disappear > without paying out customer USD balances.

So you risk your (incredibly profitable) business just to skim a little on the spread? Doesn't seem worth it.

<comment><USER5> And misconduct like that results in clear evidence which none of the people who claim to "know" can produce.

A lot of people who just do not understand how thing kind of market works make these allegations— due to things like issuing a market order and then having the trade execute at prices which are dissimilar to the last price but completely explained by the published orderbook.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Reminds me of the beginning of Arthur C. Clarke's "Childhood's End" (or was it "Fountains of Paradise"? It's been decades since I've read them), where he explains how, even in a networked, high-speed trading world, the stock trading system can get overloaded by orders and lag will cause the system to spiral out of control and collapse, repeating, in essence, the Crash of Black Tuesday.

I found that interesting because it showed how, despite advances in technology which we'd expect to solve failures of previous systems, the same fundamental vulnerabilities remained, just at a different scale.

<comment><USER7> The overloading of exchanges with orders has actually become an intentional strategy in the real world. High frequency firms send large quantities of junk orders to create arbitrage possibilites or even as an offensive measure for the purpose of slowing down the competition by making them waste ressources processing useless orders.

<comment><USER8> Um, no. This is a wild conspiracy "theory" [1] pushed by Nanex for publicity, but it's almost certainly false.

If it were true, it would be trivially easy for any of the broker, exchange or SEC to trace and shut down. These parties already have countermeasures in place to prevent you from doing this accidentally - you need to make sure the rolling average of your fill rate is above 0.5% (approximate cutoff, it varies but it's in that neighborhood).

Further, the risk of getting filled makes such a strategy insane. It's analogous to placing a bunch of bids on EBay in the hopes of slowing down their servers. Great plan, but it carries the risk that you win an auction and need to buy 1,500 copies of Dianetics @ $10.00 each.

[1] I use the term "theory" loosely. Nanex's allegations more or less amount to the idea that HFT firms are DDOSing the markets by pushing an order volume that a 2008-era laptop could handle without hitting 100% cpu, and expect to profit via unexplained mechanisms.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Whoa! It's plummeting just as I come here to read this thread.

[http://bitcointicker.co/](http://bitcointicker.co/)

I saw the first news of the Chinese restrictions last evening (United States time zones) and a person who kindly replied to my post here yesterday recommended the link I've just put here for tracking the price of Bitcoin. I saw this thread just after seeing

[http://www.latimes.com/business/money/la-fi-mo-china- bitcoin...](http://www.latimes.com/business/money/la-fi-mo-china- bitcoin-20131205,0,2766336.story)

on Google News.

<comment><USER10> I watched it live as it hit $600. A bunch of buy orders held it there for a few minutes, and then after burning thru all of them, it dropped like a rock to ~580.

I wonder where I can learn about day trading this stuff...

<comment><USER11> Answer yourself 2 questions :

1) why does trading lag on MtGox ... who benefits ?

2) does this happen every time the value drops ?

And you'll be back to day trading something else very quickly.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> This also happened on the 19th. There was an article posted explaining that their crash prevention code was processing a big sell order, reversing, and then infinite looping. This looks like the same thing.

</comment><comment><USER13> To expect that something volatile is anything other than volatile is, in general, folly. BTC may stabilize with time, but people throwing large quantities of money at it quickly doesn't help.

If BTC gains worldwide acceptance, it will be at the begrudging reluctance of governments.

</comment><comment><USER14> I made similar screenshot as the one from this article. I noticed strange periodic behavior of bitcoinwisdom.com, asked myself WTF, uploaded image to imgur, then made a post on HN. Within 5 minutes, I guessed that this behavior is caused by the javascript replaying stale package of transactions and not getting new ones. I reloaded the page, artifact disappeared, I took down HN post to avoid misleading people (it got two upvotes already and one comment). Now I see this what I thought was local glitch prominently featured as a part of front page article. I guess it wasn't so local and accidental after all.

Since the image in article comes from [http://bitcoin.clarkmoody.com/](http://bitcoin.clarkmoody.com/) not bitcoinwisdom I guess it was some glitch in MtGox API or case of clients wasn't able to tell that what they get from API is stale data not expected fresh one.

My screenshot from bitcoinwisdom: [http://imgur.com/Q6gKIok](http://imgur.com/Q6gKIok)

</comment><comment><USER15> Todays (6/12) somewhat sluggish decline[1] is perhaps largely US driven, beginning at around 8AM EST (1PM UTC). Yesterdays crash was sharp, surrounding the Chinese announcement, and was at around 4 PM China time[2] but the price soon bounced back.

Overall not very interesting.

[1] [http://bitcoincharts.com/charts/btcnCNY#rg1zczsg2013-12-06ze...](http://bitcoincharts.com/charts/btcnCNY#rg1zczsg2013-12-06zeg2013-12-06ztgMzm1g10zm2g25zv)

[2] [http://bitcoincharts.com/charts/btcnCNY#rg1zczsg2013-12-05ze...](http://bitcoincharts.com/charts/btcnCNY#rg1zczsg2013-12-05zeg2013-12-05ztgMzm1g10zm2g25zv)

<comment><USER16> Yes and then later on it fell even further. This is a cautious sell off. Big guys cannot sell tens and hundreds thousand of Bitcoins at once - they will crash the market. Super optimistic guys buy expensive and hope for better times. I witnessed today one guy buying nearly 2,000 BTC at $950 on Gox and then the price dropped by more than $100 in few minutes. I believe it will drop even further. I believe in Bitcoin, but it's doomed until its in the hands of speculators and they should get hurt and move to altcoins hopefully although they usually profit from drops as this is how they multiply their coins.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> is that unsourced chart just a screenshot biscoinwisdom, and why isn't it sourced?

<comment><USER18> The first link in the article (hyperlink text "gone crackerdog") takes you to the source: [http://bitcoin.clarkmoody.com/](http://bitcoin.clarkmoody.com/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> A couple of days ago commenter on HN said they had pulled their savings from the bank and dumped it into bitcoins. It will probably recover but betting on bitcoins is akin to taking one hell of a ride by the looks of things.

</comment><comment><USER20> You can see the last 24 hours here. Note data collection for MtGox was stalled due to their extreme server load. [http://live.bitcoinindex.es/](http://live.bitcoinindex.es/)

</comment><comment><USER21> How can anyone make seriously make statements like this:

> Following a steep decline that saw the currency trade at prices not seen > since late November

That was 2 or 3 weeks ago and they speak of it like it was a generation ago.

</comment><comment><USER22> Was hoping for a panic sell like April, O well give it a day or two and it will bounce back.

</comment><comment><USER23> This topic is full of bitcoin advocates doing terrible jobs of reconciling themselves to a new .800~.900 standard USD.

However you criticize MtGox, this has spread to other exchanges. That's the price now.

Personally, I think this is the effect of the Chinese market reversing its positivity on Bitcoin.

(which is an outgrowth of bitcoin's lack of delivery on any significant front.)

</comment><comment><USER24> Always the volatility remarks - because in contrast the world economy is so very stable, as recent years have shown?

</comment><comment><USER25> Hooray for high-freq algorithmic trading, I guess.

<comment><USER26> The fun thing about Bitcoin is the immense latency in moving money (USD) between exchanges, which has at minimum 4 days of transit. This makes just about anything involving multiple exchanges or high frequency (especially arbitrage trading) absolutely impossible to do without a service such as bitinstant, which is currently MIA

<comment><USER27> Assuming that you're willing to maintain inventory at multiple exchanges, you could still absolutely do arbitrage inter-exchange.

<comment><USER28> Unfortunately there's no way to hedge your BTC inventory so you have to take on a lot of currency risk.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: Hack Beyond LinkedIn, Rankings of the Best at Something Somewhere - <AUTHOR> https://www.personzone.com/about <comment><USER2> I have no idea what this is, or trying to be.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you for the feedback. But I thought the central point was clear: the place to find the best people at something somewhere (hire the best cook in New York, the best dancer in the world, the best cleaning lady in your local neighborhood, find the best historian in Japan, check out the best drummer in the US, the best at basketball in your hometown, ...) Human potential exposed and organized. BTW, integrating and ranking similar to Hacker News.

<comment><USER2> Sure it is kinda clear, but the fact that literally nothing works (no content?) kinda throws you off guard.

<comment><AUTHOR> That's the chicken-and-egg issue.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


App Store Simplified Screenshot Submission Process - <AUTHOR> https://developer.apple.com/news/?id=08082016a <comment><AUTHOR> Developers can now just upload one set of screenshots for an app. Optionally, they can also upload one app preview per device family. This will definitely make the release process of apps a lot faster.</comment>


Blind auditions and gender discrimination - <AUTHOR> https://jsmp.dk/posts/2019-05-12-blindauditions/ <comment><USER3> Blind auditions are one technique I push as an alternative to just selecting people based on their attributes. The authors just shredded one study. Given size of HN, it's survey time: what are all the good studies you know of it working, not working, etc?

<comment><USER4> Not sure if shredded. The author detected no significant bias in blind auditions due to gender. This may or may not mean that blind auditions are more effective in equalizing opportunities - are fair.

<comment><USER5> How could it mean that blind auditions are fairer if it didn't detect a gender bias signal to begin with? Genuine question?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Url changed from [https://medium.com/@jsmp/orchestrating-false-beliefs- about-g...](https://medium.com/@jsmp/orchestrating-false-beliefs-about-gender- discrimination-a25a48e1d02), which points to this.

<comment><USER7> Why? They are both by the same author but don't have the same content.

<comment><USER6> They mostly overlap and the author references this one from that one. We have a weak preference for niche sites as compared to platforms like medium.com. Most importantly, though: threads are incredibly sensitive to initial conditions.

The current article has a more crisply defined scope. If we start from something generic like "false beliefs about gender discrimination", an unsubstantive, angry flamewar is guaranteed. But if we start from something specific like a well-reported study that turned out to be wrong, there's at least a chance that the discussion can keep its head. Edit: especially if the first comments don't chop it off (see [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21329159](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21329159)).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Something I'm sceptical about: the idea that introducing people that look different magically automatically leads to better performing teams. Questioning this verges on heresy in this day and age, yet there seem to be plenty of companies that are utterly lacking in (superficial) diversity, yet (rather inconveniently for diversity cheerleaders) somehow make massive profits in spite of their handicap.

Another one: women are paid less than men for the same work. If this were the case, companies would - because they could do an equivalent job to a man for less money - simply hire all women workforces which due to their lower wage bill would outcompete and destroy companies that employed men. Yet - <USER2> somewhat inconveniently! - the real world refuses to match the theory.

<comment><USER9> Your second paragraph basically posits that 1950's America would have been filled with companies hiring minority workers at lower wages to achieve superior financial results, but this didn't happen to any significant degree. Was life for African Americans in 1955 one of manifest equality and fairness?

<comment><USER10> That's a bit of a strawman, the second paragraph never posited this unless you really think discrimination against women in 2015 is comparable to discrimination against blacks in 1955.

What I think the second paragraph fails to talk about is truly rampant discrimination leads to less opportunity for people to achieve the same quality/throughput of work as those not discriminated against. If you're in a group that has been systematically discriminated against it's not really reasonable to expect that group to have equal representation in an in a high skill pool they've not generally been allowed in.

Back to talking about the original point made by the comment though: The conversation and data (usually) isn't "Jane has shown herself to be equally as valuable as John but nobody will hire her for more than <smaller>% the rate of John" it's "women are not in the same high paying roles as men in the same field, by some percentage, why is that" and usually people can agree it's not that women are naturally <x>% worse performing than men in every way so there is something discriminatory we are doing wrong as a society still.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> From the article: > Unfortunately, it is not clear what else the journalists could be expected to do in this case. After all, they just quoted directly from some values in a published, peer reviewed study.

I feel this is a bit naive or condescending to journalists.

In many professions you are required to take statistics courses. After all, they are essential to reading studies.

And reading studies is something professionals should do.

I have only a cursory knowledge of statistics, but enough that if I read the paper I can pretty easily spot the issues mentioned in the article.

If a news article mentions a study in passing without depth, it could be forgiven. But writing a whole article on a study based solely on the summary of the researcher is lazy.

I think the author of the article might be acting naive with the lack of reporting standards shown by news organizations on this type of articles.

The reality is the study came to an unpopular conclusion. News organizations, like politicians, won't touch that stuff.</comment>


Ask HN: Diaspora Seeds, Proliferation and Cost - <AUTHOR>

There appear to be two main options for Diaspora: hosting your own seed or renting a server. Obviously not everyone will be able to host their own seed, for a variety of reasons. That means to truly penetrate the "social sphere" enough to reach a tipping point of mass adoption many people with have rent a server. Like with any other use of a server, there are operating costs that must be taken into account.
My question(s) is(are): Among those who choose to rent a seed (or lack the resources to host their own) will there be a willingness to pay for the use of this seed?
If there is a flat rental cost, will that ultimately deter so many people that a tipping point can't be reached?
Is there a privacy-centric mode of generating income that will effectively have these seeds pay for themselves?
There seems to be a fine balancing act between whether the added privacy and benefits of decentralization will outweigh the costs of renting a seed to the point of which a mass-adoption can still take place. But where is that middle ground?
What are your thoughts? <comment><USER2> I think diaspora is missing the boat on that one.

Nobody said they couldn't show some ads to make it pay for itself. All that is needed is a change in transparency and some kind of safeguard against abuse.

Facebook is doing pretty good, except for those two points. Diaspora wants to fix things that don't need fixing and will spend a lot of their work on it as well as limiting their chances of success by adding an immediate barrier to entry, either in the form of a 'seedbox' (which, for instance where I live would be against the t.o.s. of most providers) or by having to pay a relatively large amount of money per month.

<comment><USER3> Targeted Facebook ads are not worth much; I would expect untargeted, privacy- friendly Diaspora ads to be worth even less (i.e. zero).

Also, I think hosting can be done for $99/year which doesn't seem like that much to me.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Based on the video (not published on their site): <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qRTzRAtDujU>

It looks like they want to distribute via a virtual machine image, and that you need a dedicated web-server in order to be discoverable.

</comment><comment><USER3> Why did you dupe your own submission? <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1353754>

</comment><comment><USER5> Why can't everyone host their own seed? If it's a binary I have to install and download and message propagation is done in a p2p way?

<comment><USER4> Because, with the current proposed architecture (built on http), In order for your friends to access your content your server must be online, and most computers not dedicated as a server at the very least sleep periodically during such periods your information would be unavailable, thus the need for dedicated servers.</comment></comment>


Undercover 5: Find My Mac done right - <AUTHOR> http://www.orbicule.com/undercover/mac

<comment><USER2> I think these kinds of services are great but the key logging makes me a little nervous. No... a lot nervous.</comment>


Ask HN: Overcoming the GIL in Python - <AUTHOR>

I've been working on a python app that I've been trying to multithread for efficiency. The Global Interpreter Lock is preventing me from using the built in threading module to increase speed.<p>I've done some searching and discovered the multiprocessing module (formerly processing) which has a similar API to threading except that it spawns multiple interpreter processes to overcome the GIL. I've also read that it is possible to write a C module that can release the GIL and then reacquire it, but I would like to avoid this if possible. I'm working on a simple physics engine for fun, and I think that writing it in C might take the fun right out of it. <comment><USER2> Also check out unladen-swallow -- they aim to remove the GIL from Python (among other goals):

<http://code.google.com/p/unladen-swallow/wiki/ProjectPlan>

<comment><AUTHOR> That looks like it could eventually be incredibly useful. I hope that they write their code in a way which allows some of their improvements to be added to Python.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I have been interested in this issue for a long time, but haven't dug into it enough to be authoritative.

The GIL isn't going to be fixed until someone rewrites the interpreter, a task for a genius with time on his hands. I don't think managing the GIL in C will do what you want. If it were easy, someone would have done it. If I were you, I would go go with a package that implements a good message passing model a la Erlang. It would be a good experience. Alternatively, you could look at Jython or Iron Python which are built on top of vms with native thread support.

</comment><comment><USER4> This may be of interest:

"Stackless Python allows you to use lightweight threads (tasklets) that can be switched with less overhead and it allows for cooperative multitasking with the intention of making async programming easier. This helps with IO bound applications where you can have tens of thousands of tasklets running at the same time (try doing that with threads). It does not however allow you to take advantage of multi-core or multi-processor resources. It simply allows you to squeeze the most amount of work out of a single threaded process..."

[http://www.stackless.com/pipermail/stackless/2007-August/001...](http://www.stackless.com/pipermail/stackless/2007-August/001963.html)

<comment><USER5> Stackless is the opposite of what he wants, which is to _take advantage of multi-core or multi-processor resources_.

<comment><USER4> _Stackless is the opposite of what he wants_

The quote above does mention that "[Stackless] does not however allow you to take advantage of multi-core or multi-processor resources. _It simply allows you to squeeze the most amount of work out of a single threaded process..._ ".

Depending on the application and its particular implementation, actually Stackless could be the right solution. Which is why I brought it up. In fact, it now looks as though he might go with Stackless, just like EVE online did :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Yep, all true. You may want to check out scipy. It provides a good base for numerical integration and other things you are going to need. It is written in C so perhaps you won't have to drop into C for performance reasons.</comment>


Why I still love Java - <AUTHOR> http://developerlife.com/theblog/?p=115 Java is an awesome language. I'd forgotten how wonderful it is, until I started coding in other languages and environments. Java does not face the innovators dilemma, it's stronger than it's ever been before! <comment><USER2> It takes a very special kind of skill to attempt to criticize PHP and _fail_.

It's hard to say which line is the best. "Lack of refactoring support" is surely ROTFL-worthy, but I think "PHP and Ruby and all that" is my favorite. Yeah, PHP and Ruby are totally the same thing. I get them mixed up all the time.

"So not to take anyone's word for it, I learned PHP last night..."

One whole night! This guy is an _experienced_ PHP developer!

</comment><comment><USER3> [edit insert here - Page lost the earlier part of this comment] - This article has nothing new, just one developer liking Java because of JavaDocs.

"I learned PHP last night..." - Wow, learning PHP in one night, enough to build an opinion that dismisses it for Java [Not that the two solve the same problem]

In any case, I don't think most others talking about the API or the toolkit, and as far as I know, no one is dismissing the power of Java's platform (JVM included). Most posts talk about the language itself, and in most cases that is being remedied by languages like Scala, Groovy or even JRuby on the JVM. You get the best of both worlds.</comment>